NYU Steinhardt Launches Policy Series on Gender and Education
NYU Steinhardt recently launched a three part policy breakfast series devoted to gender and education and exploring the implications for policy and practice. The first breakfast, “Do Gender Differences in Academic Achievement Really Exist,” brought together Marcia C. Linn, professor of development and cognition in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the NSF-funded Technology-enhanced Learning in Science (TELS) center, and Joshua Aronson, associate professor of applied psychology at NYU Steinhardt who has studied stereotypes, self-esteem, motivation, and attitudes for the past 12 years. Following an introduction by Steinhardt Dean Mary Brabeck, who cited the reemergence of the belief in significant statistical differences in how the different genders learn, Linn walked the audience of policymakers, researchers, and educators through current research, which shows few, if any, differences in achievement attributable to gender. Aronson complemented Linn’s presentation with a discussion of his own study of stereotype threat, which he and others have identified as the psychological discomfort that arises in a testing situation when an individual of a particular minority group becomes aware that his or her performance on the test may confirm an established negative reputation for that group. His research shows that performance is heavily influenced by “mindset,” which speaks against the idea that there are substantial differences in intelligence or problem solving that can be attributed to gender. #
