Assignment 1 - Article Thoughts

For this assignment Mr. Borton and I read and discussed the article "The CSI Effect" written by Richard Jones and Arthur Bangert in Science Scope, the free article for November 2006. The article explained that until recently female middle school students often portrayed scientists as white einstein-like males, but that more students now hold mental images of scientists that are aligned with their own gender and typical features, rather than stereotypic “mad scientist” images.

"What phenomenon is responsible for the recent change in female students’ mental images of scientists?"

Jones and Bangert suggest that "perceptions of scientists may be more related to a public stereotype of scientists than to teachers’ efforts in the classroom, or even to scientists’ roles in real-world contexts." We discussed this from the perspective we gained from the study we handed out to our students and felt that much of this statement was accurate. Many students who took our study have parents who work in science careers, yet they likely do not see this 'real-world' context because so few of them mentioned these common careers for our area as what they would want to do. Mr. Borton mentioned that we may need to more explicitly talk about these 'real world' careers which are common in this area to try and improve students perceptions of what a scientist is.

Jones and Bangert further explained: "the results from our study suggest that the change in the mental images of scientists for middle school girls is primarily due to the recent propagation of the CSI-type television series that have appeared over the last several years." We did agree that this must have a lot to do with the change of sterotype, not only from CSI, but from many shows and multiple applications where females and males are both seen and playing active roles. We do think that there is much more than this effect, however. We discussed that many of these girls are now in the third generation of working women and that as many women have moved to the workforce that the general sterotype changed. Perhaps the CSI effect could be a direct result of women taking to the workforce in the first place.

Jones and Bangert conclude: "Our findings indicate that middle school girls’ global view of scientists is more balanced in terms of gender and less stereotypical than has been observed in the past." There is no disagreement with this; it appears obvious from our research that the sterotypical images associated with science are changing to more balanced ends.