Girls and boys are taught science differently, new study finds

The predictable assumption below is that males and females have equal aptitude in science-related abilities such as methematics.

But all the tests reveal that they do not. There are some good female mathematicians but they are rare. Only one woman, an Iranian, has ever won the Fields medal. So people who assumed that science would be more difficult for girls were simply being realistic.

That was a common (stereotypical) belief but Gordon Allport pointed out back in the '30 that stereotypes tend to have a "kernel of truth".  See also here and here on that


Educators may treat girls differently in science and subconsciously rate them less academically capable than boys in physics, a newly published paper by Macquarie researcher Dr Carol Newall and colleagues suggests.

Unconscious bias: Eight-year-old Ava, Dr Newall's daughter, likes science but faces challenges pursuing a career in this field.

Her work underscores how societal stereotypes hamper more girls from studying science and perhaps partially explains why the Nobel Prize for Physics – awarded in October 2018 to Donna Strickland, Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada – has been won by only three women in its 117-year history.

Dr Newall’s research published in Contemporary Educational Psychology investigated what happened when the gender of a fictitious eight-year-old child was manipulated experimentally, and how this affected adults’ perceptions of the child's ability and enjoyment of science.

“We discovered that adults are already biased against girls by the time children are eight years old,” Newall says. “Even at that age, adults already have low expectations of girls’ potential in physics.”

In the experiment, Dr Newall and her colleagues asked 80 trainee teachers and psychology undergraduates to rate children’s academic capability based on common but fictional profiles of eight-year olds – girls who played with dolls; boys who played cricket and non-gender stereotyped children who liked swimming.

When a child was labelled a girl, most participants said she was less likely to be good at physics - and less likely to be interested in it. If she was stereotypically feminine, they also thought she would be less likely to be interested in any science.

Participants were also required to teach the fictional child a science lesson over Skype, but researchers manipulated the experiment so that the video connection was lost just as the trainees believed they were about to teach the child.

“They were asked to continue teaching the child and we just recorded them - and got some really interesting results,” says Dr Newall, lead author of the study. “When they knew they were teaching a girl, they used less scientific talk.”

She says it is likely the participants were unaware of their bias, and had they known they had taught girls and boys differently, they would be surprised.

“Actually we are all affected by societal subconscious biases. The only way we can change this is by a cultural gender shift.”

The numbers of girls who study HSC physics illustrates this. In the final year of high school, seven percent of girls and 23.5 percent of boys study physics, according to Australian Institute of Physics (AIP) figures.

In university, female enrolment in physics undergraduate degrees has dropped to 21 percent today from 27.6 percent in 2002. The figures are similar in American and British universities.

Women are also underrepresented as physics teachers in schools and universities, and researchers in public and private laboratories. Women physicists usually have lower seniority and earn less, the AIP says.

Dr Newall’s research may also explain why companies are struggling to hire more women for roles requiring Science Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM) skills.

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Coding Academies and the Future of Higher Education
   
I recently had an extraordinarily interesting conversation with Darrell Silver, the cofounder and CEO of Thinkful, a coding academy that currently has about 1,600 students. It is doing lots of innovative things, explaining why much of traditional higher education is struggling. It and other coding academies provide hope that our nation’s future human capital needs can be fulfilled more efficiently and effectively than currently. The coding academy model reeks with incentives and innovation, keys to educational reform.

Thinkful is an online institution, so it avoids enormous capital costs (expensive buildings empty for much of the year); it uses as its faculty part-time professionals who do this in addition to a regular job; it offers students a zero tuition option using an Income Share Agreement model that motivates both student and Thinkful to perform well. It is for-profit, adding incentives to deliver students services cheaply while providing them very marketable skills. It has only one job: train individuals to be more productive in the work force in a relatively short period of time. There are no sustainability coordinators or diversity and inclusion specialists—it is all about learning.

In short, it may be the future of higher learning in America. You can’t currently use a Pell Grant or get a federally subsidized student loan to go there, but Mr. Silver and his team have innovated their way around that problem and the restrictions involved with it, like a small handful of traditional schools (e.g., Hillsdale College) have also very successfully done. Thinkful is not alone: the coding academy business is booming, while traditional higher education likely will enter its ninth year of enrollment decline this fall.

Thinkful trains mostly young adults (the average student is about 30) in computer programming and related skills needed by American business. If you want to pay cash for their typical six month training program, you can write a check for somewhere between $10,000 and $14,000. But if you are struggling financially and if Thinkful believes you have the desire and the ability to succeed (and only 10 to 20% of interested students do), they will make you a deal: pay nothing, but sign a contract giving them somewhere between 10 and 14% of your post-training income for two or three years. It is the ultimate “skin in the game” model—both the student and Thinkful have enormous incentives for the student to successfully complete the program and get a job utilizing newly acquired skills. Unlike in traditional higher education, the student’s interests are very closely aligned with that of the school. Mr. Silver tells me about 85% of participants get a full-time job within six months of completing the academy’s program. He thinks a five to ten fold growth in scale over the next few years is highly reasonable and, indeed, expected.

Having high level computer skills is not for everyone, and, as an economist I am confident if there were, say, a 100 fold growth in similar coding academies over the next few years, we would be hearing about unemployed computer geniuses—supply would grow faster than demand, lowering the remunerative value of such training. But the coding academy model undoubtedly works in other occupations as well, for example learning skills like welding or becoming experts in hospital patient information system management. Some Thinkful students have bachelor’s degrees, although many have some college training (say two years) but quit college thinking they are not on a vocationally fruitful path and don’t want to run up more student loan debt.

Will traditional universities learn from this model? You would think so, but incentives are not well aligned for that to happen. As long as taxpayers are willing to continue to subsidize the currently horrendously inefficient and costly system, university personnel will fight to keep it, with its not over demanding work ethic, relatively high level of job security, etc. But public support is waning, enrollments are falling, and a birth dearth is confronting the academy (partly aided and abetted by academic indifference or even hostility for traditional family arrangements stressing child-raising). The traditional university is not dead, nor should it be in my opinion. But it needs to respond to this new efficient form of higher learning.

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Australia: University funding boost brings hope for new era

A plan to link a small proportion of funding to the performance of universities has been hailed as a breakthrough after a funding freeze.

University chiefs have hailed a promised modest funding boost, based on new performance criteria, as a "starting point" for a new era of growth.

Education Minister Dan Tehan met with university vice-chancellors in Wollongong on Wednesday to discuss a report on performance-based funding.

The report was commissioned in the wake of a $2.2 billion funding freeze initiated by the coalition government in 2017 to help balance the federal budget.

Performance-based funding will begin from 2020 and grow in line with population growth of 18 to 64-year-olds, providing an increase of around $80 million next year.

University performance will be determined by such factors as graduate job outcomes, student success, student experience and participation of indigenous, low socioeconomic status, and regional and remote students.

Review panel chair and University of Wollongong vice-chancellor Paul Wellings said linking a small proportion of funding to the performance of universities was a world-first. "It's a starting point - how do we start to grow the sector again," he told reporters.

"There was a cap put in to try and control the overall spend ... and now we are starting to see a green shoot emerge and a new opportunity for funding."

Mr Tehan hoped to finalise the details of the plan by the end of the month, after a further meeting with university bosses.

Universities were key to improving Australia's productivity and fulfilling the government's promise to create 1.25 million jobs over the next five years, he said. "We are providing over $17 billion to the sector," he said.

"What the model does is universities give up a tiny bit of autonomy where they are not performing and enables government to work with you to lift that performance."

National Union of Students president Desiree Cai said the promised funding was inadequate in light of chronic underfunding of universities.

"At the very least, Minister Tehan needs to restore funding to what it was before the $2.2 billion funding cut introduced in the funding freeze," she said.

The government also needed to step up support for students, including boosting the Youth Allowance and student income support, and tackling job insecurity and underemployment in the workforce.

National Tertiary Education Union president Dr Alison Barnes said there could be many unintended consequences from the performance-based criteria.

"If the 'job outcome' is not linked to the learning, we may see the perverse outcome of many more lawyers being qualified, but working in fast food outlets," she said.

As well, staff could come under pressure to improve student pass rates in a bid to reduce the number of dropouts.

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