This article is from WeChat public account:Quantum (ID:QbitAI), author: Xiao Guo Yipu investigation, from the cover: vision China
The physical education of girls is not as good as men? This “cognition” is cool with the world.
And a variety of “basis” is also a big hit, such as the mathematics home of the institutions of the Paris Mathematical Foundation, women are less than 20%;
Tsinghua 2019 freshmen, science and engineering professional boys are also much more than girls, electrical, automation can reach about 4:1, mathematics and computers can even reach about 7:1;
According to the data at the end of 2017, only 6% of the Chinese Academy of Sciences academicians;
△ Image from Chinese Academy of Sciences website
Even, from high school to university, the vast majorityIn science classes and science and engineering majors, there are more boys than girls. At the same time, I believe that almost everyone has heard the argument that “there is no advantage for boys in science.”
There is even a brain-based structure based on the fact that there are different brain circuits in men and women, and the logical sciences such as the number of physical education of girls, which have no advantage over boys.
So does gender have any effect on the physical and chemical aspects of learning?
A lot of scientists have really started research on this issue, and even their results have become a hot topic on Weibo.
When we go back to the source and look closely, we find that things are not simple:
Because two scientific studies from the same journal and published only one week apart, they have completely different results.
So which study is more scientific? Which result is the scientific result?
We take a look at the papers.
The physical and mental physics of men and women, the brain circuit is different?
The first, Science issue of Science of Learning, published on November 1st, is from Florida International University, University of Delaware, Temple University, and Zhuo Keso University.
They found 101 undergraduates majoring in physics to participate in a test, including 55 boys and 46 girls, testing them in physics physics (Newtonian mechanics) Before and after anxiety, the researchers assumed that the more anxious a person is, the worse the score will be in the physics and chemistry course. Naturally, TA is not good at learning physics and chemistry.
In the experiment, before and after the start of the teaching, the students performed a resting state magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) To assess their STEM learning anxiety indicators.
STEM, which is science (Science), technology (Technology) , engineering (Engineering) and math (Mathematics), we can simply understand mathematical physics Science course.
The results of this experiment solved three problems:
Question 1: Is the anxiety of the number of physical and chemical courses the same as men and women?
The following is a scatter plot of four anxiety scores. Purple is a girl and green is a boy. The left side of each item is before teaching and the right side is after teaching.
It can be seen that the four anxiety scores of girls are higher than that of boys before and after teaching. Mathematical physiology and anxiety are closely related to gender, and after the teaching, the anxiety and science scores of boys and girls have improved.
Question 2: Is the relationship between mathematical and physical anxiety and the neural function of the brain the same as men and women?
About the neural function of the brain, the researchers locked in the neural mechanism of inter-network connectivity (inter-network connectivity).
The so-called inter-network connectivity refers to the connectivity of the three areas of pink, green and yellow in the figure below.
Psychopathological studies have shown that emotional disorders are closely related to these three regions.
The following is the result of the data. The bottom left corner of each small grid is a boy, the upper right corner is a girl, and the five-pointed star indicates relevance. It can be seen that there is no correlation between the anxiety score of girls and the connectivity between networks, while in boys, the two are closely related.
If you compare the different situations before and after the teaching, the correlation of boys is more obvious:
In other words, the relationship between mathematical and physical anxiety and the brain’s neurological function, boys and girls are different, and also face the mathematical and physic anxiety, the brain function of boys and girls will have different reactions.
Question 3: Is the relationship between mathematics and anxiety and achievement equal to men and women?
When the student’s anxiety score is put together with the student’s age and academic performance, it will be found that the anxiety and performance of the girl have nothing to do with, and the anxiety and performance of the boy are negatively correlated.
As for how anxiety affects performance, the researchers gave such a schematic diagram. There is an order of magnitude between anxiety, inter-network connectivity, and performance. For each post-teaching anxiety increase of 1.151 units, the course scores Will reduce 0.544 units.
Summary: Men and women learn to behave differently
Putting together the answers to the three questions, you will find that girls are more anxious when they are studying physical and chemical courses, and this anxiety does not affect their brain function, and they are not worried about anxiety and performance.
And boys, the number of physical and chemical courses is less anxious, this anxiety affects their brain function, and the anxiety is lower.
So, why do the two genders have this difference when they are studying mathematics and physics?
The researchers finally put forward an explanation that when the students in this experiment took physics classes, the boys’ brains would actively adapt to the increase of mathematical and physic anxiety and take the initiative to make a balanced move.
When the girl’s brain gradually increases in physico-chemical anxiety, it will enter the adaptation period earlier. The brain starts the compensation mechanism, redistributes the neural resources, and down-regulates the correlation between anxiety and the brain.
It sounds like the girl’s brain is too anxious, so she simply gives up treatment.
Moreover, even if it is not a difficult subject such as university physics, mathematics courses such as preschool and elementary school may cause anxiety. Therefore, the researchers suggest that teachers who teach mathematics courses for children should consider how to balance. Children’s learning anxiety.
However, this experiment is aimed at students who have already gone to college. It is hard to say whether these girls’ anxiety is notInfluenced by the idea that “girls are not good at science”. After all, if someone always says “your gender is not suitable for physics” in your ear, it is easy to cause learning anxiety before starting school.
Learning mathematics for men and women, the brain circuit is the same?
However, for the above conclusion, another new research paper expressed dissatisfaction!
A week later, the article also published in “Science of Learning” pointed out that there is no difference between men and women in learning mathematics, at least in the child stage.
The author of this article, Jessica Cantlon, professor of neuroscience at CMU in the United States, pointed out that there have been some studies in the past that show that there is a gap between men and women in their ability to study science, but these studies do not separate the differences between biological and social culture.
△ The author of the paper, Jessica Cantlon, is explaining math games to a child who is participating in the test
Because during the boyhood, the surrounding people’s remarks about girls’ unsuitability for science may affect one’s choices subtly.
Therefore, the author selected children as the research object, hoping to prove that there is no difference between men and women in the innate ability to learn mathematics, and gender differences are more caused by acquired factors.
To answer this question, Cantlon and her team asked 104 children aged 3 to 10 to watch in the MRI (MRI) instrument. The teaching part of counting and adding in Sesame Street counts the active parts of their brains.
Cognitive testing and watching videos about math classes. This is the first study to use neuroimaging techniques to assess biological gender differences in children’s mathematical abilities.
Cantlon said: “Compared to the non-mathematical content (as read), we studied which areas of the brain are in the video and in the mission. The math content is more responsive. So, you can look at the more responsive areas to define the neural network responsible for the math part.
If there are significant differences between men and women, the difference between these active areas should be large. For example, the wrong response of boys and girls may stem from different neural processes (for example, the efficiency of the mathematical processing area is low and the response selection mechanism is inefficient) .
The paper was compared using two sets of indicators “neural maturity” and “neural similarity”.
Neural maturity refers to the interrelationship between the active areas of the brain between children and adults, while neural similarity refers to the interrelationship between children and children.
The left side of Figure b shows the gender difference (orange) and gender similarity (dark purple) area.
The picture on the right lists the similarities and differences in the brain.The percentage of voxels that substantially support the evidence. Among them, only less than 0.8% of voxels showed evidence of significant or strong gender differences, while another 75% of voxels proved similarity between men and women.
In addition, the researchers also tested changes in brain signals in the (intraparietal sulci, IPS) region. The IPS is responsible for handling symbolic digital information.
The results also demonstrate that there is no gender difference.
And with age, the results of the mathematics ability test TEMA-3 also show that before the age of 10, the mathematics ability of boys and girls does not significantly differ with age.
Finally, they tested the neurological similarity between children and children.
The above picture shows children (yellow) and the average neurosimilarity between children of different genders (green). The third column shows the overlap of the first two columns in light green.
Based on data from children of the same gender and children of different genders, it can be seen that the areas of neural similarity are the same.
Finally, the Cantlon team concluded that, given the broad similarities between boys and girls, the gender differences observed in adolescent or adult STEM performance are unlikely to result from early childhood brain or cognitive differences.
In addition, not long ago, in the US national STEM competition, girls took the top five prizes, which subverted the cognition that the past few physical and chemical competitions were almost all male.
△Image from Forbes
There are as many male and female winners in the four STEM category awards, and this is the first time in history that there have been more girls than boys in the finals.
This also seems to prove that in developed countries, when the educational resources between men and women tend to be equal, the gap between women’s ability in STEM and men is shrinking.
I am too difficult
Is the girl really suitable for science as a boy? The results of a single study by Professor Cantlon are not entirely convincing.
Another psychology professor from the University of Missouri, David Geary, said that it is not surprising that there are no gender differences in these mathematical tasks.
However, there is additional evidence that some older students do have gender differences. In very, very high-level mathematics, the scores of boys and girls are 3 to 1.
After all, the difficulty of adding and subtracting primary schools and the calculus of the university are not a concept at all. When there is a high number of students, is there really no gender difference between men and women? Who should I trust?
Professor Cantlon’s paper can’t give an answer, but at least she proved that before the age of 10, girls did not learn mathematics worse than boys.
So, do you have any brain differences in the physical and chemical aspects of men and women, and which research results do you believe more?
References:
The first paper Sex differences in brain correlates of STEM anxietyhttps: //www.nature.com/articles/s41539-019-0058-9
Second paper Gender similarities in the brain during mathematicsDevelopmenthttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-019-0057-x
This article is from WeChat public account: author: Xiao Guo Yipu check