Curios of the week #2

Clippings, endnotes and reaping the Twitter harvest

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The seasons are turning in Ballarat as we move from the heat of summer to the golden syrup of autumn. As ever, stuff has been happening in the world of education and I have collected some of the happenings here for my subscribers.

Maths education research of the week

Much education research confirms relationships that seem obvious, at least after we have read that research. Nonetheless, it is helpful to be able to point to a study.

In this case, researchers from the United States have found a correlation between anxiety about maths and science felt by teachers and the maths and science anxiety of their low socioeconomic status students.

This is only a correlation and so we cannot prove that the teacher anxiety causes the student anxiety, but the researchers made some interesting measures and different time intervals that I find highly suggestive. Critically, it is also a plausible result — anxious teachers could well pass on that anxiety for students. We can even imagine how they would do that in the way they talk about these subjects.

The paper is available open access.