It seems that society has committed an injustice against this generation of young girls; by teaching them that intellectual abilities are something you are born with and either have or don’t have, girls become downtrodden into the stereotype that is female mathematical inferiority. But what is promising is that there is a way to fix this mess.
Carol Dweck’s chapter in Why Aren’t There More Women in Science? tackles the issue of entity and incremental theorems in depth. Through her own research, she has found that females are far more susceptible to giving up when things get hard – when they are challenged – than boys are. She attests this to a difference in gender ability to cope with setbacks and confusion rather than a difference in actual ability.
The problem here is that these young students view intellectual ability as a gift instead of a hard-earned talent, and it is reinforced from a young age that females do not tend to have this ability. Dweck runs readers through multiple experiments involving young students and entity versus incremental views they possess. She found that when students saw math ability as a gift, they were far more likely to give up and lose motivation to learn. But when they believed that math ability was something to be learned, they worked through the difficulty to succeed. She continues to study students as they first begin middle school and their freshman year of college, and this same principle holds through.
Faced with coming up with a solution to this problem, Dweck assumes that, “a big part of the problem is that women seem to lose their confidence in the face of obstacles,” (50). However, she strongly discourages giving special attention to female students in order to boost their confidence, saying that this actually does the opposite. I can attest to this fact – when told that I have done a particularly great job, or that I am really good at a particular subject, I find myself less motivated to tackle challenges and improve, since I’m already succeeding. And if I run into challenges, they are doubly hard to overcome because I feel that my so called talent is failing me.
So instead, Dweck suggests educating the masses about learning and how it works; showing them that it is scientifically proven that abilities improve over time with practice, and that they are equally capable of improvement as anyone else – as long as they put the work in. She tests this out on middle schoolers, and finds that compared to a control group, the group taught about learning growth had all students working at a level far above the control group. Most of her points are supported with research she has done herself, and this could lead to possible bias or discrepancies in her results. However, she cites other sources that have done their own experiments and came up with results parallel to hers, giving her credibility.
The solution she proposes I believe has a great chance of success. A study cited by Virginia Valian in her chapter of the book showcased how Japanese students, taught math through an incremental view, performed far above students from America on standardized math tests. Most American schools bypass the incremental theory and leave kids to believe that skill is a gift. However, I went to middle school at a place where teachers emphasized hands-on learning and didn’t accept work that wasn’t your best, pushing every student to be better, and never treated a subject as if kids either were good at or weren’t. This experience really shaped how I learn today, as if every assignment is a new challenge to overcome that will increase my skills and knowledge. How would the world look now if everyone was given an education like mine?
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