Making science more relevant

Manila, Philippines—For decades, one of the biggest concerns in education has involved the number of women in the sciences. Data from many colleges and universities around the world indicate that the men outnumber the women in many math and science fields.

In the Feb. 5 issue of British Journal of Educational Psychology, researchers from the University of Luxembourg in the country of the same name suggested that more women would be interested in the sciences if the scientific concepts they studied in class were covered using topics with which they could relate.

The idea is sound. Any parent or teacher will tell you that ideas are more easily grasped when the child or student can relate to the concept. Memorizing the statement that force is equal to mass of an object multiplied by its acceleration isn’t quite the same as being able to calculate the force behind Manny Pacquiao’s knockout punch.

However, the team led by Martin Bruner decided to test their theory by offering nearly 500 male and female teenagers lesson approaches in the fields of biology, physics, information technology and statistics that had been designed to either be more “masculine” or more “feminine.”

Self-image

They based these tests on studies indicating that students can link school subjects with self-image. Science is seen as masculine subject, said Bruner’s team, so female students focused on their feminine self-image might be less interested in the topic. By presenting gender-specific approaches to the study topic, the researchers said, both male and female students might become interested in these scientific fields of study.

For example, in the field of information technology, the feminine approach to computer-aided design involved clothes, while the masculine approach involved designing cars. In biology, the feminine topic was about beauty creams while the masculine equivalent was medical ointments. And in physics, the feminine approach to studying lasers involved their use in cosmetic surgery, while the masculine approach focused on how lasers could read CDs.

When the students were asked to review the full list of study topics and mark those they were interested in, Bruner’s team found that as they’d expected, more female students expressed interest in the four fields of study, though the male students expressed less interest in fields like information technology if presented with the “feminine” approach.

Though I can see why the researchers chose this gendered approach in order to make a point about how to help students grasp scientific concepts, I’d personally have preferred having these topics offered as alternatives to each other without classifying them for male or female use.

Individual differences

Ultimately, it appears Bruner and his team feel the same way. “The solution to the dilemma might not be the simple division of students into gender-specific groups, but to find a solution that takes into account the individual differences among students,” they wrote in their paper. One ideal they presented involves teachers being able to offer modules presented in different contexts, and the students would be able to select the ones that were most interesting to them.

I don’t know about gender-specific interests, but the reasons I read about and follow scientific research range from the threat to the continued existence of banana ketchup, to the development of rice varieties that are tolerant of changing climates and soil types, to alternative energy sources that the Philippines already has on tap such as geothermal resources, and on the progress toward cures instead of just treatments for conditions such as cancer. A few years ago, a student asked why covering science is still relevant. The answer lies in this newspaper—or in the pixels of this webpage, depending on how you’re reading this—science is part of every aspect of our lives, and that in itself offers plenty of topics for study.
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