Writing exercise helps women close gender gap in science

LONDON - A brief writing exercise can help women improve their performance and narrow the gender gap in physics classes, says a study.

The writing exercise seems to benefit female students who believe that males perform better in physics.

Akira Miyake from the University of Colorado in US and other researchers from Colorado and California suggest that similar value-affirmation exercises might help to close the gender gap further, reports the journal Science.

“The introductory course we investigated in this study is intended for students planning to be science majors,” Miyake said.

Miyake and colleagues tested 399 male and female college students in an introductory physics class, according to a Colorado statement.

During the first and fourth weeks of the class, the researchers asked a randomly selected group of the students to write about their personally important values, such as friends and family, for 15 minutes.

Other students were randomly placed into a control group and asked to write about their least important values and to explain why they might be important to other people.

The values-affirmation exercise turned out to be a promising intervention that appears to provide a measurable boost for women - but not for men - during both their in-class multiple-choice exams and a national, standardised test of conceptual mastery of physics, the researchers say.