11.20.06
Adamson, L. B., Moster, M. A., Roark, M. L., & Reed, D. B. (1998). Doing a science project: Gender differences during childhood. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 35(8), 845-857.
Adamson, L. B., Moster, M. A., Roark, M. L., & Reed, D. B. (1998). Doing a science project: Gender differences during childhood. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 35(8), 845-857.
In the article, the authors looked at two years of a elementary school science fair focusing on gender differences in areas of science, participation, awards given, as well as whether the parents and science fair judges had any obvious gender biases. They did this through observing science fair results and participants, a parent survey, and asking the judges to give their best guess as to the gender of the science projects they had judged. The authors found little difference in participation, but found females doing more projects in the biological/social sciences than males. No obvious gender biases were seen in either the parents or judges.
I could say loads about this article since we did a critique on it but I’ll be brief. As a social science major with many natural science/engineering friends in college I feel they needed to explain their categorization of the sciences a bit more. I would have been more comfortable if they had split natural and social sciences and then talked about biology as on odd case than the way the authors classified it in the paper. For more on this paper, see my critique.
