The roots of gender disparities in science achievement take hold in early childhood. The present studies aimed to identify a modifiable feature of young children’s environments that could be targeted to reduce gender differences in science behavior among young children. Four experimental studies with children (N = 501) revealed that describing science in terms of actions (“Let’s do science! Doing science means exploring the world!”) instead of identities (“Let’s be scientists! Scientists explore the world!”) increased girls’ subsequent persistence in new science games designed to illustrate the scientific method. These studies thus identified subtle but powerful linguistic cues that could be targeted to help reduce gender disparities in science engagement in early childhood.
BarmanC. R. (1999). Students’ views about scientists and school science: Engaging K-8 teachers in a national study. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 10, 43–54. doi:10.1023/A:1009424713416
2.
BaronA. S.DunhamY.BanajiM.CareyS. (2014). Constraints on the acquisition of social category concepts. Journal of Cognition and Development, 15, 238–268. doi:10.1080/15248372.2012.742902
3.
BeedeD.JulianT.LangdonD.McKittrickG.KhanB.DomsM. (2011). Women in STEM: A gender gap to innovation (ESA Issue Brief #04-11). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce.
4.
BianL.LeslieS. J.CimpianA. (2017). Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children’s interests. Science, 355, 389–391. doi:10.1126/science.aah6524
5.
CainK. M.DweckC. S. (1995). The relation between motivational patterns and achievement cognitions through the elementary school years. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 41, 25–52. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1998.tb06197.x
6.
ChapinJ. (2006). The achievement gap in social studies and science starts early: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. The Social Studies, 97, 231–238. doi:10.3200/TSSS.97.6.231-238
7.
CimpianA. (2013). Generic statements, causal attributions, and children’s naive theories. In BanajiM. R.GelmanS. A. (Eds.), Navigating the social world: What infants, children, and other species can teach us (pp. 269–274). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
8.
CimpianA.ArceH. C.MarkmanE. M.DweckC. S. (2007). Subtle linguistic cues affect children’s motivation. Psychological Science, 18, 314–316. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01896.x
9.
CimpianA.MuY.EricksonL. C. (2012). Who is good at this game? Linking an activity to a social category undermines children’s achievement. Psychological Science, 23, 533–541.
10.
DienesZ. (2014). Using Bayes to get the most out of non-significant results. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, Article 781. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00781
11.
DweckC. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York, NY: Random House.
12.
EcclesJ.WigfieldA. (2002). Motivational beliefs, values, and goals. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 109–132. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.53.100901.135153
13.
Foster-HansonE.CimpianA.LeshinR.RhodesM. (2018). Asking children to “be helpers” backfires after setbacks. Child Development. Advance online publication. doi:10.1111/cdev.13147
14.
FoxJ.WeisbergS. (2011). An R companion to applied regression (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
15.
GelmanS. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
16.
GelmanS. A.HeymanG. D. (1999). Carrot-eaters and creature-believers: The effects of lexicalization on children’s inferences about social categories. Psychological Science, 10, 489–493. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00194
17.
GelmanS. A.TaylorM.NguyenS. P.LeaperC.BiglerR. S. (2004). Mother-child conversations about gender: Understanding the acquisition of essentialist beliefs [Target article and commentaries]. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 69(1), 1–142. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5834.2004.06901002.x
18.
GelmanS. A.WareE. A.KleinbergF. (2010). Effects of generic language on category content and structure. Cognitive Psychology, 61, 273–301. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2010.06.001
19.
KaminsM. L.DweckC. S. (1999). Person versus process praise and criticism: Implications for contingent self-worth and coping. Developmental Psychology, 35, 835–847. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.35.3.835
20.
KnobeJ.PrasadaS.NewmanG. E. (2013). Dual character concepts and the normative dimension of conceptual representation. Cognition, 127, 242–257. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2013.01.005
21.
KruschkeJ. K.LiddellT. M. (2018). The Bayesian new statistics: Hypothesis testing, estimation, meta-analysis, and power analysis from a Bayesian perspective. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25, 178–206.
22.
MasterA.CheryanS.MeltzoffA. N. (2016). Computing whether she belongs: Stereotypes undermine girls’ interest and sense of belonging in computer science. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108, 424–437. doi:10.1037/edu0000061
23.
MasterA.CheryanS.MeltzoffA. N. (2017). Social group membership increases STEM engagement among preschoolers. Developmental Psychology, 53, 201–209. doi:10.1037/dev0000195
24.
McGuireJ. T.KableJ. W. (2012). Decision makers calibrate behavioral persistence on the basis of time-interval experience. Cognition, 124, 216–226. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.03.008
25.
McPhersonE.ParkB.ItoT. A. (2018). The role of prototype matching in science pursuits: Perceptions of scientists that are inaccurate and diverge from self-perceptions predict reduced interest in a science career. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44, 881–898. doi:10.1177/0146167217754069
26.
NewtonD. P.NewtonL. D. (1992). Young children’s perceptions of science and the scientist. International Journal of Science Education, 14, 331–348. doi:10.1080/0950069980200909
27.
NosekB. A.SmythF. L.SriramN.LindnerN. M.DevosT.AyalaA.. . . GreenwaldA. G. (2009). National differences in gender–science stereotypes predict national sex differences in science and math achievement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 106, 10593–10597. doi:10.1073/pnas.0809921106
ParkD.SchaefferM. W.NollaK. M.LevineS. C.BeilockS. L. (2017). How do generic statements impact performance? Evidence for entity beliefs. Developmental Science, 20(2), Article e12396. doi:10.1111/desc.12396
30.
RattanA.GoodC.DweckC. S. (2012). It’s ok, not everyone can be good at math: Instructors with an entity theory comfort (and demotivate) students. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 731–737. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2011.12.012
31.
R Core Team. (2018). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Retrieved from http://www.R-project.org
32.
RhodesM.BusharaL. (2015). Learning about science and self: A partnership between the Children’s Museum of Manhattan and the Psychology Department at New York University. In SobelD.JipsonJ. (Eds.), Fostering cognitive development in children’s museums (pp. 104–119). New York, NY: Psychology Press.
33.
RhodesM.LeslieS.-J. (2018). Children’s media communicates essentialist views of science and scientists. Retrieved from PsyArXiv website: https://psyarxiv.com/s6chb/
34.
RhodesM.LeslieS. J.BianchiL.ChalikL. (2017). The role of generic language in the early development of social categorization. Child Development, 89, 148–155. doi:10.1111/cdev.12714
35.
RhodesM.LeslieS.-J.TworekC. M. (2012). Cultural transmission of social essentialism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 109, 13526–13531. doi:10.1073/pnas.1208951109
36.
RhodesM.MandalaywalaT. M. (2017). The development and developmental consequences of social essentialism. WIREs Cognitive Science, 8(4), Article e1437. doi:10.1002/wcs.1437
37.
SchoenfeldD. A. (1983). Sample-size formula for the proportional-hazards regression model. Biometrics, 39, 499–503.
38.
SegallG.BirnbaumD.DeebI.DiesendruckG. (2015). The intergenerational transmission of ethnic essentialism: How parents talk counts the most. Developmental Science, 18, 543–555. doi:10.1111/desc.12235
39.
SmileyP. A.DweckC. S. (1994). Individual differences in achievement goals among young children. Child Development, 65, 1723–1743. doi:10.2307/1131290
40.
WaltonG. M.CohenG. L. (2003). Stereotype lift. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 456–467. doi:10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00019-2
41.
WaxmanS. (2010). Names will never hurt me? Naming and the development of racial and gender categories in preschool-aged children. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 593–610. doi:10.1002/ejsp.732
42.
WeinburghM. (1995). Gender differences in student attitudes toward science: A meta-analysis of the literature from 1970 to 1991. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 32, 387–398. doi:10.1002/tea.3660320407
43.
ZhaiJ.JoczJ. A.TanA.-L (2014). ‘Am I like a scientist?’: Primary children’s images of doing science in school. International Journal of Science Education, 38, 553–576. doi:10.1080/09500693.2013.791958
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
