Isabelle Plante

There is growing concern about boys' lagging performance in school, not only in language arts, where the gap is particularly pronounced, but also in mathematics. Stereotypes associating one gender with language arts or with mathematics are likely to contribute to these gaps. Such stereotypes can translate into explicit beliefs such as the extent to which students are aware of societal stereotypes or the extent to which they personally believe stereotypes to be true, but also indirectly into performance following a stereotype threat manipulation. However, few studies have considered these multiple stereotype expressions in both mathematics and language arts to examine their importance in predicting boys' and girls' actual grades in school. To fill this gap, two complementary studies examined high school boys' and girls' awareness and endorsement of stereotypes about both language arts ( n = 299) and mathematics ( n = 243), as well as whether stereotype threat impaired boys' performance on a spelling test. Although the effect of stereotype threat was not significant overall, our results showed that students were aware of and endorsed strong stereotypes advantaging girls in language arts. In mathematics, students endorsed counter‐traditional stereotypes slightly advantaging girls. Our results also showed that these multiple expressions of stereotypes related to students' grades. In doing so, our work provides insights regarding possible targets for interventions to reduce gender gaps disadvantaging boys in school.

This study aimed to examine the evolution of test anxiety during the transition to secondary school, a challenging period that includes a set of contextual factors that could potentially increase students’ test anxiety. In addition, to further understand the contribution of different individual factors that might increase the susceptibility to test anxiety during this transition, the study examined the role of motivation, achievement, internalizing behaviors and gender in the development of test anxiety. A total of 478 French-speaking students (231 boys, 247 girls) were followed during their transition to secondary school. Latent growth analysis revealed an overall stable trajectory of test anxiety during the transition to secondary school. However, internalizing behaviors and gender moderated the trajectory over time. Additionally, high initial levels of internalizing behaviors, as well as lower grades in mathematics, were associated with initial levels of test anxiety, as measured at the end of elementary school.