An official website of the United States government
There is an established gender gap in middle school math education, where female students report higher anxiety and lower engagement, which negatively impact their performance and even long-term career choices. This work investigates the role of digital learning games in addressing this issue by studying Decimal Point, a math game that teaches decimal numbers and operations to 5th and 6th graders. Through data from four published studies of Decimal Point, involving 624 students in total, the authors identified a consistent gender difference that was replicated across all studies – male students tended to do better at pretest, while female students tended to learn more from the game. In addition, female students were more careful in answering self-explanation questions, which significantly mediated the relationship between gender and learning gains in two out of four studies. These findings show that learning games can be an effective tool for bridging the gender gap in middle school math education, which in turn contributes to the development of more personalized and inclusive learning platforms.
more »
« less
Using a Multi-Dimensional Model of Gender to Assess Learning with Different Game-Based Learning Narratives
Digital learning games can help address gender disparities in math by promoting better learning experiences and outcomes for girls. However, there is a need for more research to understand why some digital learning games might be especially effective for girls studying mathematics. In this study, we assess two possible pathways: that girls might benefit from math games because they reduce the anxiety and evaluation apprehension that girls are more likely to experience when doing math; and that girls might benefit from math games when they enjoy the narrative and thus experience greater engagement. To evaluate these pathways, our work uses multiple dimensions of gender (e.g., gender identity and gender-typed interests, activities, and traits) and surveys of affective experiences to examine the impact of three learning systems with identical learning content: a digital learning game, Decimal Point, that has consistently led to better learning for girls over boys; a new masculine-typed game, Ocean Adventure, developed based on a survey of over 300 students; and a conventional tutoring system. We predicted that girls and students with stronger feminine-typed characteristics would experience less math anxiety in both Decimal Point and Ocean Adventure compared to the tutor. We also predicted that girls and students with stronger feminine-typed characteristics would experience greater engagement and learning with Decimal Point while boys and students with stronger masculine-typed characteristics would experience greater engagement and learning with Ocean Adventure. Consistent with predictions, students with stronger feminine-typed characteristics experienced less anxiety and evaluation apprehension in both games compared to the tutor. This suggests that math learning games may provide a way to address these negative affective experiences. In terms of our measures of engagement, we found that students with stronger masculine-typed characteristics reported greater experience of mastery in the masculine Ocean Adventure; however, this was the only indicator that the more masculine narrative of Ocean Adventure led to different experiences based on gender. This suggests that narrative alone may not have a strong enough effect on students based on gender, especially when other game features are kept constant. Contrary to our predictions, there were no effects of gender identity or condition on learning outcomes, although both masculine-typed and feminine-typed characteristics were negatively associated with learning. Overall, these results point to the value of a multi-dimensional model of gender in assessing learning with a game, the important role learning games can have in reducing math anxiety and evaluation apprehension for girls and students with feminine-typed characteristics, and the nuanced effects of game narratives on experiences with game-based learning.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2201798
- PAR ID:
- 10588697
- Publisher / Repository:
- Play Story Press
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Game-based Learning Decimals Learning Enjoyment Gender Anxiety Evaluation Apprehension
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
There is an established gender gap in middle school math education, where female students report higher anxiety and lower engagement, which negatively impact their performance and even long-term career choices. This work investigates the role of digital learning games in addressing this issue by studying Decimal Point, a math game that teaches decimal numbers and operations to 5th and 6th graders. Through data from four published studies of Decimal Point, involving 624 students in total, the authors identified a consistent gender difference that was replicated across all studies – male students tended to do better at pretest, while female students tended to learn more from the game. In addition, female students were more careful in answering self-explanation questions, which significantly mediated the relationship between gender and learning gains in two out of four studies. These findings show that learning games can be an effective tool for bridging the gender gap in middle school math education, which in turn contributes to the development of more personalized and inclusive learning platforms.more » « less
-
Parents’ beliefs about the importance of math predicts their math engagement with their children. However, most work focuses on mothers’ math engagement with preschool- and school-aged children, leaving gaps in knowledge about fathers and the experiences of toddlers. We examined differences in mothers’ and fathers’ ( N = 94) engagement in math- and non-math activities with their two-year-old girls and boys. Parents reported their beliefs about the importance of math and literacy for young children and their frequency of home learning activities. Parents of sons did not differ in their engagement in math activities from parents of daughters. Mothers reported engaging more frequently in math activities with their toddlers than fathers did, but the difference reduced when parents endorsed stronger beliefs about the importance of math for children. Even at very early ages, children experience vastly different opportunities to learn math in the home, with math-related experiences being shaped by both parent gender and parents’ beliefs.more » « less
-
Stereotypes about men being better than women at mathematics appear to influence female students’ interest and performance in mathematics. Given the potential motivational benefits of digital learning games, it is possible that games could help to reduce math anxiety, increase self-efficacy, and lead to better learning outcomes for female students. We are exploring this possibility in our work with Decimal Point, a digital learning game that scaffolds practice with decimal operations for 5th and 6th grade students. In several studies with various versions of the game, involving over 800 students across multiple years, we have consistently uncovered a learning advantage for female students with the game. In our most recent investigation of this gender effect, we decided to experiment with a central feature of the game: its use of prompted self-explanation to support student learning. Prior research has suggested that female students might benefit more from self-explanation than male students. In the new study, involving 214 middle school students, we compared three versions of self-explanation in the game – menu-based, scaffolded, and focused – each presenting students with a different type of prompted self-explanation after they solved problems in the game. We found that the focused approach led to more learning across all students than the menu-based approach, a result reported in an earlier paper. In the additional results reported in this paper, we again uncovered the gender effect – female students learned more from the game than male students, regardless of the version of self-explanation – and also found a trend in which female students made fewer self-explanation errors, suggesting they may have been more deliberate and thoughtful in their self-explanations. This self-explanation finding is a possible key to further investigation into how and why we see the gender effect in Decimal Point.more » « less
-
We investigated how gender is represented in children’s books using a novel 200,000 word corpus comprising 247 popular, contemporary books for young children. Using human judgments and word co-occurrence data, we quantified gender biases of words in individual books and in the whole corpus. We find that children’s books contain many words that adults judge as gendered. Semantic analyses based on co-occurrence data yielded word clusters related to gender stereotypes (e.g., feminine: emotions; masculine: tools). Co-occurrence data also indicate that many books instantiate gender stereotypes identified in other research (e.g., girls are better at reading and boys at math). Finally, we used large-scale data to estimate the gender distribution of the audience for individual books, and find that children are more often exposed to gender stereotypes for their own gender. Together the data suggest that children’s books may be an early source of gender associations and stereotypes.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
