Old article but a good one, I think. I can't stand people who spread this virus, especially in the presence of kids.

  • save_vs_death [they/them]
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    edit-2
    11 days ago

    Mainstream reporting is very bad at actually citing the works they're writing about but these three paragraphs are summaries of the research.

    Anxiety over mathematics has been recognized as a grade killer. The National Mathematics Advisory Panel of the U.S. Department of Education has found that anxious students perform lower than their abilities. What’s more, there is growing evidence that mathematical anxiety can be passed on like a virus from teachers to students as well as from parents to children.

    Girls are especially affected when a teacher publicly announces math hatred before she picks up the chalk. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that female — but not male — mathematical achievement was diminished in response to a female teacher’s mathematical anxiety. The effect was correlated: the higher a teacher’s anxiety, the lower the scores.

    Parents’ mathematical anxiety can have a similar effect on their children. Researchers observed that children who received math homework help from mathematically fearful parents showed weaker math achievements than their peers, which in turn resulted in increased math anxiety for the children themselves.

    If by "where's the research" you mean where are the actual papers, they're not that hard to find, i got these two in like 2 minutes of searching just copy pasting the quoted journals with some extra words in there

    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8240551/

    https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0910967107

    (edit: not to say i'm faulting you for not immediately getting what they mean by "research says no", science communication really is in the dumpster; a regular ass person that has a passing interest in something really has to do this extra homework and trawl these papers that were never meant for them to read to get at the good bits which should have been in the reporting itself)