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Mathematics performance and underperformance: Effects of gender and confidence
Abstract
Boys and men tend to do better in math class and to have higher math confidence than their female classmates. It has been hypothesized that low confidence is a precursor to poor performance. Because of this, a great deal of effort has been expended on raising our students' confidence. As a result of this, students in the United States are more confident of their math ability than students anywhere else in the world. Despite this, math performance remains low, for both male and female students. American students seem to interpret this low performance as an indication of limited ability. To change this interpretation, I told some students in introductory calculus classes that their prior math failures were due to low effort and that increased effort should lead to success in college. To make this information more believable, it was embedded in a personality profile that had been generated specifically for the student, and given a scientific sounding name: Talent/Motive Disjunction (TMD). Students who were told that they had TMD did significantly better in calculus than students who were not told they had TMD. This increase in performance was not the result of increased confidence. Students in the TMD condition were no more confident at the end of the semester than students in the No TMD condition. This suggests that changing attributions about success and failure may be effective in improving our students' performance even if confidence raising is not.
Subject Area
Mathematics education|Educational psychology|Womens studies|Educational evaluation
Recommended Citation
Gutbezahl, Jennifer, "Mathematics performance and underperformance: Effects of gender and confidence" (1996). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9638965.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9638965