Awesome Math Girls

I do admit that if I get a bad grade in any subject, I feel bad. It is also true of my classmates whether they are boys or girls.

Reinhard Pekrun at the University of Munich in Germany followed 3,425 German students from fifth through ninth grades with help of his colleagues. They surveyed the students every year on math and asked whether they enjoyed the subject or dreaded it. They also asked students whether they were proud of their accomplishments or ashamed of their performance. They compared the behavioral results with the actual grades achieved by these students.  There was a strong correlation between the grades and how the students felt about their achievement or lack there of.  The emotion about math also impacted their next year’s grade. However, what the researchers found is that the emotions associated with bad grades impacted girls more than the boys as it conforms the gender stereotypes further leading to deterioration of girls performance and hence validating the stereotypes.

“It’s an excellent study,” says Lisa Linnenbrink-Garcia who is a psychologist at Michigan State University. “It does a lot to tell us how emotions might predict grades over time, [and how] doing well, in turn, predicts the emotions you’re experiencing.”

There are a lot of ways students can improve their performance and the grade by analyzing what really went wrong and there are things that parents and teachers can also do to help them navigate and get out of a vicious cycle if a student is trapped in it. The past performance need to be an indicator for future performance and whenever a student slips and gets a bad grade in math, it should be dealt with immediately with a plan for improvement rather than saying “math is not her thing!”.

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