| OK, Greg, so I finally managed to read the article you mentioned - |
| the one about the study on gender in physics. |
| About the study of college students done by Akira Miyake and his team? |
| I was interested that the researchers were actually a mix of psychologists and physicists. |
| That's an unusual combination. |
| Yeah. |
| I got a little confused at first about which students the study was based on. |
| They weren't actually majoring in physics - |
| they were majoring in what's known as the STEM disciplines. |
| That's science, technology, engineering and... and math. |
| Yes, but they were all doing physics courses as part of their studies. |
| That's correct. |
| So as I understood it, |
| Miyake and co started from the fact that women are underrepresented |
| in introductory physics courses at college, |
| and also that on average, |
| the women who do enrol on these courses perform more poorly than the men. |
| No one really knows why this is the case. |
| Yeah. But what the researchers wanted to find out |
| was basically what they could do about the relatively low level of the women's results. |
| But in order to find a solution |
| they needed to find out more about the nature of the problem. |
| Right - now let's see if I can remember... |
| it was that in the physics class, |
| the female students thought the male students all assumed that women weren't any good at physics... |
| was that it? |
| And they thought that the men expected them to get poor results in their tests. |
| That's what the women thought, and that made them nervous, so they did get poor results. |
| But actually they were wrong... |
| No one was making any assumptions about the female students at all. |
| Anyway, what Miyake's team did was quite simple - |
| getting the students to do some writing before they went into the physics class. |
| What did they call it? |
| Values-affirmation - |
| they had to write an essay focusing on things that were significant to them, |
| not particularly to do with the subject they were studying, |
| but more general things like music or people who mattered to them. |
| Right. |
| So the idea of doing the writing is that this gets the students thinking in a positive way. |
| And putting these thoughts into words can relax them and help them overcome the psychological factors |
| that lead to poor performance. Yeah. |
| But what the researchers in the study hadn't expected |
| was that this one activity raised the women's physics grades from the C to the B range. |
| A huge change. |
| Pity it wasn't to an A, but still! |
| No, but it does suggest that the women were seriously underperforming beforehand, in comparison with the men. |
| Yes. Mind you, Miyake's article left out a lot of details. |
| Like, did the students do the writing just once, or several times? |
| And had they been told why they were doing the writing? |
| That might have affected the results. |
| You mean, if they know the researchers thought it might help them to improve, |
| then they'd just try to fulfill that expectation? |
| Exactly. |
| So anyway, I thought for our project we could do a similar study, |
| but investigate whether it really was the writing activity that had that result. |
| OK. |
| So we could ask them to do a writing task about something completely different... |
| something more factual? |
| Like a general knowledge topic. |
| Maybe... |
| or we could have half the students doing a writing task |
| and half doing something else, like an oral task. |
| Or even, half do the same writing task as in the original research |
| and half do a factual writing task. |
| Then we'd see if it really is the topic that made the difference, or something else. |
| That's it. Good. |
| So at our meeting with the supervisor on Monday |
| we can tell him we've decided on our project. |
| We should have our aims ready by then. |
| I suppose we need to read the original study - the article's just a summary. |
| And there was another article I read, by Smolinsky. |
| It was about her research on how women and men perform in mixed teams in class, |
| compared with single-sex teams and on their own. |
| Let me guess... the women were better at teamwork. |
| That's what I expected, |
| but actually the men and the women got the same results |
| whether they were working in teams or on their own. |
| But I guess it's not that relevant to us. |
| What worries me anyway is how we're going to get everything done in the time. |
| We'll be OK now we know what we're doing. |
| Though I'm not clear how we assess whether the students in our experiment actually make any progress or not... |
| No. |
| We may need some advice on that. |
| The main thing's to make sure we have the right size sample, |
| not too big or too small. |
| That shouldn't be difficult. |
| Right, what do we need to do next? |
| We could have a look at the timetable for the science classes... |
| or perhaps we should just make an appointment to see one of the science professors. |
| That'd be better. |
| Great. |
| And we could even get to observe one of the classes. |
| What for? |
| Well... OK maybe let's just go with your idea. |
| Right, well... |