A new study shows that young girls who, like Marie Curie, embrace the role of successful female scientists stay on challenging science games longer.

This study suggests that science role-playing can help close the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and careers for women, simply by enhancing their identity as scientists. suggesting.

Reut Shachnai, a Cornell University graduate student, was frustrated by the gender gap in STEM, which employs at least three times more men than women in some fields, and wanted to do something about it.

Shakunai, who is still studying at Yale University, says the idea to help develop an interest in science in girls came to her during a class she was taking on “The Psychology of Imagination.” .

“We read a paper about how kids pretending to be superheroes did well on self-regulation tasks (the so-called ‘Batman effect’),” says the class, now a psychologist. says Tamar Kushnir, professor of science and neuroscience. Co-author of a new paper with Duke University. “Reut thought this might also help encourage girls to stick to science.”

Researchers devised an experiment to test whether taking on the role of a successful scientist would improve girls’ tenacity in a “sink or float” science game.

“What are your predictions, Dr. Marie?”

The game itself is simple but rewarding. A computer screen showed a slide with an object floating above a puddle. The children then had to predict whether objects such as anchors, basketballs and balloons would sink or float. After making a choice, we learned whether we made the right choice by watching whether the object sank or floated.

The researchers recruited 240 children between the ages of 4 and 7 for the experiment.

“Kids around the age of six start thinking that boys are smarter and better at science than girls,” says co-author Lin Bian, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago.

Researchers assigned boys and girls to three different groups. The baseline group was told they would be scientists for the day, and then started playing games.

Children in the “Story” group received the same information, but also learned about the successes and struggles of gender-matched scientists before playing the game. I heard about Curie. Also, after the story he had to take a 2-question quiz to see if he was paying attention (and he was paying attention).

Finally, the children in the “pretend” group did exactly the same as the “story” group, with one important twist. game (“Dr. Marie, what are your predictions?”).

All children played at least one round of the game and were then asked if they wanted to play more or do something else. Once the children tapped out, they were asked to rate how good they thought they were at the game and as scientists.

power to pretend

Regardless of which group they belonged to, girls were just as likely to answer correctly as boys. It was almost 70% chance. However, boys never really benefited from stories and pretend play.

“Boys were hitting their limits,” says Kushnir. “No matter what we did, they were almost ceiling performances.”

Girls, on the other hand, benefited greatly from pretend play.

Without being exposed to Madame Curie, the girls quit it after six attempts. However, the girls who pretended to be Dr. Marie lasted twice as long in the sink or float game, playing just as well as the boys (about 12 trials on average).

The girls’ reputation as science gamers did improve, although they didn’t get much benefit from hearing Madame Curie’s story expand the range of games.

This study raises many new questions for researchers. For example, whether children who take on the role of successful scientists who match their race or ethnicity may also benefit (in this study, most of the participants were white).

“Our findings suggest that we want to take representation one step further,” says Shachnai. “Children may benefit from actively performing the types of behaviors they have seen a role model perform, rather than simply listening to them. In other words, simply the way she walks. Take a few steps in the shoes of a role model instead of observing

The research will be published in a journal psychologyThe National Science Foundation and the Cornell Center for Social Sciences funded this work.

Source: Dan Vahaba, Duke University