Breaking Science Stereotypes: Research Article Review

Katelyn McCormick 

Breaking Science Stereotypes:  Research Article Review

The article Breaking Science Stereotypes, written by Alec Bodzin and Mike Gehringer, begins by explaining a study they conducted on students’ perceptions of scientists. When asked to draw a picture of what a scientist looks like, most depicted an old man in a lab coat with glasses.  Even if that is the common perception of scientists, teachers want their students to see that a scientist can come in multiple shapes and sizes and that they have different roles in their profession.  

The authors felt it was important to conduct their study because they wanted to see if a visit from a real-life scientist could change the misperceptions students have of scientists. To conduct the study, teachers were asked to have their students draw pictures of what they believed scientists look like. Then, during a two-day period that followed, the teachers had two different scientists come in. One was a woman in a lab coat who called herself an engineer. The other was a man, dressed in a button-down shirt with no jacket or lab coat, who called himself a physicist. 

The main purpose of the article was to see if children’s perception of scientists could change. The article states, “This study reported the students typically viewed  scientist as white males who wore stereotypical items such as lab coats and eyeglasses.” The key question that the authors wanted to address is if students’ perceptions of scientists would change if they were shown what real scientists look like. The methods the scientist used to answer the question included having real-life scientists visit the classroom, people exactly opposite of the students’ perceptions. 

After having the two scientists visit the school, the students were asked to draw a picture of a scientist again. This time the drawings contained less stereotypical images about scientists. Some of the images depicted women and other images showed scientists without lab coats. 

The most important information in this article is that having scientists in the classroom did change students’ perceptions. The article states, “Analyst using dependent t-test procedures was conducted on the DAST-C checklist scores of the participating classes. Significant differences were found between the pre-visit and the post-visit scores for the participating students.” This means that before the scientists visited the school, students were more likely to draw the stereotypical images of scientist and after the scientists visited the students were more likely to draw pictures of the scientist they observed in the classroom.  The results show students were two times more likely to draw a non-stereotypical picture after the scientists visited their classroom. 

The article concludes that, “the interactions between scientist and students in a classroom setting influence how students perceive the scientist.” If people take the information in this article seriously, there will be benefits. If female students see female scientists, then they are  more likely to pursue careers involving math and science. 

The article helped me understand how important it is to teach children that their perceptions aren’t always correct, especially about scientists. If we change a students’ perception of something, we can encourage them to think outside the box and take on new challenges.

 Work cited

Bodzin, A., & Gehringer, M. (2001). Breaking science stereotypes. Science and Children,36-41. Retrieved November 10, 2018.

a students drawing before he met the scientist 

A students drawing after he met the scientist