When I first started writing diaries here, one of the first things I chose to write about was the Cohen group's studies on closing the racial achievement gap for black seventh graders by administering...a writing exercise at the beginning of the school year that aided in the self-affirmation of worth. It may not seem like a revolutionary idea, but as was reported by the group, the results were profound, both in the short term:
The intervention, a brief in-class writing assignment, significantly improved the grades of African American students and reduced the racial achievement gap by 40%.
And the long-term:
Over 2 years, the grade point average (GPA) of African Americans was, on average, raised by 0.24 grade points.
Now Cohen and others have come back to apply their methods to the gender achievement group in the college physics classroom. The results give reason to be optimistic and shall be detailed over the fold.
Miyake, et al. published their results in the journal Science. Their finding?
Values affirmation reduced the male-female performance and learning difference substantially and elevated women's modal grades from the C to B range. Benefits were strongest for women who tended to endorse the stereotype that men do better than women in physics. A brief psychological intervention may be a promising way to address the gender gap in science performance and learning.
Like the racial achievement gap studies, this provided experimental confirmation that addressing the psychological threat to a particular group of people—in this case, women—plays a significant role in learning and academic performance. The gender achievement gap is not the result of this ridiculous notion that women are intrinsically subpar performers in the science classroom, but that's the stereotype out there and constitutes a prime example of the psychological threat. Previous means to combat this gender achievement gap were more instructional in nature than psychological, but this study demonstrates that the instructional aspect was definitely not the whole story.
The study was conducted under randomized and double-blind conditions with a readily controllable treatment variable, so like the racial achievement gap studies, it was heavily controlled. The affirmation writing exercises were administered twice, once at the start of the semester and once shortly before the first midterm
Now to explain the specific results of the study, which I find easier to do by appealing to the figures in the paper (which I have access to).
Figure 1A shows the average of three midterm and a final exam scores for both men and women in the control groups and the group that did the values affirming exercise. The gender achievement gap, by this measure, was significant reduced in the values affirmation group. Figure 1B shows the mean FMCE Score for both genders in both groups... the Force & Motion Conceptual Evaluation test is a standardized test in conceptual physics. This figure controlled for scores on the beginning-of-semester scores in order to contain the effects of learning. What's significant here is that the achievement gap essentially disappears.
There's a second figure that shows a final grade distribution both genders in both groups, but the results can be summarized simply:
The distribution of final letter grades indicated that values affirmationwas particularly effective in improving women's performance from average (C) to above average (B). As shown in Fig. 2, women in the two groups differed primarily in the B-to-C range; more women earned B’s in the affirmation group than in the control group, whereas more women earned C’s in the control group than in the affirmation group [P = 0.04]. There was no such difference in grade distribution for men [P= 0.88].
Fig. 3 I find to be the most interesting, but it will probably require the most explanation for facile interpretation:
So you know the exam data from Figure 1? Well, those exam averages were broken down further between people who personally believed in the stereotype that women are inherently worse at science and those who rejected this stereotype. You will notice, in both Figure 3A and Figure 3B, that women who did not undergo the affirmation exercise (so we're looking at "Control Women") who showed a "High" level of gender stereotype endorsement showed the lowest overall exam scores. You will also note then the significant disparity, in the "High" stereotype endorsement regions, between women who did not undergo the affirmation exercise and women who did. Remarkable, isn't it?
The researchers on this figure:
Although women as a group did not strongly endorse the negative gender stereotype, even a moderate level of stereotype endorsement was costly for women in the control condition, with their exam scores decreasing as a function of stereotype endorsement [P < 0.01] (Fig. 3A). Affirmation, however, buffered women against this identity threat, eliminating the negative relation between stereotype endorsement and exam scores [P = 0.35]. Moreover, among women expressing higher levels of stereotype endorsement (defined as 0.75 SDs above the mean here), affirmation improved the exam scores relative to the control condition [P <0.01]. </p>
So overall, this is very fascinating. And I hope I've provided an adequate explanation for the results.
But the "moral" of the story: these stereotypes against women do psychological harm, but we've experimentally found a way to combat them in the classroom.