A Study On Mathematical Gender Stereotype Impression In Junior Middle School Students

Academic gender stereotypes refers to the people think that men are more suitable for learning science, but women are more suitable for literature and history. Math gender stereotype is the most typical academic gender stereotype and researchers paid much attention to study it. Math gender stereotype refers to the people think that men are more suitable for learning mathematics than women. Many studies have found that, as early as in primary school, students had held academic gender stereotypes and the phenomenon were highlighted in the middle school. In addition, there are a lot of research also confirmed that the academic gender stereotypes had a negative effect on students’ self-esteem, academic performance and career planning. In order to eliminate the stereotype threat, the researchers have found a lot of effective intervention strategies. However, these intervention strategies were too scattered and lack of adequate theory basis and ecological validity that limited the actual application of stereotype threat intervention in the social work and life.Based on identity threat model, from the three aspects of stereotype threat information processing (person characteristics, collective representation and situational clues), this study designed a set of systematic math gender stereotype intervention program for middle school students to explore the effect of the intervention program, the characteristics of academic gender stereotypes and its influence on academic achievement. The intervention program includes 9 sessions, which adopts stereotype intervention strategy, such as encourage the self-affirmation, external attribution training, to remove the math gender stereotype of girls. At the same time, use the math gender stereotypes scale, Chinese gender stereotypes scale, self-esteem scale to measure subjects before intervention, at the end of the intervention and 3 months after intervention ending. Math and Chinese grades were also collected during study. The research results show that: Conclusions of this study are as follows: (1)The gender stereotype held by adolescent girls should be weakened significantly after systematic intervention following the guidelines suggested by identity threat model and the Intervention effect is stable. (2)The intervention directing to one kind of stereotype should causes the reduction of the aimed kind of gender stereotypes, rather than other kinds of stereotypes. That is to say, the characteristic of math gender stereotype is field independence rather than field dependence.(3)Adolescent girls’ self-esteem will increase significantly through reducing math gender stereotypes by systemic intervention, but the effect is not stable enough.(4)Adolescent girls’ academic grades will increase through reducing negative math gender stereotype by intervention, but the effect is not stable enough.