Value Affirmation In Education

Because these conditions often discourage women from pursuing a career in the male-dominated STEM field, a variety of intervention tactics have been proposed in order to decrease the gender gap. Oftentimes, the decreased quality of work is related to the low self esteem women garner due to the judgement of their peers and professors as well as the quality of work they produce when in the presence of negative stereotypes. Thus many intervention tactics focus on improving one’s ability to handle and react to stressful environments. One such approach, known as social-belonging intervention, is the use of encouraging students to view adversities as a part of their academic journey rather than issues resulting from their permanent inability to …show more content…
This increase in confidence aims to improve the performance of female students. Values affirmation is an intervention in which female students “reflect on self-defining values, [which] can buffer people against such psychological threat” (Miyake, 1234). In the study explored by Akira Miyake, students in a college level physics course students were divided into a control group and an affirmation group. The control group selected values that were least important to them and wrote why these values may be important to other students. Meanwhile, the affirmation group described the values that were important to them. This writing exercise was administered once in the beginning of the semester, and again prior to their first exam to both groups. Conditions during the test were the same for both groups, however both groups were made aware of the stereotype that men perform better than women in physics. The results of the study revealed that the values-affirmation intervention succeeded in improving the exam grades of female students in the college-level physics class, reducing the gender gap in performance. The physics exams in the class and a national standardized physics test, the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE), have both displayed a performance gap between genders in the past, however, after the use of values-affirmation tactics, the performance of female students improved. This is reflected in the increased amount of Bs received as the final semester grade in the affirmation group, compared to the amount of Bs received by students in the control group (Miyake 1235-6). In a similar study conducted by Walton, researchers utilized the values-affirmation intervention tactic in hopes of reducing the amount of times the