14 DAY TRIAL // Ask any kid or teenager and they'll tell you: math can sometimes be fairly scary. What's interesting is that, according to a paper set to soon be published in the journal Psychological Science, math freaks out girls more than it does boys.
Experiments have shown that, when asked to think about potential upcoming math tests, girls were more anxious than boys were.
Researchers theorize this happened because of stereotyped beliefs that tricked girls into thinking that their competence in mathematics was not as great as that of boys.
In the same paper, the researchers explain that, both directly before and during a math test, the boys and girls taken into consideration for this study experienced roughly the same levels of anxiety.
Furthermore, they had similar achievements, EurekAlert reports.
As far as the specialists who have carried out this investigation are concerned, this just goes to prove that, although girls find the idea of taking a math test scarier than most boys do, they all perform equally well (or bad, for that matter) in real-life settings.