Pre-service Elementary School Teachers’ Expectations about Student Performance: How their Beliefs are affected by their Mathematics Anxiety and Student’s Gender

Using a survey-experiment methodology we evaluate whether pre-service elementary school teachers’ expectations about students’ achievement, and beliefs about students’ need for academic support, are influenced by future teachers’ mathematics anxiety level or by gender and socioeconomic status of the student. We found that mathematics anxiety can negatively influence pre-service elementary school teachers’ expectations about students, and that participants assign lower expectations of future mathematics achievement to girls than boys. These two effects, however, appear to be strictly independent as we did not find statistically significant interaction effects between pre-service teacher’s mathematics anxiety and the expectations biases associated with student’s gender. Our results also suggest that mathematics anxiety could affect pre-service teachers’ capacity to develop inclusive learning environments in their classrooms.