The Development Of Middle School Students' Mathematical Gender Stereotype, Identity Of Sex Role And Their Impact On Mathematic Achievements

Mathematical gender stereotype is the concept people hold that men's mathematic ability is better than women's. This biased belief exists in college students according to most of researchers who focused on this kind of field all over the world. Most of them tend to believe that social environment may be a vital factors comparing with others. Thus two different districts were selected to compare regional difference in this paper. Identification of sex role means the formation process of sex role, including the natives, attitudes, value conceptions and behaviors, which is formed according to the expectations of social culture to male and female. And all of those become the gender character of male or female. Recently, since androgynous model of sex role was raised, it provided a new way to study mathematical gender stereotype. Some researches investigated that the level of psychological gender identity will impact upon individual's cognition and behavior, and it also related to students' mathematic score. So, according to the previous studies, the development of mathematical gender stereotype and gender identity and how they related to mathematic score are discussed in this paper.It is hard to study this kind of problem, because people are always not willing to concede that they take bias or negative attitude towards one group. Thus, students whose implicit and explicit mathematic stereotype were measured by implicit association test and explicit self-report respectively were selected in Liaoning and Shanghai district. Meanwhile, Bem Sex Role Inventory was used to measure the identification of sex role among high school students who were selected. And the results were analyzed on the above basis.Participants were selected from Grade 7 to Grade 11, and each class were radamly selected from each grade in this research.323 effective participants were got finally.The following conclusions were drawn in this research:1 There was not a significant difference in the explicit mathematical gender stereotype overall. But there is a significant difference between men and women. Men strongly insisted that men's mathematic ability is better than women's and women, on the other hand, tend to believe that women's mathematic ability is better than men.2 Participants generally showed implicit mathematical gender stereotype, but the level is different.3 Explicit mathematical gender stereotype is independent to mathematic score in both districts. There is significant linear correlation between implicit mathematical gender stereotype and mathematic score in Liaoning junior students.4 In the relation between the typed-sex role and mathematic score, the students of undifferentiated and femininity typed-sex role tend to get low mathematic score; the students of masculinity and androgynous tend to get high mathematic score and the difference is all significant except high students in Shanghai.5 The general relations of implicit mathematical gender stereotype, typed-sex role and mathematic score tend to show that students who are in low implicit mathematical gender stereotype and the one who belongs to masculinity and androgynous tend to get high mathematic score.