the psychology of learning and motivation - Percepts and Concepts ...

Implications for Enhancing Academic Achievement 149academic tasks via a compromising of WM resources necessary for taskperformance.3.3. The developmental approachGiven that we have focused much of our discussion thus far on the impactof negative group stereotypes on the performance of adults, one mightwonder when awareness of these stereotypes comes about and the developmentaltrajectory of their impact. To answer this question, Ambady,Shih, Kim, and Pittinsky (2001) asked young Asian-American girls (inkindergarten through eighth grade) to complete an age-appropriate mathtask. However, children preceded this task by either coloring a picture of ayoung child eating with chopsticks (which was meant to prime theirethnic identity) or coloring a picture of a young child playing with a doll(which was meant to prime their gender identity), or coloring a picture ofa landscape scene (the control condition). Since Asian-Americans generallyshare a positive stereotype about their performance in math, the studyfound that math performance was enhanced when children were given anethnic identity prime. However, the students’ performance was harmedwhen they were given the gender identity prime. These results aresobering as they indicate that children at a young age have already internalizednegative gender stereotypes and their math performance can beimpacted by being reminded of such stereotypes. These results also leadone to question where children are getting these stereotypes from.One source that seems strongly involved in shaping children’s abilitybeliefs and awareness of stereotypes is their parents. For example, parentstend to believe that boys have higher math ability and have greaterexpectations of success than they do with girls (Eccles, Jacobs, &Harold, 1990). This is also reflected in parents’ perceptions that boys haveto try less hard in math than girls (Yee & Eccles, 1988). This is despite thefact that gender differences in math performance tend to be nonexistent atthe ages of the children for which parents were sampled in these studies.Recently, we published a study that examined how teachers may alsoinfluence young children’s gender ability beliefs and math achievement(Beilock, Gunderson, Ramirez, & Levine, 2010). This work was motivatedby past research suggesting that teachers also show stereotyped beliefs. Forinstance, teachers believe that boys like math more than girls (Fennema,Peterson, Carpenter, & Lubinski, 1990) and that boys have greater competencyin math than girls (Tiedemann, 2000a, 2000b, 2002). Since themajority of early elementary school teachers are female (>90%; NationalEducation Association, 2003), we wondered if female teachers may becommunicating their beliefs about their own insecurities in math to theirstudents (especially to their female students).