1OK, Greg, so I finally managed to read the article you mentioned -
2the one about the study on gender in physics.
3About the study of college students done by Akira Miyake and his team?
4I was interested that the researchers were actually a mix of psychologists and physicists.
5That's an unusual combination.
6Yeah.
7I got a little confused at first about which students the study was based on.
8They weren't actually majoring in physics -
9they were majoring in what's known as the STEM disciplines.
10That's science, technology, engineering and... and math.
11Yes, but they were all doing physics courses as part of their studies.
12That's correct.
13So as I understood it,
14Miyake and co started from the fact that women are underrepresented
15in introductory physics courses at college,
16and also that on average,
17the women who do enrol on these courses perform more poorly than the men.
18No one really knows why this is the case.
19Yeah. But what the researchers wanted to find out
20was basically what they could do about the relatively low level of the women's results.
21But in order to find a solution
22they needed to find out more about the nature of the problem.
23Right - now let's see if I can remember...
24it was that in the physics class,
25the female students thought the male students all assumed that women weren't any good at physics...
26was that it?
27And they thought that the men expected them to get poor results in their tests.
28That's what the women thought, and that made them nervous, so they did get poor results.
29But actually they were wrong...
30No one was making any assumptions about the female students at all.
31Anyway, what Miyake's team did was quite simple -
32getting the students to do some writing before they went into the physics class.
33What did they call it?
34Values-affirmation -
35they had to write an essay focusing on things that were significant to them,
36not particularly to do with the subject they were studying,
37but more general things like music or people who mattered to them.
38Right.
39So the idea of doing the writing is that this gets the students thinking in a positive way.
40And putting these thoughts into words can relax them and help them overcome the psychological factors
41that lead to poor performance. Yeah.
42But what the researchers in the study hadn't expected
43was that this one activity raised the women's physics grades from the C to the B range.
44A huge change.
45Pity it wasn't to an A, but still!
46No, but it does suggest that the women were seriously underperforming beforehand, in comparison with the men.
47Yes. Mind you, Miyake's article left out a lot of details.
48Like, did the students do the writing just once, or several times?
49And had they been told why they were doing the writing?
50That might have affected the results.
51You mean, if they know the researchers thought it might help them to improve,
52then they'd just try to fulfill that expectation?
53Exactly.
54So anyway, I thought for our project we could do a similar study,
55but investigate whether it really was the writing activity that had that result.
56OK.
57So we could ask them to do a writing task about something completely different...
58something more factual?
59Like a general knowledge topic.
60Maybe...
61or we could have half the students doing a writing task
62and half doing something else, like an oral task.
63Or even, half do the same writing task as in the original research
64and half do a factual writing task.
65Then we'd see if it really is the topic that made the difference, or something else.
66That's it. Good.
67So at our meeting with the supervisor on Monday
68we can tell him we've decided on our project.
69We should have our aims ready by then.
70I suppose we need to read the original study - the article's just a summary.
71And there was another article I read, by Smolinsky.
72It was about her research on how women and men perform in mixed teams in class,
73compared with single-sex teams and on their own.
74Let me guess... the women were better at teamwork.
75That's what I expected,
76but actually the men and the women got the same results
77whether they were working in teams or on their own.
78But I guess it's not that relevant to us.
79What worries me anyway is how we're going to get everything done in the time.
80We'll be OK now we know what we're doing.
81Though I'm not clear how we assess whether the students in our experiment actually make any progress or not...
82No.
83We may need some advice on that.
84The main thing's to make sure we have the right size sample,
85not too big or too small.
86That shouldn't be difficult.
87Right, what do we need to do next?
88We could have a look at the timetable for the science classes...
89or perhaps we should just make an appointment to see one of the science professors.
90That'd be better.
91Great.
92And we could even get to observe one of the classes.
93What for?
94Well... OK maybe let's just go with your idea.
95Right, well...