How strongly children identify with math—their math “self-concept”—can predict how high they will score on a standardized test of math achievement, a new study shows.
The study also measured the strength of students’ stereotype that “math is for boys” and found that, for girls, the stronger this subconscious stereotype, the weaker the individual child’s math self-concept.
“Our results show that stereotypes are related to how children think of themselves as math learners, which, in turn, is related to how well they do on an actual math test,” says lead author Dario Cvencek, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.
This self-concept matters because it is correlated with actual behavior, such as math achievement.
