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TRA NGUYEN (PSY 3320)

Article Review 1

I. Reference: Spencer, S. J., Steele, C. M., & Quinn, D. M. (1999). Stereotype threat and women’s math performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 4-28. II. Study design: (page 4) Experimental study: the author examined the correlation within one gender: female and their performance under the threat of gender stereotype according to different levels of mathematics tests when some of them were told that they were taking a non-stereotype mathematical tests and the rest of them were told that they were sitting a tests which were gender stereotype. The researchers conducted the study in order to analyze the effect of arousal of the gender stereotype on women’s performance on increasingly difficult mathematical tests whether they suffered from the stereotype. III. Variables: (page 4) Independent variable: the levels of the math tests, the gender of the participants, and the presence of the gender stereotype. Dependent variable: test marks (their performance). IV. Operational Definitions of Variables: Operational definition for independent variables: the phrase women mentioned in the hypothesis is female participants engaged in answering different levels of mathematical tests. Operational definition 1: the performances of women under the stereotype-threatened condition would be better on easy tasks. Operational definition 2: women would performed more poorly when they had to handle hard tasks under the condition of stereotype threat. V. Participants: (page 4) All of the participants engaging in the experiment in order to earn credits for their study attended an introductory psychology class. They were a group of 164 students, including 59 women and 105 men, and their background demographics were 7 Americans with African origins, 6 Asiaborn Americans, 4 Hispanics/Latinos, 2 from India or Central Asia, 4 Native American, 137 White individuals, and 4 people who were mixed. VI. Procedure: (page 4 and 5) The participants experienced a 3-step experiment. The first step was that the participants read the cover sheet handed when they arrived the laboratory, which informed them that the intention of the experiment that they were engaging in was to evaluate their performance through a series of mathematical tests. At this point the researchers deliberately mentioned the gender differences condition that some of the participants would experienced when handled the tests. Afterwards, participants completed a questionnaire about their feelings before taking the first tests. The

TRA NGUYEN (PSY 3320)

Article Review 1

questionnaire for the last 94 participants included a self-report measure of motivation together with a five-term measure of evaluation apprehension. Then participants sat the tests, which they were notified when there was one minute left and were requested to stop as soon as the time was up. VII. Measures: (page 5) To measure the effect of gender stereotype on the performance of women, the author requested the participants to take three tests with different levels, an easy test, a hard test, and a math persistent test as well as to fill out a questionnaire about their motivation and evaluation apprehension. All of three tests had distinct evaluation methods to examine participants’ performance. Concerning the easy test, it involved solving 20 problems of three-digit multiplication problems without being allowed to utilize calculators within 10 minutes. As regards the difficult test, the participants had to answer 15 questions extracted from the quantitative SAT. They were fiveoption questions with multiple-choice format, and the participants had a total of 11 minutes to accomplish the test. For both tests, the performance of participants was marked by adding one point for every correct response and penalizing one-fifth point for each incorrect answer. In terms of the test measuring math persistence, it was a kind of mental math. This means that participants were given instruction to produce answers for problems relating to addition and subtractions, and they had to solve the problems without the permission of using any piece of paper as a draft and write down the answer alone. In addition, participants had about 8 minutes to finish this 24-questions test. The mental math test placed emphasis on the concentration and effort, hence mathematical aspects were very easy, including only addition and subtraction. Regarding the questionnaire, the researchers intended to measure their feelings in advance of the mathematical tests. For the last 94 participants, they had to answer questions about their motivation and anxiety. To answer about their motivation, participants were asked about how motivated they were to perform well on the test, and participants gave responses on a 100-point scale with 0 labeled not at all motivated and 100 labeled extremely motivated. There were five items taken from Spencer (1999) in the evaluation apprehension measure, including “If I do poorly on this test, people will look down on me” and “If I don’t do well on this test, others may question my ability”. VIII. Hypotheses: (page 4) The researcher anticipated that women would have superior performance on easy tasks and experienced poorer performance on difficult tasks by contrast impacted by arousal when they were in the condition of the stereotype threat. IX. Results: The primary focus of the test is to confirm the theory of the three-way interaction between gender, threat manipulation, and math levels. For women, while participants who were faced the threat of gender stereotype had greatly superior results of the easy test to those of the hard test, test-takers who did not confront this threat had unnoticeable difference between their performances on the easy test and the hard test. By contrast, performances of men were equivalent when they sat either the easy test or the hard test irrespective of the manipulation of

TRA NGUYEN (PSY 3320)

Article Review 1

gender stereotype. In addition, concerning the presence of gender stereotype, the performances of women on easy tests were significantly higher than those of men, whereas the women’s results of hard tests were far lower than what men did. In terms of the elimination of the manipulation threat, men performed significantly better than women did on both two types of the test. As a result, the findings of the experiment agreed with the hypothesis mentioned by the researchers that women were significantly impacted by the gender stereotype, meaning that they would performed better under the condition of this threat if the test was easy, and they would do poorly if it was hard. On the contrary, the threat had no effect on men’s performances. X. Conclusion: The researcher suggested that women and men were not in identical conditions when they solved an equally difficult task as well as people did not totally perceive the presence of stereotyped threats and their consequences for women. Apart from the effect of gender stereotype, the researcher mentioned the need of adequate teaching method in order to facilitate their capability of handling and transfer this adverse effect to motivation for difficult tasks. XI. Critique: According to the researcher, he stated that due to the very difficult part of the test abstracted from the GMAT used in Spencer, Steele and Quinn’s experiment (1999) associating with his restricted sample, from the psychology classes, responses of first 71 participants were almost equivalent; therefore, he eliminated the test for the last 94 participants. In addition, at the first step of data analysis the researcher employed means and standard deviations according to gender, which conflicted the definition of the elimination of sex effect, so the results were quite identical, the researcher, as the result, used the overall mean and standard deviation to compare the performances of men and women. In my opinion, I think that there was a restriction on the sample size determination that sample size was limited to a particular population, a psychology class. Therefore, the results of the experiment were not inclined to represent for broad society. Moreover, the experiment also witnessed a limitation on the variety of ethics engaging in when whites constituted the majority of participants (137 individuals out of 164 participants), hence it would not exemplify the effect of gender stereotype on any ethics across the world, or in other words, it would primarily reflect the stereotype-threatened impact on White people....