High School Students Gender Stereotypes And Intervention Study

This research conducts psychological experimental methods to study gender-subject stereotypes among high school students from explicit and implicit points of view and meanwhile it explores the changeability of implicit gender-subject stereotypes.This study is divided into three parts:Experiment1discusses the existence of explicit gender-subject stereotype among high school students and that of the difference of explicit gender-subject stereotype among respondents of different genders. This research is conducted among91respondents with the5-point score questionnaire as the tool of measuring their explicit attitude. The results show the objective existence of explicit gender-subject stereotype among these high school respondents and their inclination of matching the science and engineering subjects with boys and literature and history subjects with girls.Experiment2uses Greenwald’s Implicit Association Test (IAT) as the assessment tool to investigate the existence of implicit stereotype among80high school students. The results show that implicit gender-subject stereotype exists in the subject classification process. Furthermore, different degrees of being stereotyped from implicit gender stereotypes test were significantly different. Subjects with high stereotype degrees have more implicit effects. Subject’s implicit and explicit gender-subject stereotype is no significant correlation.Experiment3discusses the changeability of the implicit gender-subject stereotypes among high school students. By the Implicit Association Test (IAT) with Evaluative Conditioning (EC),the intervention study are conducted among65respondents on their implicit gender-subject stereotypes.It has found that the stereotype is relatively stable, while it still can be changed with subliminal evaluative conditioning techniques. Also its changeability is in accordance with the degree of its implicit gender-subject stereotypes.