15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics
To see if their task could help, Miyake recruited 283 men and 116 women who were taking part in the university’s 15-week introductory course to physics. He randomly divided them into two groups. One group picked their most important values from a list and wrote about why these mattered to them. The other group – the controls – picked their least important values and wrote about why these might matter to other people.
This sort of brain-trickery has always been fascinating to me. If you’re a woman in physics at CU, don’t read this study, cause you’ll blow everything. Otherwise, read on to learn just how critical it is that we strive to not just improve education, but improve the environment in which we provide it.