This is cool, and surprising: with one 15 minute self affirmation journal they've completedly closed the typically huge gender gap in this physics class. Very interesting insights on how stereotype threat works and how it can be combatted.
Posted by sinflower (Member # 12228) on :
quote:To see if their task could help, Miyake recruited 283 men and 116 women who were taking part in the university’s 15-week introductory course to physics. He randomly divided them into two groups. One group picked their most important values from a list and wrote about why these mattered to them. The other group – the controls – picked their least important values and wrote about why these might matter to other people.
This happened twice at the start of the course, and the whole thing was led by teaching assistants who didn’t know what was going on (it was a “double-blind” experiment). They, and the students, were all told that the exercise was meant to improve writing skills.
The task worked. During the rest of the semester, the students sat for four exams that made up most of their final grade. Among the control group, who wrote about other people’s values, men outperformed women by an average of ten percentage points. But among the students who affirmed their own values, the gender gap largely disappeared. Their final grades reflected this shrunken divide: if the women took Miyake’s exercise, far more got Bs and far fewer got Cs.
Miyake also gave the students a standard test called the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE), which checks their understanding of basic physics concepts. In Miyake’s control group, the men outscored the women, as they usually do. But the women who wrote about their values closed the gap entirely.
Posted by James Tiberius Kirk (Member # 2832) on :
That's interesting. Why does it work?
--j_k
Posted by sinflower (Member # 12228) on :
By reversing stereotype threat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat , presumably. What I find interesting about it is that it's just a general self-affirming exercise, unrelated to the domain (physics). It seems to suggest that stereotype threat works by attacking general self-esteem and self confidence instead of anything more specific. Which is... counterintuitive, so maybe I'm interpreting this wrong.