Teaching Women Science

In my last entry, I touched on a rather difficult topic: how best to improve outcomes for women in college-level physical science courses. I don't think there are any simple answers to that question. Certainly the research being done on the topic has noble goals and the people working on it should be commended; they've done great work in finding ways to improve all students' learning, including women's. Nonetheless, I think the question itself is ill-formed. Before you read on, allow me to warn you that I have not done any research on the subject and am not in any way qualified to make authoritative statements about 50% of the human population of the planet; however, if you are interested in a 100% pure-opinion discussion of female students from the perspective of a female physical science student, please continue.

There is a reasonably large amount of relatively convincing evidence, as far as evidence in the social sciences goes, that when taken as large groups women and men are more alike than different. There do, of course, exist real differences. However, it is highly questionable whether generalized differences between large populations can be applied to tiny, self-selected subsets thereof. A difference between the populations of all males and all females which is statistically significant at the population level may not, and likely does not, have any predictive value for a sample of size 30 or 40, especially when that sample is self-selected for attributes that may very well correlate with the trait in question.

Therefore, I would urge anyone who is involved in teaching or curriculum development for college-level science courses to be very cautious with any statement of the form "Women are X" or even "Most women are X" or "Most women are more X than most men." It may be true. It may even be an accurate description of your wife, mother, daughter, self, or one or more memorable students. But there is no reason to believe that it will be true of any individual student and very little reason to expect it to be true of your students in general. The sizes of the differences between women and men in large-scale studies are tiny, and the individual differences among both men and women are far, far larger. Generalized ideas about men and women will not be helpful when working with individuals and small groups.

That is not to say that these generalized studies of gender differences are not relevant or useful. Certainly they can tell us some important things; the cohort studies in particular are interesting, as they help illuminate some mysterious elements of gender differences, telling us when - and occasionally why - girls diverge from boys in various aspects of psychology. However, to use a physical science analogy, studying overall gender differences in a population is like studying climate: you can make some useful predictions, but they only make sense on a large scale. A climate model can't tell me anything about the weather in my town tomorrow, in my county next week, or even in my state next month, and it will be shaky about next year - but it should be pretty good for my region over the next decade.

Keeping that in mind, I do have some constructive suggestions that I believe can have a positive effect on outcomes for traditionally-underperforming groups in physical science courses, including women and to some extent cultural minority groups.

1. Do not assume that your students know anything.

1a. Any required formal academic background for the class or major, including high school mathematics and science education, should be documented clearly in the course description; outlines of the content that should have been covered in high school classes should be freely available from the department. Prerequisites, including required high school preparation, should be enforced. Placement tests are not a bad idea - they have worked quite well for math departments.

1b. The expected informal/non-academic backgrounds for students entering your course/degree program should also be stated explicitly. This requires a certain amount of introspection; it is difficult to construct an explicit outline of the sorts of informal science and engineering experiences you expect your students to have come in contact with over the course of their lives. However, it will benefit both you and your students to make the effort. If you have a habit of using airplanes and bouncing balls as examples in your mechanics class, your students should know some basic ideas about airplanes and have played with a Superball at least a few times. If you can get together with other faculty members teaching introductory courses, you may even be able to put together a one- or two-credit preparatory course, or perhaps an optional seminar to parallel the introductory sequence, which focuses on these sorts of informal experiences with the physical world - building model airplanes, going to air shows, building or repairing simple electronics, stargazing, dissecting a telescope to see how it works. As a group, your female students are less likely to have had these experiences than your male students (although still more likely than the general population, since your class is self-selected for physical science interest) and are thus at a disadvantage in conceptual understanding.

2. Ensure that your students have a mix of both collaborative and non-collaborative out-of-class assignments and that not all collaborative assignments are done in exactly the same groups. Some students tend to dominate collaborative work, and others may be too timid to speak up or unaware of other students' subtle dominance (this may or may not break down along gender lines, and whether it does or not is completely unimportant). On the other hand, students often can genuinely learn from each other in collaborative assignments. If you encourage students to work together on homework, give a few low-stakes take-home tests or other independent assignments throughout the term to challenge your students and help them evaluate their own independent ability to solve problems. If you assign lab groups or project groups, ensure that you vary their composition. If you allow students to select their own groups, watch for subtle signs of problems (if a student's labs and homework show an excellent understanding of material but he/she appears lost on tests, that's a warning sign that he/she is relying too much on his/her group and should probably try working alone or with different people; the student may not realize this on his/her own, and it only takes a few seconds to write a quick note on a test or have a word with him/her after class).

3. Teach in a style with which you are comfortable. If you try new pedagogical techniques and discover that they take time away from presenting needed material or that they feel ridiculous, stop. The vast majority of your class will benefit most from you teaching in a way such that you feel comfortable and can muster as much enthusiasm as humanly possible for your subject. The fact that a study shows a technique to be effective does not mean that it will mesh well with your personality.

4. Try to avoid stereotyping and deal with your students as individuals. The young black woman in your class may be a future physics major who will exceed all your expectations and need a greater challenge, and the glasses-wearing kid who looks just like a younger version of you may be struggling desperately to pass the calculus-based physics class he selected because it would good on his law school application. Both will need support to reach their goals, but the support required will be of vastly different types and cannot be discerned from their gender or physical appearance.

5. Try to use inclusive examples of real-world applications of your physical science concepts. One excellent example that was used by my current physics professor was the application of rotational motion concepts to figure skaters. Most modern physics textbooks have an excellent selection of problems; take a look at your assignments and try to include a variety of problem types, making sure that not all of them involve guns, baseballs, slingshots, and rockets.

6. For those instructing physical science classes with students who will probably go on to take standardized tests in the field: Work with your department to arrange some sort of optional course or seminar that teaches standardized test-taking explicitly. Encourage your female students to take it. Many instructors include some multiple-choice questions as part of their regular tests, which is good, but one generalization that has proven true and significant among female physical science majors is that we tend to do worse on standardized tests than our male peers; evidently we are not absorbing the implicit teaching as currently implemented. Test-taking is a skill that can be taught, and your female students will go on to be more successful if they learn it.

Overall, I think most professors do an excellent job. As I noted in my previous post, the amount that a college professor can do about the "gender gap" is somewhat limited; students, both male and female, who come into a class with less will leave with less. But there are some few things you can do to help even the playing field for all of them.

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Surprise! There's Still No Magic Bullet.

As a female student of a physical science, I have a certain amount of interest in the subject of female students in the physical sciences. It turns out we're pretty rare - the gap is practically gone in the biological sciences, closing rapidly in chemistry, and closing slightly more slowly in mathematics, but it's remained stubbornly large in physics, engineering, and computer science. It also turns out we underperform compared to our male colleagues both in introductory classes and on standardized tests. The biggest and most influential gap I'm aware of is on the Physics GRE, but we also apparently underperform on the physics SAT II, math SAT, quantitative GRE, and the standardized pre/post-test used in many introductory physics classes called the "Force Concept Inventory."

Every few years, one study or another comes up with great data showing that girls or women do a lot better in math or science classes when certain changes are made. These changes almost invariably correspond to the techniques that just happen to be generally fashionable in the educational community at the time. When the "new math" was in vogue, there were studies showing that it closed the gender gap (it may have, to some extent, by crippling boys and girls equally); "child-led learning" was supposed to do the same; then there were charter schools, smaller class sizes, and recently a proposed return to gender-segregated schools championed by the sorts of people who said that girls would learn math better by counting flower petals instead of solving equations. It's almost enough to make one cynical.

The method in vogue today is something alternately called "active," "interactive," or "collaborative" learning. It's implemented at the grade school level as "think-pair-share"; for adults in college classrooms, a similar technique is used, but the silly terminology is (thankfully!) left out in favor of more age-appropriate phrases like "peer instruction." The general idea is that a significantly larger portion of class time than usual is devoted to various structured collaborative small-group activities, with or without ensuing full-class discussions.

Now, there are all sorts of ad-hoc rationalizations about why this is supposed to be better for female students in general - we're supposedly more collaborative, less competitive, more timid about answering questions in class, and better at coming up with answers if we can verbalize them in small groups first. The fact that male students almost universally also benefit from changes in teaching techniques designed to benefit girls is always ignored. The observation that nearly all students in serious college-level for-majors math and science courses are atypical in some way, and female students are more often than not gender-atypical, is never taken seriously.

Doing my best to lay aside my own reaction to these teaching techniques (I hate it! I hate talking to people when I haven't had a chance to work out a problem on my own! I hate feeling locked in to a solution because someone has already seen it and listened to me explain it! I hate feeling like I'm teaching my classmates when I'm completely and utterly unqualified to do so! I hate feeling responsible for other people's misconceptions!) Anyway...doing my best to lay all that aside and realize that the generalizations made in studies aren't necessarily intended to apply to me personally, I took a serious look at the Harvard study released a while back that showed that the gender gap could be significantly reduced with the introduction of interactive learning techniques. It seems fairly well-done, with a typical narrative for the sort of study that it is: women were worse off than men coming into a calculus-based physics course and the differences were magnified by the end of the course, new teaching technique was adopted, both women and men did better but women did so much better that the gap was erased.

As I sad, this is typical for the sort of study that it is. You could easily substitute any of the myriad of other educational fashions in for "interactive learning techniques" and find a study that produces basically the same results in some field or other in some age group. To the extent that these studies demonstrate anything, it's that when you take decent instructors, give them a new tool in their teaching toolbox, tell them how to use it, and force them to pay more attention to their teaching (because they're using the new tool), their students do better. This may indirectly help to close the gender gap in some cases by lifting all students up to a similar level of understanding - students, including girls, who come in unprepared are more reliant on being "taught" - but the evidence that any gender-equalization effect is really linked to the techniques' catering to sex-stereotyped learning styles is in my opinion weak at best.

So, as you may guess, I was completely unsurprised to discover that a new study, this one from the University of Colorado, failed to show any statistically-significant gender-gap reduction using the same techniques as the Harvard study. Again, all students did better with the new teaching style, but women didn't gain on men as they did at Harvard. In fact, men made greater gains than women.This ought to be shocking; a "feminine" sex-stereotyped program aimed at improving women's learning actually benefits men more than women. But it's barely worthy of mention, and the study authors make sure to appease the sex-stereotypers by noting that women in the classes did in fact perform in accordance with their stereotypes, doing better than men on "collaborative" homework and worse on "competitive and time constrained" exams, achieving overall grades that were on average equal to the men's. Altogether, the results were impressive as a demonstration of the effectiveness of a new teaching style implemented well, but failed to show any implications for gender equality whatsoever.

So there's still no silver bullet; students, including women, who come into a physics class with less preparation will usually leave with a weaker understanding of the material, the Harvard study notwithstanding. It's possible there may have been a confounding variable like class size, instructor availability, or simply the general higher preparation level of the Harvard students as compared to the Colorado students. But the use of some new teaching techniques can be of general benefit to most students. It doesn't make for good headlines - but responsible science, especially in the social sciences, generally doesn't.

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