The role of feedback in young people’s academic choices

Abstract

Women are underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics subjects with more girls leaving these subjects at every stage in education. The current research used a scenario methodology to examine the impact of teacher feedback on girls' and boys' choices to study a specific science subject, engineering. British participants aged 13 (N = 479) were given scenarios where a new teacher encouraged them to take engineering using person feedback which focussed on their abilities, process feedback which focussed on their effort levels or gave them no reason. Results suggested that both boys and girls were more likely to select to study engineering when they received person feedback rather than process or no feedback. Young people also thought that ability was more important to being successful in science than in non-science subjects. This suggests young people feel that ability is needed to succeed in science subjects and person feedback can lead them to believe that they have this ability. Therefore, teacher feedback which gives ability attributions for possible success could be used to encourage more young people to persist in science. However, the potentially negative longer term outcomes of ability attributions and how they can be negated are also discussed.

Distributing Feedback Wisely to Empower Girls in STEM

“…Girls rely more on teacher feedback than boys to assess their performance in STEM. Even high-performing girls rely less on their grades as an indicator of their knowledge, and look to their teacher instead (Skipper and Leman, 2017). Their critical self-assessments are often accompanied by their belief that talent is the main requirement for success in STEM; moreover, these negative self-assessments can be intensified by gender stereotypes that attribute STEM talent exclusively to boys/men (Luttenberger et al, 2018).…”

“…However, research shows that teacher feedback often fails to support girls in STEM. Girls receive less instructional and discussion time in the STEM classroom than boys, and are less often the focus of classroom interaction, receiving less feedback (Skipper and Leman, 2017). Teachers also often attribute boys' STEM achievement to talent and girls' STEM achievement to effort and hard work (Burnett, 2002), conveying the message that STEM subjects are not for everyone.…”

“…When students with a fixed mindset encounter a difficult problem or concept, they see these difficulties mainly as expectable evidence of their lack of innate ability. They tend to seek out easy problems (to prove their ability) and avoid challenging ones that would help them progress in their learning (Dweck, 2007;Skipper and Leman, 2017). As Freudenthaler et al (2008) could show, task avoidance is an important predictor for girls' school achievements.…”

“…In a study with students in secondary education (Skipper and Leman, 2017), process-related feedback failed to raise the attractiveness of possible STEM careers (feedback indicated either that students would be suited to take a STEM course because they work hard vs. or because they are clever). Here, person-related feedback was more successful; it suited students' prior assumptions that success in science is mainly due to innate ability.…”

“…Person-related feedback has undesirable long-term effects, especially in case of failure, for example in how it decreases the likelihood to choose challenging and difficult tasks and ties self-efficacy assessments to estimation of talent. However, with a fixed and gender-biased mindset, girls may misinterpret the usually more favorable process-related feedback and believe that a teacher is actually pointing out their lack of talent whenever she/he praises their learning behavior and efforts (Skipper and Leman, 2017).…”