Math anxiety is contagious

ArsTechnica has a great summary of a study today entitled Female teachers transmit math anxiety to female students. The quick version:

The study found that when elementary school teachers, who are primarily female, displayed a high level of anxiety about math, that skittishness was transmitted to their female students. Those students who spent a year with a math-phobic teacher displayed lower math achievement and an increased belief in stereotypes about female mathematical ability.

This is cool for a couple of reasons.

First, there's the possibility of a (slow) virtuous cycle. Increase the maths skills (and comfort levels) of female elementary school teachers, and you increase the performance of girls in math. This should in turn lead to increased math skills for elementary school teachers down the road when the students become teachers.

Second, the study underscores the importance of applying the scientific method to the teaching of science and then applying the results. There are a lot of subtle things about how we communicate that turn out to be really important determinants of our effectiveness at getting our point across (see stereotype threat). Gladwell spends a chapter on some of these ideas in The Tipping Point and in Blink. Yet the people who teach college level science and math at major universities almost never learn these things - grad students get thrown into classrooms as TAs or instructors and have to learn to teach on their own.

How hard would it be to distill down the most important and relevant findings in education research to a manageable (10-20 page, say) document that you could make sure everybody read before teaching college level courses?