6 ms·

15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics

81 points by darshan 16y ago

hugh3 16y ago
I remain really skeptical. 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.
- darshan 16y ago
  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.
  - erikpukinskis 16y ago
    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.
    - darshan 16y ago
      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.
      - sp332 16y ago
        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.
      - regularfry 16y ago
        The control group wasn't necessarily supposed to do worse. The control group were ideally supposed to be unaffected.
- derefr 16y ago
  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.)
  - hugh3 16y ago
    So does it give additional test-taking anxiety to the male students, who do worse than those in the control group?
    - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
      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.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- btmorex 16y ago
  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)
  - shasta 16y ago
    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?
- jberryman 16y ago
  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.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    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.
    - jberryman 16y ago
      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.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      >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 ....
- RK 16y ago
  I wonder how these students did in their other classes? It was not even presented to the students as a physics specific event. I am also very skeptical.
- stelfer 16y ago
  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. Which interview do you perform better on?
  - hugh3 16y ago
    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.
  - 16y ago
- Helianthus16 16y ago
  If deep societal problems could be solved in fifteen minutes, they wouldn't be deep societal problems.
- anthonyb 16y ago
  Or you could try a real alternative hypothesis like: "variation in the male test scores is not statistically significant".
- Cushman 16y ago
  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.
wazoox 16y ago
Very interesting. It may need to be backed with some more data but it's promising.
- smokeyj 16y ago
  My money is on statistical fluke, how many times was this experiment even run? If they're credible they should collect the average over a number of experiments (the higher the better).
  - wazoox 16y ago
    That's exactly what I said, they need more data.
axiom 16y ago
Can someone who has access post the original paper? http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6008/1234 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6008/1234
- Locke1689 16y ago
  Here you go: http://acm.cs.northwestern.edu/site_media/Science-2010-Miyake.pdf http://acm.cs.northwestern.edu/site_media/Science-2010-Miyak...
  - RK 16y ago
    According to the paper, it looks like to do best on the final exam you'd want to be a male in the control group with low gender stereotype endorsement. To do best on the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation, you'd want to be a female in the values affirmation group with high gender stereotype endorsement. So basically females that think they are supposed to do poorly at physics, but affirm they are good at something, do better than ones that have no particular preconceived notion...
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      >So basically females that think they are supposed to do poorly at physics, but affirm they are good at something, do better than ones that have no particular preconceived notion... So we have to tell women they're going to fail at physics because they're XX and then at the last minute say "ha ha fooled you, you're really awesome". Then we'll have a well verified strongly supported ToE by next Christmas.
rfugger 16y ago
I'd be interested in seeing the results for a control group that wasn't given any writing exercise at all.
VladRussian 16y ago
confirms my everyday anecdotal observations - for women to get better men should get worse. Why women can't just reach men's level without need to lower the men' level? While taking a bit longer and more work, wouldn't that way it be more beneficial for human species?
- Helianthus16 16y ago
  I find it amusing that you are being downvoted for saying the same thing many others are saying, but less politely and more baldly. We are at a point where men are starting to realize that gender imbalance works both ways, where lots of comments decry the article's inattention to the male decrease in performance. But there's still a taboo.
  - VladRussian 16y ago
    >...less politely and more baldly. "[these days] a shape is being ascribed with very high content" - a phrase from a good movie about another society living an artificial reality - socialism of the Soviet Union 25+years ago.
Groxx 16y ago
Odd results, with the male scores dropping, but I suspect that merely has to do with a small sample size (399 in the whole set). This makes sense, especially as a number of people I know feel stupid because they have test anxiety. My wife included. "Non-"tests such as these seem like they could help quite a few, as they have the exact same physical location as real tests, but break the trend of habitual anxiety because little to nothing is on the line. Practice tests elsewhere don't share the classroom setting, and there's quite a bit of evidence that location influences memory / emotion, so it would seem they should be about as effective as they are at combating anxiety (ie: not much, and not for many (anecdotally)). edit: <strikeout>Though, to be potentially inflammatory, this does seem to support the opposite stereotype of men having more control over (non-anger-based) emotions than women. Especially when you look at the original article (linked below by Locke1689: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1943596 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1943596), and see almost no difference in score distribution for men but huge changes for women in the B and C categories (A had almost no change - surprise, surprise, the ones without testing problems showed no gain).</strikeout>
- anthuswilliams 16y ago
  I don't think it supports the idea that men have better control over their emotions than women. Rather, I think it illustrates the effects of stereotype anxiety. The article also mentions the same phenomenon wrt black students taking standardized tests. Although I don't have the source on hand, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece a few months ago reporting a similar effect in the performance of white basketball players relative to that of blacks in American high schools.
  - Groxx 16y ago
    That's a good point, forgot the black student results. I take it back! Thanks :)
baldercrash 16y ago
>Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you. What has this got to do with physics and why are universities so interested in students' private lives?
- hugh3 16y ago
  That's pretty much what my reaction would have been if they'd tried to give me an irrelevant flowers-and-kittens writing assignment on the first day of undergraduate physics. I'd probably be seriously second-guessing my choice of university if they did.
chesser 16y ago
"Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields." I wasn't aware that this had been definitively established as a myth. Last I checked, there was a gender gap. There are a lot of interpretations that wish to ascribe this to a social difference rather than a physical one. Further, this is an introductory course. The overwhelming number of top scientists are male. IQ tests (FWIW) also place more males at both the top and bottom ends, with females clustered more around the middle. One interpretation there is that nature can afford to take more chances with males, so there are more extremes. I can think of at least one factor that is physical, even though it doesn't have to do with mental capacity per se. A major impediment to learning tends to be psychological laziness; anything that gets us to push past this means we are using more of our capacity. Testosterone increases risk-taking behaviors and reduces complacency. This drive to constantly seek out the new and challenge the old might be sufficient by itself, even if there are no relevant neurological differences otherwise. I also don't understand this push to try to equalize gender distribution. Even if the ONLY differences are social, it doesn't follow that it's better to socialize females in ANY given arbitrary manner just because they're female. Clearly any field should be open to any individual who wishes to pursue it. Trying to equalize the numbers, given the current disparity, means pushing a lot of females into pursuing subjects they aren't interested in. Even if we posit that these fields have been traditionally male-biased, the majority of males are not interested in them. This has to be open on an individual level, and whichever way it shakes out with regard to gender, it shakes out. It's profoundly unfair to cite social differences and then blame colleges who only get people after 18 years of social indoctrination.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >"Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields." I just thought more men preferred Physics. Do women really contend with this? Is it any worse than for a man trying to be a kindergarten teacher? Do theoreticians jump online and check the sex of the author's of papers in Physics A before they'll read them - like "damn that ToE is pretty compelling with great predictive powers and a beauty akin to the Maxwell equations but, y'know, we can't let it stand it's been formulated by a woman" ...
mkramlich 16y ago
I've always been offended that there's a gender gap when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth. Perhaps a writing exercise could be devised that would erase the horrible, oppressive and misogynistic stereotype that prevents men from becoming pregnant and giving birth. That is necessary if we are to ever achieve true equality. (cheek <- tongue)
- Tichy 16y ago
  In that case, it seems rather women have to change to achieve equality.
xiaoma 16y ago
I can't believe that the article didn't even mention once that the exercise decreased male performance. The text was also full of assertions that are clearly politically motivated.
- chesser 16y ago
  Since they only had two groups, one of them HAD to come out ahead. I also noted it listed MEAN score instead of MEDIAN. This would allow for a small number of people to spike the score. For example, a group of friends, or a study group. I have tutored students from a 60 or 70 to close to 100% in the space of a single math test. If the divvying up happened to put a few more brainiacs in one group and a few more dullards in another, this could account for the entire swing. The specifics of dividing up the groups is very important. For example, if one entire classroom got Essay A and another got Essay B, even if there were equal numbers of bodies, it would only take one good study group to account for the discrepancy.
dmoney 16y ago
Did values affirmation actually make men score lower? Or were they just ranked lower because women, on average, had higher absolute scores than the control? Speaking of control, writing about values in a physics class could cause people otherwise interested in physics to lose interest in the class.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
patio11 16y ago
I would be very interested to hear whether stereotype threat responds to the prompt: "Write something about fish. You have 15 minutes."
lutorm 16y ago
A popular but fairly comprehensive summary about stereotype threat research is at http://reducingstereotypethreat.org/ http://reducingstereotypethreat.org/.
mhartl 16y ago
Men dominate the physical sciences and mathematics, with the disparity growing as the subjects get more advanced. The notion that a 15-minute writing exercise can close this gap strains credulity. For a hard-headed introduction to this subject, I recommend The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Women and men have different cognitive strengths: on average, women are more verbally fluent and are better at inferring emotional states from facial expressions and body language, whereas men are better at spatial rotations and abstract reasoning. Women do better or worse on typically "male" tasks depending on the phase of their menstrual cycles and the corresponding levels of androgens ("male" hormones) in their bloodstreams. Patients undergoing male-to-female sex-change operations do progressively worse on "male" tasks and better on "female" ones as the estrogen therapy progresses, with the opposite effect in female-to-male patients. And so on. While the bell curves substantially overlap, the notion that men and women are cognitively identical is scientifically untenable. Perhaps the continuing disparity in the abstract sciences points to discrimination against women in those subjects. And yet, women make up approximately 56% of college graduates, with men at 44%—a 12-point gap. I find it telling that virtually no one decries this disparity, nor infers from it a systemic anti-male bias in higher education. The authors of these kinds of studies clearly want there to be no gender gap. (The results of this study could reasonably be described as "the 15-minute writing test that boosts female learning and suppresses male learning".) When the political biases of the researchers are so evident, it's difficult to trust the results.
iopuy 16y ago
When I was 12 years old we were forced to take Tae Kwon Do in school for some odd reason (yes an American school). At the end of the practice session we would all sit around in a circle in the brightly light gym/dancing room with the instructor in the center. He would tell us to close our eyes for 2 minutes and when we were told to reopen them the lights seemed brighter. We were told if we did this once a week every week in life we would succeed no matter what. Well I have in my opinion succeeded in life so it must be because of the eye drill.
rudyfink 16y ago
The fact that they tinkered with the Y axis scaling on the graph makes me quite suspicious of their results. I admit it is knee jerk, but anytime I see charts asking me to compare things and the scales are different I just wonder what else someone felt the need to obscure.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
If this is true, it seems we can completely replace all affirmative action, "women in X" programs and special resources, and all that other stuff with 30 minutes of writing. This is fantastic - now we can stop spending millions on "women in X", and instead spend the money on real science. Right?

81 points by darshan 16y ago

hugh3 16y ago

I remain really skeptical. 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.

darshan 16y ago
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.
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
  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.
  - darshan 16y ago
    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.
    - sp332 16y ago
      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.
    - regularfry 16y ago
      The control group wasn't necessarily supposed to do worse. The control group were ideally supposed to be unaffected.
derefr 16y ago
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.)
- hugh3 16y ago
  So does it give additional test-taking anxiety to the male students, who do worse than those in the control group?
  - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
    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.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
btmorex 16y ago
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)
- shasta 16y ago
  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?
jberryman 16y ago
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.
- hugh3 16y ago
  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.
  - jberryman 16y ago
    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.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >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 ....
RK 16y ago
I wonder how these students did in their other classes? It was not even presented to the students as a physics specific event. I am also very skeptical.
stelfer 16y ago
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. Which interview do you perform better on?
- hugh3 16y ago
  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.
- 16y ago
Helianthus16 16y ago
If deep societal problems could be solved in fifteen minutes, they wouldn't be deep societal problems.
anthonyb 16y ago
Or you could try a real alternative hypothesis like: "variation in the male test scores is not statistically significant".
Cushman 16y ago
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.

wazoox 16y ago

Very interesting. It may need to be backed with some more data but it's promising.

smokeyj 16y ago
My money is on statistical fluke, how many times was this experiment even run? If they're credible they should collect the average over a number of experiments (the higher the better).
- wazoox 16y ago
  That's exactly what I said, they need more data.

axiom 16y ago

Can someone who has access post the original paper? http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6008/1234 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6008/1234

Locke1689 16y ago
Here you go: http://acm.cs.northwestern.edu/site_media/Science-2010-Miyake.pdf http://acm.cs.northwestern.edu/site_media/Science-2010-Miyak...
- RK 16y ago
  According to the paper, it looks like to do best on the final exam you'd want to be a male in the control group with low gender stereotype endorsement. To do best on the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation, you'd want to be a female in the values affirmation group with high gender stereotype endorsement. So basically females that think they are supposed to do poorly at physics, but affirm they are good at something, do better than ones that have no particular preconceived notion...
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >So basically females that think they are supposed to do poorly at physics, but affirm they are good at something, do better than ones that have no particular preconceived notion... So we have to tell women they're going to fail at physics because they're XX and then at the last minute say "ha ha fooled you, you're really awesome". Then we'll have a well verified strongly supported ToE by next Christmas.

rfugger 16y ago

I'd be interested in seeing the results for a control group that wasn't given any writing exercise at all.

VladRussian 16y ago

confirms my everyday anecdotal observations - for women to get better men should get worse. Why women can't just reach men's level without need to lower the men' level? While taking a bit longer and more work, wouldn't that way it be more beneficial for human species?

Helianthus16 16y ago
I find it amusing that you are being downvoted for saying the same thing many others are saying, but less politely and more baldly. We are at a point where men are starting to realize that gender imbalance works both ways, where lots of comments decry the article's inattention to the male decrease in performance. But there's still a taboo.
- VladRussian 16y ago
  >...less politely and more baldly. "[these days] a shape is being ascribed with very high content" - a phrase from a good movie about another society living an artificial reality - socialism of the Soviet Union 25+years ago.

Groxx 16y ago

Odd results, with the male scores dropping, but I suspect that merely has to do with a small sample size (399 in the whole set). This makes sense, especially as a number of people I know feel stupid because they have test anxiety. My wife included. "Non-"tests such as these seem like they could help quite a few, as they have the exact same physical location as real tests, but break the trend of habitual anxiety because little to nothing is on the line. Practice tests elsewhere don't share the classroom setting, and there's quite a bit of evidence that location influences memory / emotion, so it would seem they should be about as effective as they are at combating anxiety (ie: not much, and not for many (anecdotally)). edit: <strikeout>Though, to be potentially inflammatory, this does seem to support the opposite stereotype of men having more control over (non-anger-based) emotions than women. Especially when you look at the original article (linked below by Locke1689: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1943596 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1943596), and see almost no difference in score distribution for men but huge changes for women in the B and C categories (A had almost no change - surprise, surprise, the ones without testing problems showed no gain).</strikeout>

anthuswilliams 16y ago
I don't think it supports the idea that men have better control over their emotions than women. Rather, I think it illustrates the effects of stereotype anxiety. The article also mentions the same phenomenon wrt black students taking standardized tests. Although I don't have the source on hand, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece a few months ago reporting a similar effect in the performance of white basketball players relative to that of blacks in American high schools.
- Groxx 16y ago
  That's a good point, forgot the black student results. I take it back! Thanks :)

baldercrash 16y ago

>Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you. What has this got to do with physics and why are universities so interested in students' private lives?

hugh3 16y ago
That's pretty much what my reaction would have been if they'd tried to give me an irrelevant flowers-and-kittens writing assignment on the first day of undergraduate physics. I'd probably be seriously second-guessing my choice of university if they did.

chesser 16y ago

"Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields." I wasn't aware that this had been definitively established as a myth. Last I checked, there was a gender gap. There are a lot of interpretations that wish to ascribe this to a social difference rather than a physical one. Further, this is an introductory course. The overwhelming number of top scientists are male. IQ tests (FWIW) also place more males at both the top and bottom ends, with females clustered more around the middle. One interpretation there is that nature can afford to take more chances with males, so there are more extremes. I can think of at least one factor that is physical, even though it doesn't have to do with mental capacity per se. A major impediment to learning tends to be psychological laziness; anything that gets us to push past this means we are using more of our capacity. Testosterone increases risk-taking behaviors and reduces complacency. This drive to constantly seek out the new and challenge the old might be sufficient by itself, even if there are no relevant neurological differences otherwise. I also don't understand this push to try to equalize gender distribution. Even if the ONLY differences are social, it doesn't follow that it's better to socialize females in ANY given arbitrary manner just because they're female. Clearly any field should be open to any individual who wishes to pursue it. Trying to equalize the numbers, given the current disparity, means pushing a lot of females into pursuing subjects they aren't interested in. Even if we posit that these fields have been traditionally male-biased, the majority of males are not interested in them. This has to be open on an individual level, and whichever way it shakes out with regard to gender, it shakes out. It's profoundly unfair to cite social differences and then blame colleges who only get people after 18 years of social indoctrination.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>"Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields." I just thought more men preferred Physics. Do women really contend with this? Is it any worse than for a man trying to be a kindergarten teacher? Do theoreticians jump online and check the sex of the author's of papers in Physics A before they'll read them - like "damn that ToE is pretty compelling with great predictive powers and a beauty akin to the Maxwell equations but, y'know, we can't let it stand it's been formulated by a woman" ...

mkramlich 16y ago

I've always been offended that there's a gender gap when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth. Perhaps a writing exercise could be devised that would erase the horrible, oppressive and misogynistic stereotype that prevents men from becoming pregnant and giving birth. That is necessary if we are to ever achieve true equality. (cheek <- tongue)

Tichy 16y ago
In that case, it seems rather women have to change to achieve equality.

xiaoma 16y ago

I can't believe that the article didn't even mention once that the exercise decreased male performance. The text was also full of assertions that are clearly politically motivated.

chesser 16y ago
Since they only had two groups, one of them HAD to come out ahead. I also noted it listed MEAN score instead of MEDIAN. This would allow for a small number of people to spike the score. For example, a group of friends, or a study group. I have tutored students from a 60 or 70 to close to 100% in the space of a single math test. If the divvying up happened to put a few more brainiacs in one group and a few more dullards in another, this could account for the entire swing. The specifics of dividing up the groups is very important. For example, if one entire classroom got Essay A and another got Essay B, even if there were equal numbers of bodies, it would only take one good study group to account for the discrepancy.

dmoney 16y ago

Did values affirmation actually make men score lower? Or were they just ranked lower because women, on average, had higher absolute scores than the control? Speaking of control, writing about values in a physics class could cause people otherwise interested in physics to lose interest in the class.

deleted 16y ago

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patio11 16y ago

I would be very interested to hear whether stereotype threat responds to the prompt: "Write something about fish. You have 15 minutes."

lutorm 16y ago

A popular but fairly comprehensive summary about stereotype threat research is at http://reducingstereotypethreat.org/ http://reducingstereotypethreat.org/.

mhartl 16y ago

Men dominate the physical sciences and mathematics, with the disparity growing as the subjects get more advanced. The notion that a 15-minute writing exercise can close this gap strains credulity. For a hard-headed introduction to this subject, I recommend The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Women and men have different cognitive strengths: on average, women are more verbally fluent and are better at inferring emotional states from facial expressions and body language, whereas men are better at spatial rotations and abstract reasoning. Women do better or worse on typically "male" tasks depending on the phase of their menstrual cycles and the corresponding levels of androgens ("male" hormones) in their bloodstreams. Patients undergoing male-to-female sex-change operations do progressively worse on "male" tasks and better on "female" ones as the estrogen therapy progresses, with the opposite effect in female-to-male patients. And so on. While the bell curves substantially overlap, the notion that men and women are cognitively identical is scientifically untenable. Perhaps the continuing disparity in the abstract sciences points to discrimination against women in those subjects. And yet, women make up approximately 56% of college graduates, with men at 44%—a 12-point gap. I find it telling that virtually no one decries this disparity, nor infers from it a systemic anti-male bias in higher education. The authors of these kinds of studies clearly want there to be no gender gap. (The results of this study could reasonably be described as "the 15-minute writing test that boosts female learning and suppresses male learning".) When the political biases of the researchers are so evident, it's difficult to trust the results.

iopuy 16y ago

When I was 12 years old we were forced to take Tae Kwon Do in school for some odd reason (yes an American school). At the end of the practice session we would all sit around in a circle in the brightly light gym/dancing room with the instructor in the center. He would tell us to close our eyes for 2 minutes and when we were told to reopen them the lights seemed brighter. We were told if we did this once a week every week in life we would succeed no matter what. Well I have in my opinion succeeded in life so it must be because of the eye drill.

rudyfink 16y ago

The fact that they tinkered with the Y axis scaling on the graph makes me quite suspicious of their results. I admit it is knee jerk, but anytime I see charts asking me to compare things and the scales are different I just wonder what else someone felt the need to obscure.

yummyfajitas 16y ago

If this is true, it seems we can completely replace all affirmative action, "women in X" programs and special resources, and all that other stuff with 30 minutes of writing. This is fantastic - now we can stop spending millions on "women in X", and instead spend the money on real science. Right?