Effects of a women-in-sciences/men-in-humanities intervention on Taiwanese adolescents’ attitudes towards learning science

Abstract

A pretest-posttest control group design was used to investigate the effects of an intervention that focused on the acknowledgement of women in sciences and men in humanities, awareness of academic gender stereotypes, and development of unique selves on student attitudes (interest, confidence, and value) towards learning science. The research participants were 247 Grade-8 students (123 girls) from eight classes (randomly assigned to experimental and control conditions) in a Taiwanese junior high school. Similar to the results of most past studies, girls had a more negative attitude towards learning science than boys as a whole. However, there was an effect of interaction between the experiment and gender, which showed that the gender gap in attitudes towards learning science, especially the value of learning science, diminished after the intervention. This finding suggests that academic gender stereotypes can at least partly intervene in the process of the formation of attitudes towards learning science for both girls and boys.