University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock has built a career on studying elite athletes, students and other strivers who “choke” under pressure. In 2010 she wrote a book on the subject, "Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To."

Now, Beilock, a AAAS fellow, is trying to figure out why American kids lag behind much of the rest of the world in mathematics, the fundamental skill set for the jobs our economy will need most in the 21st century.

...

In an earlier study, Beilock showed that the higher a teacher’s math anxiety, the lower the scores of the girls in her classroom—but not the boys. Studies have shown that female education majors are more likely to have math anxiety than any other group of college students, and more than 90 percent of elementary teachers are women. Young children notice gender, according to Beilock’s study. A common stereotype holds that “girls are bad at math.” For girls who are inclined to believe that stereotype in the first place, watching their female teachers struggle with math reinforces it, Beilock and her colleagues found.

As to parents, they do have a role to play in math education, for example talking about numbers, space-related concepts and counting at home, and making sure that all their children, boys and girls, get puzzles and Legos and other toys that get them thinking spatially, Beilock says. But at this point, she says, parents who conscientiously read bedtime stories to their children often don’t see themselves as having any role at all in their kids’ math education.

Currently, Beilock is fielding a two-year study of first- and second-grade students to evaluate what happens early on in school around subjects like math. Going back and forth between classrooms and her laboratory, she is using tools like fMRI to see how her subjects’ bodies and brains react in various situations. For example, Beilock has used fMRI technology to show that math anxiety can light up the brain’s pain centers in some subjects. Actually doing math didn’t cause the pain, though; it was anticipating math activity that registered hurt.