This might be worth trying!

[steuard]

There's been some attention on the intertubes lately to a study based at the University of Colorado about reducing the persistent gender gap in intro physics. One good description of the idea and results is a blog entry at Not Exactly Rocket Science: the gist is that by having students write two 15-minute essays at the start of the term justifying some of their most important values (nothing to do with physics!), the usual gap between male and female course grades (and assessment scores) was essentially eliminated. That's a Big Deal(TM), because physics has the worst gender imbalance of all the sciences (including math and CS, and I think even most engineering specialties).

That blog post is a very nice summary of this research, which is much more than I can say for the article on Ars Technica where I first saw this study mentioned. One major flaw of the Ars article was its title: "Self-affirming essay boosts coeds' physics skills". I loathe the word "coed" used in this way, so much so that I suspect that its use here actively makes physics gender inequality worse. (Seriously, does anyone under the age of 40 use "coed" to mean "college woman" in any context except porn?)

The other big flaw of the Ars article (which left me horribly skeptical about the research) was that it gave no indication of how a physics professor is supposed to nonchalantly slip a completely irrelevant essay assignment into the class. Happily, the blog post explains that it was billed as an exercise to improve writing skills. That actually feels plausible, and it's a great fit for my class: I've always insisted that students explain their equations with English sentences (for many good reasons). So I may very well try this myself, if not next semester then next fall. I hope it helps!

Comments

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

I'm a little unclear on the concept. Is the idea that writing these essays will give girls/women something they are disproportionately better at, to offset their disproportionately worse grades in the rest of the course? Or does writing these essays somehow change the relationship of females to the course material, so that they actually become better at physics than they would otherwise have been? One of these, I think is a totally awesome thing to pursue. The other.... not so much.

Newt

[kuddliphish.livejournal.com]

The idea is that writing these essays eliminates "stereotype threat" though how it does so is a little unclear. It seems like thinking about what's important to you for 15 minutes shouldn't have that profound an effect over the course of a semester, but the study showed that the women went on to do better in the class with higher test scores and such.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

To add a little to what kuddliphish said, the study's results imply that it really is a matter of women who wrote the essays going on to learn physics better. (It's not even clear to me that the essays were included in the course grade; it certainly wasn't a major factor if they were.) And even ignoring course grades entirely, on a standard physics assessment test at the end of the term the groups that wrote these essays showed a complete lack of the gender gap that was so clear in the control group. (The control group wrote essays, too: on a very similar topic, but one that explicitly did not affirm each student's own personal values.)

I'm not at all clear on how the heck this manages to help so substantially, but for results like that I'm willing to deal with being puzzled.

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

Huh. Thinking back to courses I felt huge trepidation about or in which I failed to ever connect with the material, feeling some sort of affirmation in the course towards the beginning might have made some difference. If nothing else, it might have helped with the feeling that the prof was a Big Scary Person, and I might have been more likely to go ask for help. So maybe there is something to that. (I sometimes wish I could do my college years over again with the assertiveness I've learned since then.)

Newt

[kirin]

Huh. People are very weird things, but if it works, it works. And at worst, it's just half an hour of time investment.

[lordhylas.livejournal.com]

I came to like that you require students to explain equations and thought processes in clear sentences. I ended up continuing that practice in all the physics classes I took after you, and I think it helped a lot. It certainly made me think about my process more and helped me come to a better understanding of what exactly I was doing. Also, it gives us more concept-oriented people a chance to prove we have an inkling of what we're doing even if our math looks horrible.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

Excellent! Sounds like that policy accomplished exactly what I hoped it would. (Explaining your own work really does help, so anything that can help people get in that habit is a good thing.) And yeah, the extra opportunity for partial credit doesn't hurt, either.