The Effect Of Single Sex Group And Salient Stereotype Information To Gender-math Stereotype Threat

Gender-math stereotype threat is a situational predicament where female individuals or group perceived cues related with gender-math stereotype,and this process in turn confirms negative stereotypes about their groups because of worry and anxiety.Group cues plays a pivotal role on evoking gender-math stereotype,especially when female is numerically atypical in the sex composition group.Compared with female from numerically typical group,those from numerically atypical group perform worse on the same math test,despite without any presentation of gender stereotype information and this effect can not be explained by the difference of general intelligence or previous math performance.Previous researches attribute these effect to female's attention of male's number superiority then the effect of gender-math stereotype threat is evoked,strengthened,and resulting in worse math performance.But this explanation has not been examined.The present study is designed for exploring whether the conclusion mentioned above will be replicated in the condition of single sex group or sex mixed group.Moreover,math performance will be decomposed to several indicators such as score and accuracy,whilst the eye-tracking technique will also be employed to further analyze female's eye movement shift during the experiment process in order to explore the internal cognitive factors that cause such phenomenon and the influence on math performance.Firstly,3 postgraduate students major in psychology were employed to do the first screen of the pictures which would be used in the later experiment.Then 20 undergraduate students were recruited to assess the facial attraction of these pictures.20 pictures in the middle level were selected out as the experiment stimulus.Three groups(male,female and sex mixed group)were developed according to the priority of the picture amount.The result suggested that participants in male's group experienced the highest gender-math stereotype threat.The highest anxiety level,lower score and accuracy were also found in this group.The regression analysis was alsomade to test the relationship between eye-movement data and math performance indicators.Positive predicating effect was found only in male's group.Specifically,The more times of gazing males pictures,the lower accuracy of math performance the participants would get.Study 2 further improved the design in study 1 by changing the multiple-choice question to the gap filling and named all of the pictures(picture x).Salient gender-math information was also presented.Results showed that male's group still experienced the highest gender-math stereotype threat and positive predicating effect was found only in male's group instead of other groups.Effect of gender number status to gender-math stereotype threat was found through the eye-tracking and it's cognitive mechanism was discussed.The conclusion suggested that female would performed better in math test when they are in majority of the group compared with when they are in minority.The possible explanation is that the priority of female's number buffer the effect of gender-math threat The future study can extend the understanding to stereotype threat from the angle of Multi-Threat Framework and explore it's effect on motivation and attitude toward math related issues instead of only focusing on math performance.