Gender representation and academic achievement among STEM-interested students in college STEM courses

Substantial gender equity gaps in postsecondary degree completion persist within many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, and these disparities have not narrowed during the 21st century. Various explanations of this phenomenon have been offered; one possibility that has received limited attention is that the sparse representation of women itself has adverse effects on the academic achievement—and ultimately the persistence and graduation—of women who take STEM courses. This study explored the relationship between two forms of gender representation (i.e., the proportion of female students within a course and the presence of a female instructor) and grades within a sample of 11,958 STEM-interested undergraduates enrolled in 8686 different STEM courses at 20 colleges and universities. Female student representation within a course predicted greater academic achievement in STEM for all students, and these findings were generally stronger among female students than male students. Female students also consistently benefitted more than male students from having a female STEM instructor. These findings were largely similar across a range of student and course characteristics and were robust to different analytic approaches; a notable exception was that female student representation had particularly favorable outcomes for female students (relative to male students) within mathematics/statistics and computer science courses.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/175215/1/tea21778.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/175215/2/tea21778_am.pd

A Virtual Joy-Stick Study of Emotional Responses and Social Motivation in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

A new virtual reality task was employed which uses preference for interpersonal distance to social stimuli to examine social motivation and emotion perception in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Nineteen high function children with higher functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD) and 23 age, gender, and IQ matched children with typical development (TD) used a joy stick to position themselves closer or further from virtual avatars while attempting to identify six emotions expressed by the avatars, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise that were expressed at different levels of intensity. The results indicated that children with HFASD displayed significantly less approach behavior to the positive happy expression than did children with TD, who displayed increases in approach behavior to higher intensities of happy expressions. Alternatively, all groups tended to withdraw from negative emotions to the same extent and there were no diagnostic group differences in accuracy of recognition of any of the six emotions. This pattern of results is consistent with theory that suggests that some children with HFASD display atypical social-approach motivation, or sensitivity to the positive reward value of positive social-emotional events. Conversely, there was little evidence that a tendency to withdraw from social-emotional stimuli, or a failure to process social emotional stimuli, was a component of social behavior task performance in this sample of children with HFASD