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

[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.