If you believe this, then doing a fifteen-minute writing exercise at the start of a fifteen week course in which you "write about your values" rather than a different fifteen-minute writing exercise where you "write about other peoples values" leads you to understand introductory physics significantly better at the end, if you're a woman, or understand introductory physics significantly worse, if you're a man.
I could start speculating on mechanisms for this, but I think it's better to wait until the same effect has been replicated in a different place and a different time (and let's hope that none of those future test subjects have read this article or else they'll know what's up).
On the other hand, if one were to repeat this experiment one would have to wonder whether it's ethical to force male students to do a writing exercise if you have reason to believe that it will hinder their ability to learn physics.
Update: My alternative hypothesis is that all the competent male students who showed up for a Physics class and were given a silly "write about your values" exercise got so offended by such a frou-frou exercise in what was supposed to be a physics class that they dropped out and enrolled in something else.
As i read it, it doesn't change actual understanding, but rather removes (some of) the confounding variable of test-taking anxiety. Female students actually understood the material just as well as male students, but they didn't believe that they did, and they didn't test like they did, so for all empirical purposes, they didn't.
The writing task was basically a luminosity exercise: making them aware of their own true knowledge and beliefs through introspection, such that they then had the confidence to take risks on questions they otherwise wouldn't have (assuming the tests were scored negatively on incorrect answers to discourage guessing.)
That is a really interesting question. Given the "control" was also given a writing exercise, I think it opens a lot more questions. If we hold it true that the 15 minute writing assignment makes a difference by itself (questionable, obviously), it would bring up interesting questions about male versus female motivation, where males do better when writing about others' motivations while females do better when writing about their own.
I doubt you have spent time teaching undergraduate physics.
Your assertion that the male students might have dropped out because of the "frou-frou" exercise is easily construed as chauvinistic.
Unless you are a female student in physical sciences or math, I don't think you can really understand what its like to be told, implicitly and explicitly, for most of your secondary and college education, that you are inferior to your male peers.
But here's a hypothetical for you. You come to my company for a job interview.
When you come see me, I ask you what your favorite subject is and I let you talk about it for twenty minutes. Then we start talking about the job.
When you see Bob next door, he immediately starts drilling on topic.
I doubt you have spent time teaching undergraduate physics.
Why do you doubt that? I did a bit of teaching during my PhD, though never an entire lecture course.
Your assertion that the male students might have dropped out because of the "frou-frou" exercise is easily construed as chauvinistic
This concerns me less than whether or not it's likely to be true.
Unless you are a female student in physical sciences or math, I don't think you can really understand what its like to be told, implicitly and explicitly, for most of your secondary and college education, that you are inferior to your male peers.
Ah, the old "unless you belong to group X you're not allowed to comment on this" line. I have nothing for this.
* But here's a hypothetical for you. You come to my company for a job interview.
When you come see me, I ask you what your favorite subject is and I let you talk about it for twenty minutes. Then we start talking about the job.
When you see Bob next door, he immediately starts drilling on topic.
Which interview do you perform better on?*
I have no idea. It's possible that the stress of being judged on what my favourite topic is might cause me to stress out even more. In any case, it's a pretty nonequivalent situation.
There are two types of physics students... the ones who are really at university to learn something else, and the ones who are at university to learn physics. I was in the latter category. Going to my first physics class and having it being a hand-holding exercise instead of a "listen up you pricks, F = ma and you'd better not forget" lecture would have seemed like a waste of precious lecture time. Of course, a female student could easily have felt exactly the same way.
Unless you are a female student in physical sciences or math, I don't think you can really understand what its like to be told, implicitly and explicitly, for most of your secondary and college education, that you are inferior to your male peers.
I'm a woman. My undergad major is "Environmental Resource Management" and I have a certificate in GIS (a 2/3 male field and my classes were all about 2/3 male). I don't know if I am just oblivious or what, but it was the last week of GIS school before it dawned on me that the majority of women consistently occupied the last two rows of seats in class and a few other women floated around the classroom but I was the only woman who usually sat up front (assuming a seat was available up front, which it usually was). I occasionally wonder why I seem to live differently from other women and why I seem to not hear or not take to heart (or something) such "messages". Where are women hearing these messages? (Serious question -- I've wondered about this for years. What am I missing??) Anyone have any thoughts?
I've had practical obstacles to my success that were related to being female. Most of those disappeared with my divorce. But I really don't get where or how such brainwashing occurs for most women (even though it seems pretty clear it does occur).
Unless you are a female student in physical sciences or math, I don't think you can really understand what its like to be told, implicitly and explicitly, for most of your secondary and college education, that you are inferior to your male peers.
I honestly don't believe this is the actual problem. Students of both sexes encounter negative attitudes during their schooling. It's just that women are more likely to take it to heart.
The average male physics student (I include myself in this) has something of an underlying belief that they understand the world better than everyone else. It's an expression of the extreme male brain.
I doubt you would find the same characteristics in male students studying, say acting.
> Unless you are a female student in physical sciences or math, I don't think you can really understand what its like to be told, implicitly and explicitly, for most of your secondary and college education, that you are inferior to your male peers.
I keep hearing this "inferior to your male peers" bit, but oddly enough, when I was in high school, the higher-level math and science classes were mostly populated by girls. The more respectable the class was, the more female-skewed the sex ratio was. I think I was the only person in my physiology class with a Y chromosome. This was in the American Midwest, in a vaguely lower-middle-class area.
To this day, I still don't know what was up with that.
Physiology was just one example. I could just as easily have talked about the highest-level classes my high school offered in math and the physical sciences, but they all had longer, clunkier names. All of them had that same female-skewed sex ratio.
You pose this question as if the answer were obvious, but I'm not only stupid enough not to see it, I can actually think of couple of reasons it could go either way, and they do not feel construed (to me, anyway). On several occasions I've asked people enrolled a couple years ahead of me about their favorite subjects and pet projects and whatnot, and while they were friendly and everything, they were uncomfortable reflecting about their schooling in front of a (relative) stranger, and they grew even more uncomfortable when I tried to coax them to discuss our discipline by talking about my own pet projects or struggles.
On the other hand, It's perfectly normal for interviewee to be nervous and underperform, and twenty minutes of chat on relevant and familiar topic would seem to dissipate impact somewhat.
Alternative hypothesis to your alternative hypothesis: if you have a class of finite time, increasing the engagement of one group by means of removing obstacles to engagement means that the rest of the class will have comparatively less class time and attention devoted to them, and thus see decreased performance.
Or maybe you're right, and male physics students are typically such pricks that having to think about feelings for fifteen minutes causes a semester-long depressive spiral. Could go either way.
I did find it quite interesting that the men seemed to do worse with the values exercise than without it, and strange that the article didn't discuss this aspect. The idea I had was that if the men are subject to the same stereotype (that they are inherently better than women at physics), and then they find themselves in a class where the women are doing just as well as them, that they would lose some confidence. Since they only did slightly worse, I think this is perhaps a reasonable explanation.
If so, then I think it is ethical, because all you're doing is challenging an incorrect stereotype that was unfairly giving men a slight boost and women a significant handicap.
Did either of you read the article? The control group picked "their least important values and wrote about why these might matter to other people." The article says nothing about how either men or women perform without a values exercise.
I don't think that exercise, in itself, would make anyone perform worse at physics. While writing about why your values are important to you could very plausibly increase your confidence, I don't see how writing about why other people might care about things you don't value would decrease your confidence or performance.
I think it mirrors the way women might experience a physics class. They might feel like the class is about things that other people value, and that might make them perform worse.
I'm very skeptical too especially when they write this near the end of the paper:
"One virtue of the affirmation is that it can
be combined with instructional approaches that
show promise in closing the gender gap, such as
the interactive engagement approaches used in the
present course"
so the course they are teaching isn't a standard physics course. They very well might be on to something, but I think it's a huge stretch to attribute the performance difference to a couple 15 minute writing exercises. (what is "interactive engagement" anyway? not explained in the paper)
Yes, the other "stereotype threat" researchers (studying race effects) also gave oral exams, and I agree that this is very fishy. Why in the world would you do an "interactive" physics exam in this situation if you had any interest in objectivity?
Generally this just strains credulity. Telling yourself "I can solve this problem" goes a long way in math and physics, but there's also a feedback loop (the article even alludes to it) - successfully solving problems makes you better at solving problems. So how is it that over a decade of damage due to this effect can be undone with a single inspirational chat?
Seems like you just skipped to the graphs which showed men in the control group doing slightly better than men in the "affirmation" group.
If you read the article it does not suggest that men did worse because of the affirmation excercise. These were two different groups of men, so presumably the control group happened to be a smarter bunch. Or maybe the other class took place at 8am and everybody was asleep, etc.
Of course it would be interesting to see this done on a larger scale with more details of statistical significance of the numbers.
If you read the article it does not suggest that men did worse because of the affirmation excercise. These were two different groups of men, so presumably the control group happened to be a smarter bunch.
In which case we can equally well say that the women in the non-control group just happened to be a smarter bunch. Even more easily, since the sample size of women was even smaller than those of the men. If the results aren't statistically significant I'm not sure why they were even published.
First, the difference for each gender respectively of the scores across the control and "affirmation" groups isn't what they care about. It is the difference between gender within each group.
I can't say whether the results are statistically significant, but there are error bars on the graphs and the scientists who did the experiment seem to think the results are significant.
>If the results aren't statistically significant I'm not sure why they were even published.
I'm going to go with "because there's a lot of money available for people that show that women are better at science then men"; doh, I mean "more equal" of course, not better ....
If you believe this, then doing a fifteen-minute writing exercise at the start of a fifteen week course in which you "write about your values" rather than a different fifteen-minute writing exercise where you "write about other peoples values" leads you to understand introductory physics significantly better at the end, if you're a woman, or understand introductory physics significantly worse, if you're a man.
I could start speculating on mechanisms for this, but I think it's better to wait until the same effect has been replicated in a different place and a different time (and let's hope that none of those future test subjects have read this article or else they'll know what's up).
On the other hand, if one were to repeat this experiment one would have to wonder whether it's ethical to force male students to do a writing exercise if you have reason to believe that it will hinder their ability to learn physics.
Update: My alternative hypothesis is that all the competent male students who showed up for a Physics class and were given a silly "write about your values" exercise got so offended by such a frou-frou exercise in what was supposed to be a physics class that they dropped out and enrolled in something else.