Katrina Schwartz

It’s a common refrain that there aren’t enough women in jobs that require math and science skills like engineering and computer science. Though more programs are cropping up geared towards girls involved in science through camps, rocketry clubs or with more focused courses on STEM subjects, the gender imbalance is still striking.

The discrepancy became all-too apparent to Debbie Sterling, a budding inventor who was one of the only girls in her engineering courses at Stanford. So she came up with an idea to encourage more girls in  is why she’s spent the last several years developing GoldieBlox, a toy focused on developing spatial skills in girls.

“I just think there need to be more options, more role models, more career paths for girls to see and that’s what I’m trying to do with GoldieBlox,” Sterling said.

Sterling discovered her interest in engineering almost by accident — a math teacher suggested she take a course when she got to college — and she wonders if girls would choose science careers if they were exposed to basic engineering and physics concepts earlier in life.

Research shows that building toys like Legos or Erector Sets are good for building spatial skills, but those typically fall under the stereotype of toys for boys. After visiting the toy store and experiencing what she called “the pink explosion isle for girls” Sterling decided she needed to build an engineering toy that would appeal to girls.

GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine is a construction kit with pieces that clip into a board to make a simple belt drive. The set comes with a story that tells of a girl engineer named Goldie who wants to build a spinning machine so all her friends can spin together. She takes apart a jewelry box to learn about the spinning mechanism and then builds her own.

[RELATED READING: Giving Good Praise to Girls: What Messages Stick?]

“My ‘ah ha’ moment was that instead of a construction toy only, which is spatial skills and object play, I would combine spatial skills with verbal, so I would have the construction toy plus the book,” Sterling said. “By introducing the story of Goldie and these characters, and building for a reason, it gave girls the context they were craving and the narrative behind the play that was meaningful to them.”

She came up with the idea of her hybrid story-building toy by observing that girls prefer narrative-based play. She hoped she could draw girls in with a story and after directing them to follow along with Goldie as she builds, they’d get comfortable tinkering with the construction kit. Once they’re comfortable with the parts and how they work, the hope is that they begin to design their own machines.

“Some modeling of a cool, young girl engineer could be useful if the girl playing can see a path from where she is to where the cool, functioning engineer is,” said Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. She said the connection between the toy and engineering needs to be clear and that the hands on-skills girls learn at young ages need to be continual reinforcement for the effects to last.

Goldie can be a role model to younger girls, while the inventor herself can model what a successful female engineer looks like to older girls. “She’s not the kid genius,” Sterling said describing Goldie. “She’s well liked; she’s fun; she’s quirky; she’s a little messy. I guess that is a bit like me.”

Sterling said in its early days the toy has been very popular with engineering parents. “It touched my heart that it was a mechanical toy that was targeted towards young girls,” said Martin Miller, an engineer who pre-ordered GoldieBlox for his six-year-old daughter Kaitlin when the toy appeared on Kickstarter. “That’s unusual and I felt that was perfect for my little daughter.” Kaitlin has two older brothers and Miller considers a tomboy, so he thought she’d like a building toy. She has also already begun to play with the characters off the board, imagining scenes for Goldie and her friends.

Sterling hoped her toy would inspire creative play and was also aware of research like Carol Dweck’s that shows kids need to learn to struggle with difficult concepts so they know how to tackle setbacks in the future.

“From a very young age I would start stressing the fun and interestingness of difficult tasks,” Dweck said. “When something is easy I’d say, ‘oh that’s boring, that’s a waste of time.’”

[RELATED READING: How to Foster Grit, Tenacity and Perseverance: An Educator's Guide]

In the first draft of the story, Sterling had Goldie build a machine that didn’t work. But when Sterling tested the story line, girls and their parents got so frustrated that the machine didn’t work that they refused to turn the page and continue. So Sterling softened the failure.

“I have a moment where Goldie is perplexed,” she said. “So I don’t set anyone up for failure, but I show that she’s confused and she doesn’t know the answers and she goes through a series of funny moments where she tries a bunch of things until she finally works it out.”

That strategy is in line with Dweck’s research on how to keep kids striving for challenging tasks. “If you have little failures along the way and have them understand that’s part of learning, part of building and that you can actually derive useful information about what to do next — that’s really useful,” Dweck said.

Some specialty toy stores are already stocking GoldieBlox after the Kickstarter campaign Sterling launched to fund manufacturing went viral and more than doubled its goal. “From the very beginning I knew I wanted this girl character sitting on the shelf next to Bob the Builder and Thomas the Train,” Sterling said.

The game costs $29.99 and the three additional story lines and accompanying kits that Sterling is working on will likely have similar price tags.

Sterling wants the toy to be inclusive, unlike her experiences in engineering classes at Stanford, where most of her professors were men and she often felt her ideas were discounted. “I want everybody to get to have fun with engineering and I think that by doing it in this very accessible way that no one has to feel like they don’t belong,” she said.

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A new study from Stanford shows that a simple teaching tactic may help close the achievement gap between Latino American students and their white peers. Geoffrey Cohen, a professor of education and psychology at Stanford, and David Sherman of the University of California-Santa Barbara, and their fellow researchers explored the negative effects of “stereotype threat,” and came up with a finding, published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The article below by Marguerite Rigoglioso explains in detail.

The matter comes down to overcoming the negative effects of “stereotype threat,” a phenomenon that researchers have identified and documented over the last two decades. What they have found – in numerous studies – is that the stress and uncertain sense of belonging that can stem from being a member of a negatively stereotyped group undermines academic performance of minority students as compared with white students.

Cohen and his colleagues have been looking for remedies to stereotype threat. In the first study described in the article, the researchers devised well-timed “values-affirmation” classroom assignments given to both Latino and white students as a part of the regular classroom curriculum. In one exercise, middle schoolers were given a list of values, such as “being good at art,” “being religious” and “having a sense of humor.” They were asked to pick the ones that were important to them and write a few sentences describing why. In a second exercise, they reflected in a more open-ended manner on things in their life that were important to them, and in a third they were guided to write a brief essay describing how the things they most consistently valued would be important to them in the coming spring.

Students completed several structured reflection exercises in their class throughout the year. The tasks were given at critical moments: the beginning of the school year; before tests; and near the holiday season, a period of stress for many people.

The control group was guided to write about values that were important to other people, but not themselves, or about other neutral topics.

The results were dramatic: Latino students who completed the affirmation exercises had higher grades than those in the control group. Moreover, the effects of the affirmation intervention persisted for three years. The task had no significant effect on white students.

A second study looked at whether affirmation interventions could lessen the persistent threat to Latino Americans’ identity caused by the overt or subtle presence of racial and ethnic stereotypes and prejudices. Researchers administered values affirmation tasks and also assessed students’ perceptions of daily adversity, identity threat and feelings of academic fit. They did this several times over the school year as reflected in diary entries, and again measured students’ grades.

[RELATED: Girls and Math: Busting the Stereotype]

Surveys completed by children in the classroom indicated that Latino students who had participated in the affirmation exercises were less likely to see daily stress and adversity as threatening to their identity and sense of belonging in school. Once again, their grades were higher than those who did not participate in the affirmation assignments.

“Self-affirmation exercises provide adolescents from minority groups with a psychological time out,” said Cohen. In an environment many minorities find hostile, such tasks provide reassurance about who they are and what’s really important at a critical time in their lives.

As to why the interventions affected minorities but not white students, Cohen said, “Latino Americans are under a more consistent and chronic sense of psychological threat in the educational setting than their white counterparts on average. They constantly face negative stereotypes about their ability to succeed, so they are the ones to benefit the most from affirmations that help them to maintain a positive self-image.”

MULTIPLE BENEFITS 

Such affirmations not only help students feel more confident, they allow them to reframe adversity and challenges as temporary phenomena rather than looming signs that they somehow don’t belong – or, worse, that they are fulfilling negative stereotypes about their inferiority.

The studies also underscore that underperformance is frequently not a function of individual inadequacy, but rather systemic failure. “A threatening environment can make smart kids less likely to show what they know, whereas a positive environment might pull out qualities that make the seemingly average student shine,” said Cohen.

Cohen’s study represents the latest advance in decades-long work on minority student achievement pioneered by a group of researchers across the country, most notably Stanford Graduate School of Education Dean Claude Steele. His book, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, chronicles the discovery and explanation of stereotype threat. Working in this arena for the past decade, Cohen, often in collaboration with Steele, Stanford psychology professor Greg Walton and others, has used insights from previous research to explore measures that might reduce its effects.

Cohen cautioned that such interventions are not a magic bullet. ”Psychological threat might not contribute to a group’s performance in some schools,” he said.

[RELATED: Can Stereotyping Girls Harm Boys Too?]

And he noted that such interventions echo what great teachers already do: continually affirm children. “Small gestures of affirmation can have lasting consequences, especially when they are woven into the student’s daily experience,” he said. Teacher training, he indicated, should ensure that teachers make them a part of their toolkit.

“At the school level you need committed teachers, and a solid curriculum,” Cohen said.  “When these factors are in place, when opportunities for growth are there, psychological interventions can help students change their lives.”

The study’s other co-authors were from UC-Santa Barbara, Columbia University, the University of Colorado and the University of Chicago. The National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the University of California funded the research.

Marguerite Rigoglioso writes frequently for the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where this article originally appeared.

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Games are increasingly recognized by educators as a way to get kids excited about learning. While the stereotype of a “gamer” may evoke the image of a high school boy holed up in a dark room playing on a console, in reality 62 percent of gamers play with other people either in person or online, and 47 percent of all gamers are girls.

Game developers and academics who have been studying the elements that go into making games more attractive to girls found that those very same qualities are also important components of learning. For instance, girls are more drawn to games that require problem solving in context, that are collaborative (played through social media) and that produce what’s perceived to be a social good. They also like games that simulate the real word and are particularly drawn to “transmedia” content that draws on characters from books, movies, or toys.

“Something we’ve seen as a tremendous motivator for girls to learn about math and science is that they need to see the connection from the classroom out into the real world,” said Victoria Van Voorhis, the founder of Second Avenue Learning in a recent webinar. Her company has received funding from the National Science Foundation to study how to reach girls through gaming with the help of the Rochester Institute of Technology. They tested a physical science game called “Martha Madison’s Marvelous Machines” with middle school girls in urban, suburban, and rural environments to gauge whether playing the game would increase their interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), whether it appealed to them and if it could improve their understanding of fundamental mechanical devices.

[RELATED READING: What's the Secret Sauce to a Great Educational Game?]

“When we asked them about springs and levers, they had no understanding of why they were important in the real world,” Van Voorhis said. “But when we were able to situate those kinds of tools in a real-world context, where they were solving a problem that was directed towards social good, we saw the engagement numbers pop.”  girls were talking about physics or game play 76 percent of the time and were only off topic 5 percent of the time.

One of the biggest draws for girls to gaming are the passionate communities that spring up around the games. Affinity groups, or what’s sometimes referred to as the meta-game, often involve users creating their own story lines, interacting with each other and sharing. Jayne Lammers, a professor at the University of Rochester, spent extensive time studying affinity groups of girls that play SIMs, the game that allows users to simulate real life through the game, and watched girls go from consumers to creators in the space. They wrote stories, solicited feedback from peers, demonstrated self-awareness, and even learned elements of programming and design through their creations.

“As we think about how girls are developing these skills outside of the classroom such as affinity spaces, I think it’s important that we think about how to bring it back into the classroom,” Lammers said. But it can be hard to convince parents and administrators that a video game is helping students learn, especially when game-producers have upended some foundational thinking about how to educate – like allowing a student to interpret and analyze a subject on their own before giving them explicit content instruction.

“Invoking their interest in the topic through play is a great way to get them to come to their reading or lectures or small group work with an explicit agenda,” Van Voorhis said. She advocates for thinking of learning as a non-linear path, where steps are taken forward, but also backwards and sideways.

“The critical thinking and the problem solving that students experience in games create spontaneous innovation,” Van Voorhis said. “It can be the catalyst and the spark to get a kid to that ‘ah ha moment’ that inspire a kid to get deeper into that content area.” And games allow kids to experiment, try new methods and fail without consequences.

Van Voorhis constructed a different version of Bloom’s Taxonomy based on game play, in which students first explore a theme informally, and that process helps them understand written text afterwards.

“Invoking their interest in the topic through play is a great way to get them to come to their reading or lectures or small group work with an explicit agenda,” she said.

Second Avenue

A flipped version of Bloom's Taxonomy, informed by game-play.

Flickr: Benjamin Rossen

We’ve explored a variety of angles about different aspects of teaching and learning math — everything from stereotyping girls to how to deal with math anxiety to the importance of spatial thinking. Here are some helpful articles that examine the learning processes.

• WHY IT’S IMPORTANT TO TALK MATH WITH KIDS >> Many of us feel completely comfortable talking about letters, words and sentences with our children—reading to them at night, helping them decode their own books, noting messages on street signs and billboards. But speaking to them about numbers, fractions, and decimals? Not so much. And yet studies show that “number talk” at home is a key predictor of young children’s achievement in math once they get to school. Now a new study provides evidence that gender is part of the equation: Parents speak to their daughters about numbers far less than their sons.
• HOW DO YOU SPARK A LOVE OF MATH IN KIDS? >> Decades of educational research demonstrate that during the years between elementary school and high school, many students disengage from math and don’t regain their interest—to the detriment of their later schooling, and even their adult careers. A study that followed 273 students over the course of their first year of middle school, for example, found that by spring, the pupils described mathematics as less valuable than they had the previous fall, and reported that they were investing less effort and persistence in the subject than they had before.
• GIRLS AND MATH: BUSTING THE STEREOTYPE MYTH >> According to Claude Steele, author of Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, it’s not that girls aren’t necessarily interested in science and math, the problem lies whether they’re discouraged from following their interests because of the persistent stereotype that girls aren’t good at that sort of thing.
• HOW TO DEAL WITH KIDS’ MATH ANXIETY >> In children with math anxiety, seeing numbers on a page stimulates the same part of the brain that would respond if they spotted a slithering snake or a creeping spider—math is that scary. Math anxiety is real and can’t simply be wished away. But there are specific exercises that have been shown to reduce students’ nervousness and allow them to focus on their work without the powerful distraction of fear.
• HOW THINKING IN 3D CAN IMPROVE MATH AND SCIENCE     SKILLS >> Growing evidence suggests that a focus on these characteristics of the material world can help children hone their spatial thinking skills—and that such skills, in turn, support achievement in subjects like science and math.

Flickr:Idovermani

By Shankar Vedantam

Walk into any tech company or university math department, and you’ll likely see a gender disparity: Fewer women than men seem to go into fields involving science, engineering, technology and mathematics.

Over the years, educators, recruiters and government authorities have bemoaned the gender gap and warned that it can have dire consequences for American competitiveness and continued technological dominance.

It isn’t just that fewer women choose to go into these fields. Even when they go into these fields and are successful, women are more likely than men to quit.

“They tend to drop out at higher rates than their male peers,” said Toni Schmader, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. “As women enter into careers, the levels of advancement aren’t as steep for women as for men.

Schmader and a colleague, Matthias Mehl at the University of Arizona, recently came up with an innovative way to study one dimension of the gender gap in fields such as computer science and engineering.

Mehl often uses a device known as an Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) in his research. It’s an audio recorder that the psychologist can attach to volunteers. The device automatically turns itself on and off.

“We program the device to record for 30 seconds every 12 minutes,” Mehl said in an interview. “That gives you about 5 soundbites per hour, or 70 soundbites per day.”

By “sampling” people’s daily lives, Mehl said his recorder often picks up on things that people don’t notice. Most of us remember only the highlights of our days — an interesting conversation or a ballgame. But much of the time, our lives run on autopilot, and we don’t notice what’s going on. Mehl said getting detailed information about what people do during the majority of their time is central to understanding them psychologically.

The sampling technique has revealed flaws in common stereotypes. Take the one about how women like to talk much more than men. When Mehl actually measured how many words men and women speak each day, he found there was practically no difference — both men and women speak around 17,000 words a day, give or take a few hundred.

Mehl and Schmader said in interviews that they felt the unobtrusive sampling technique could shed some light on why women who’d made it through grueling Ph.D.s and become science and math professors might feel like throwing it all away.

They had male and female scientists at a research university wear the audio recorders and go about their work. When the scientists analyzed the audio samples, they found there was a pattern in the way the male and female professors talked to one another.

When male scientists talked to other scientists about their research, it energized them. But it was a different story for women.

“For women, the pattern was just the opposite, specifically in their conversations with male colleagues,” Schmader said. “So the more women in their conversations with male colleagues were talking about research, the more disengaged they reported being in their work.”

Disengagement predicts that someone is at risk of dropping out.

There was another sign of trouble.

When female scientists talked to other female scientists, they sounded perfectly competent. But when they talked to male colleagues, Mehl and Schmader found that they sounded less competent.

One obvious explanation was that the men were being nasty to their female colleagues and throwing them off their game. Mehl and Schmader checked the tapes.

“We don’t have any evidence that there is anything that men are saying to make this happen,” Schmader said.

But the audiotapes did provide a clue about what was going on. When the male and female scientists weren’t talking about work, the women reported feeling more engaged.

For Mehl and Schmader, this was the smoking gun that an insidious psychological phenomenon called “stereotype threat” was at work. It could potentially explain the disparity between men and women pursuing science and math careers.

What Is Stereotype Threat?

Several years ago, psychologist Claude Steele posed an interesting question about an everyday scenario: Let’s say you stopped by a math classroom and saw boys and girls learning together.

“The teacher is the same; the textbooks are the same; and in better classrooms, these students are treated the same,” Steele wrote. “Is it possible, then, that they could still experience the classroom differently, so differently in fact as to significantly affect their performance and achievement there?”

Steele and other psychologists said a psychological phenomenon could be influencing the performance of students.

When there’s a stereotype in the air and people are worried they might confirm the stereotype by performing poorly, their fears can inadvertently make the stereotype become self-fulfilling.

Steele and his colleagues found that when women were reminded — even subtly — of the stereotype that men were better than women at math, the performance of women in math tests measurably declined. Since the reduction in performance came about because women were threatened by the stereotype, the psychologists called the phenomenon “stereotype threat.”

Stereotype threat isn’t limited to women or ethnic minorities, Steele wrote elsewhere. “Everyone experiences stereotype threat. We are all members of some group about which negative stereotypes exist, from white males and Methodists to women and the elderly. And in a situation where one of those stereotypes applies — a man talking to women about pay equity, for example, or an aging faculty member trying to remember a number sequence in the middle of a lecture — we know that we may be judged by it.”

Over the years, experiments have shown that stereotype threat affects performance in a wide variety of domains.

Male And Female Scientists

Mehl and Schmader said they believed the same psychological phenomenon was responsible for the different ways in which conversations between male and female scientists were leaving the scientists engaged or disengaged.

“For a female scientist, particularly talking to a male colleague, if she thinks it’s possible he might hold this stereotype, a piece of her mind is spent monitoring the conversation and monitoring what it is she is saying, and wondering whether or not she is saying the right thing, and wondering whether or not she is sounding competent, and wondering whether or not she is confirming the stereotype,” Schmader said.

All this worrying is distracting. It uses up brainpower. The worst part?

“By merely worrying about that more, one ends up sounding more incompetent,” Schmader said.

Mehl and Schmader think that when female scientists talk to male colleagues about research, it brings the stereotype about men, women and science to the surface.

When the female scientists talked to men about leisure activities, it didn’t activate the stereotype. It wasn’t that women liked to talk only about their weekends and personal lives. When the women talked to other women about science, the stereotype wasn’t activated. It was the combination — women talking to men, and women and men talking about science, that activated the stereotype threat.

Now, most scientists say they don’t believe the stereotype about women and science, and argue that it won’t affect them. But the psychological studies suggest people are affected by stereotype threat regardless of whether they believe the stereotype.

Mehl, for example, knows all about stereotype threat. He even studies it for a living. The psychological phenomenon affects even him. In Mehl’s case, the stereotype that threatens his performance has to do with dancing — and the fact he’s from Germany and his wife is from Mexico.

“When I go dancing in Mexico, the stereotype of Germans not being good dancers is very salient,” he said. “So I find myself much more aware of the way I dance when I dance among a group of Latinos, compared to when I dance among a group of Germans.”

I asked Mehl whether worrying about his performance could be undermining his dancing.

“It’s, well, possible that it undermines my performance,” he said. Mehl said he’s tried to fight the stereotype by reminding himself about how the psychological phenomenon works.

“What takes place is really mostly in my head,” he said he tells himself. “‘Guess what? The Latinos around me don’t really care about how I dance.’”

The Wrong Conclusion

Mehl and Schmader said the stereotype threat research does not imply that the gender disparity in science and math fields is all “in women’s heads.”

The problem isn’t with women, Mehl said. The problem is with the stereotype.

The study suggests the gender disparity in science and technology may be, at least in part, the result of a vicious cycle.

When women look at tech companies and math departments, they see few women. This activates the stereotype that women aren’t good at math. The stereotype, Toni Schmader said, makes it harder for women to enter those fields. To stay. To thrive.

“If people like me aren’t represented in this field, then it makes me feel like it’s a bad fit, like I don’t belong here,” she said.

Shirley Malcom, a biologist who heads education programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science calls it a chicken and egg problem: “The fact that there are maybe small numbers in some areas keeps the numbers down.”

It may sound like a Zen riddle, but Malcom, Schmader and Mehl’s solution to the problem of stereotype threat in science, technology and engineering is actually simple.

In order to boost the numbers of women who choose to go into those fields, you have to boost the number of women who are in those fields.

This post originally appeared on NPR.

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When Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard, made his infamous remark in 2005 about “intrinsic aptitude” in explaining part of the gap between men and women’s performance in math and science, he was accused of making it harder for women and girls to succeed in those fields. He wasn’t blamed for hobbling the performance of men and boys—but maybe he should have been.

According to new research, both males and females do worse on a spatial reasoning task when they’re told that intrinsic aptitude accounts for the gender gap in the test’s results—even though the gap favors men.

In the study, published in the February issue of the journal Learning and Individual Differences, psychologist Angelica Moè told a group of 201 high school students that they would be taking a test that measured how well they could mentally manipulate imagined objects. They were also told that males perform better than females on this exercise, known as the Mental Rotation Test. Such pre-test comments are a standard way of inducing what psychologists call “stereotype threat.”

Research shows that when women or minorities are reminded before being evaluated that the group to which they belong commonly scores poorly, they themselves do worse than if they had received no such reminder. Anxiety about confirming the negative stereotype hampers their performance.

But Moè went a step further. She divided the students into four groups and offered each one a particular explanation for women’s comparative disadvantage. One group was told that the gap resulted from genetic differences between men and women. A second group was told that time limits were the problem: women could do as well as men on the test, but they were more affected by restrictions on the amount of time they could take to work on it. A third group was told that other people’s stereotypes were to blame, making women feel less able than they are. And a fourth group, acting as a control, was simply told again that men perform better on the task than women. Then all the groups took the test.

The results: When women were given an external reason for females’ poor performance—time limits or others’ stereotypes—they did better on the test. When they were given an internal reason—their own deficient genes—they did worse. But the study’s really striking finding was that men also did worse when told that genes were the cause of the gender gap.

It turns out that genetic explanations for performance aren’t good for anybody: women are convinced that their inferior genes won’t allow them to compete, and men worry that they won’t live up to the claims made for their supposedly superior Y chromosome. “It does not matter if the genetic explanation is really true or to what extent it is true,” Moè writes. “What makes the difference is the belief that failures or difficulties are dependent on genetic reasons.”

When genetic explanations are “really true,” we should respect them as solid scientific evidence. But loose talk about the genetic basis of ability—whether in speeches by college presidents or in hype-filled newspaper headlines—may well harm the performance of everyone, male and female alike.

Parents and educators can push back against such talk by emphasizing at every opportunity the malleable nature of intelligence—pointing out, for example, that performance on tasks like the Mental Rotation Test can be improved with training and practice. And test-takers can “prime” their own belief in flexible intelligence by saying to themselves, “I can do well if I try really hard,” or “With practice I will get better at this.” These aren’t cheesy self-affirmations, but truthful statements that will put us in the frame of mind to do our best.