How gender stereotypes of students and significant others are related to motivational and affective outcomes in mathematics at the end of secondary school

Abstract

We examined associations between the explicit mathematics-related gender stereotypes of students, parents, teachers, and classmates and students’ motivational-affective outcomes in mathematics (self-concept, interest, anxiety) at the end of Grade 9. Based on representative data from the German Trends in Student Achievement 2018 study (N = 30,019), results of latent multilevel mixture models show that boys’ and girls’ explicit beliefs in the stereotype favoring their own gender in-group (i.e., boys’/girls’ belief that boys/girls do better at mathematics) were related to higher levels of self-concept and interest and to lower anxiety. Parents’ gender stereotypes showed an incremental association with all three outcomes for girls but only with mathematics self-concept for boys. Gender stereotypes of teachers were not related to students’ outcomes. However, classmates’ stereotypes favoring girls or boys in mathematics were negatively associated with outcomes of the positively stereotyped group. Thus, a male student in a classroom with classmates who share the traditional stereotype that boys do better at mathematics than girls would hold a lower self-concept and interest and higher anxiety level after controlling for the beneficial individual association of himself having the same belief and his motivational and affective outcomes. Similarly, a girl’s motivational-affective outcomes would be more favorable in the same environment characterized by the shared traditional stereotype of mathematics as a male domain after controlling for the negative individual association. Shared stereotypes in the classroom could thus trigger social comparison processes to which students are more susceptible than to stereotypes of their teachers.