The Effects of Gender Stereotypic and Counter-Stereotypic Textbook Images on Science Performance

to address the gap in science achievement between male and female high school students, the authors of this study consider the impact of the pictures of scientists in science textbooks. This study follows previous research on stereotype threat in which women perform more poorly on math and science tasks when aware of negative stereotypes about women in STEM fields. The authors devise an experiment to test male and female high school students’ performance in a chemistry lesson when that lesson is presented with images of only female scientists, only male scientists, or an even mixture of male and female scientists. Read More…