07 Jun Women Underperformed Men in High Level Critical Thinking Examinations
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Sara Brownell
Sara E. Brownell PhD
School of Life Sciences
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Brownell: Our group has been broadly interested in gender biases in introductory biology
since we published a study that showed that women underperform on course
exams and under participate in whole class discussions compared to men
(http://www.lifescied.org/content/13/3/478.full). We were curious why women
might be under performing on these course exams so in this new study, we
examined characteristics of the exams to see if that had an impact. What we
found was that women and men perform equally on questions that test basic
memorization. However, when questions tested more higher-level critical
thinking skills, women were not scoring as high as men. This happened even
when we took into account the academic ability of the students – women and men
who had the same ability coming into the class. We also found that students
from lower socioeconomic statuses also underperformed on these higher-level
critical thinking questions compared to students from higher socioeconomic
statuses, again even when we took into account academic ability.
MedicalResearch.com: What should readers take away from your report?
Dr. Brownell: There is a national movement to shift our tests away from memorization to more critical thinking. Doing so may help to improve student’s conceptual understanding of biology. However, given our findings these gaps may be exacerbated if we as a community are not careful about how we move forward with making our exams test more critical thinking. We want to test students on critical thinking, so it’s important to emphasize that we are NOT suggesting to instructors that they should construct tests that only contain memorization-level questions as a way to minimize these gaps. Far from it. However, these findings mean that we may need to think more carefully about how the characteristics of our exams can impact different student groups and what we as instructors can be doing in our classrooms to lessen these gaps.
MedicalResearch.com: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?
Dr. Brownell: This study was done at a single institution, so obviously more research needs to be done to see if this pattern holds true in biology classes at other institutions.
Also, we do not know why the patterns we observed may be happening. In our
paper, we lay out several possible explanations backed up by previous literature
that could lead to our findings, but they are currently just ideas and more work
needs to be done to determine which, if any, of these explanations may be
driving the patterns we observed.
MedicalResearch.com: Thank you for your contribution to the MedicalResearch.com community.
Citation:
C. D. Wright, S. L. Eddy, M. P. Wenderoth, E. Abshire, M. Blankenbiller, S. E. Brownell. Cognitive Difficulty and Format of Exams Predicts Gender and Socioeconomic Gaps in Exam Performance of Students in Introductory Biology Courses. Cell Biology Education, 2016; 15 (2): ar23 DOI: 10.1187/cbe.15-12-0246
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Last Updated on June 7, 2016 by Marie Benz MD FAAD