This project will develop new strategies for addressing the persistent gender gap in science achievement by targeting the mechanisms by which maladaptive beliefs that interfere with achievement arise. The persistent underrepresentation of women in science limits women's cognitive and economic attainment and-due to the growing number of households relying on the sole income of a female earner-contributes to child poverty and its concomitant negative effects on child physical, emotional, and cognitive development. Increasing the representation of women in science is a crucial way to help girls and women optimize their opportunities for cognitive development, and will also help to close the gender-linked earning gap, decrease rates of child poverty, and improve child health. Maladaptive beliefs-that scientists are a distinct kind of person, that being a scientist requires innate talent, and that scientists are deeply different from non-scientists-reflect an essentialist conception of science that interferes with female students' achievement. This project aims to discover: (a) what experiences cause girls to develop these beliefs, (b) what is responsible for girls having those experiences in the first place, and (c) how to intervene to stop the processes by which these maladaptive beliefs arise. This projects tests the hypothesis that these maladaptive beliefs are transmitted via pervasive but subtle linguistic cues-for example, by asking children to be scientists instead of to do science. These linguistic cues implicitly describe success in science as involving membership in a particular category, thus eliciting maladaptive essentialist beliefs. The planned studies test (a) whether hearing these linguistic cues causes girls to develop maladaptive, essentialist beliefs about science, (b) whether adults' own beliefs cause them to produce these linguistic cues, and (c) whether targeting adults' beliefs and language can help children develop more adaptive beliefs and increase girls' engagement in science. By partnering with a major cultural institution that provides informal educational opportunities to children and by involving educators directly in this work, this projec maximizes the opportunities for this research to lead to rapid changes in educational practices that will benefit children.
The persistent underrepresentation of women in science limits girls' opportunities for cognitive development and economic attainment and-due to the growing number of households relying on the sole income of a female earner-contributes to child poverty and its concomitant negative effects on child development. This project will develop new strategies for addressing the persistent gender gap in science achievement by targeting the mechanisms by which maladaptive beliefs that interfere with achievement are transmitted via language. This research will identify new intervention strategies to target these mechanisms to improve female students' attainment in science.
| Foster-Hanson, Emily; Cimpian, Andrei; Leshin, Rachel A et al. (2018) Asking Children to ""Be Helpers"" Can Backfire After Setbacks. Child Dev : |
| Mandalaywala, Tara M; Ranger-Murdock, Gabrielle; Amodio, David M et al. (2018) The Nature and Consequences of Essentialist Beliefs About Race in Early Childhood. Child Dev : |
| Rhodes, Marjorie; Mandalaywala, Tara M (2017) The development and developmental consequences of social essentialism. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci 8: |
