The Project CLIMB team has been hard at work collecting data for several projects. In one study, we began examining the emergence and development of children’s science gender stereotypes. While recent studies have started to detail children’s emerging math stereotypes, we recognize less is understood about whether children’s developing math and science concepts lead to different gender specific stereotypes.

Often in developmental research researchers use stimuli depicting children. Similarly, social psychological research with adults often uses images of adults for stimuli. In some cases these decisions stem from the belief that age matched exemplars might represent the typical cases individuals think about. We recognize that in the context of measuring gender stereotypes about math and science that the particular stereotype might be sensitive to the age of the target. That is, we might expect that the type of stimuli we use to represent gender (images of children or images of adults) might activate different beliefs in this stereotyped domain depending on whether the stereotype is represented as a particular gender (e.g., females) or as a subgroup of a gender (e.g., Women). In consideration of this possibility, we recognize the importance of understanding how the nature of these gender stereotypes change with age (without necessarily being influenced by the stimuli choices). To begin to address this question, in another project initiated this year we began investigating whether our measurement of math gender stereotypes is impacted by whether the targets of those stereotypes are of children or of adults. This study is being conducted both with children and adult participants.

Data collection with children is temporarily on hold until we move child testing protocols online in response to Covid-19. We have already shifted our adult testing online, in part with the help of one of our research partners, Cloud Army, and expect to finish that data collection this summer in collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Steele’s lab at York University.  We anticipate child testing to resume in the next month, also on the Cloud Army platform.

In other work, particularly while our main research site, Science World, is temporarily closed, we are working diligently on several manuscripts including new submissions and revisions to manuscripts under review. In one of these papers we demonstrate that children’s math-gender stereotypes can be changed following a brief exposure to counter-stereotypical exemplars. Interestingly, we show that it is possible to both increase and decrease children’s gender-math stereotypes among primary school-aged children. In other work, we have a paper under revision detailing a novel methodology for measuring implicit associations in pre-school aged children. Another paper on the malleability of implicit bias is also under revision and a new manuscript on the developmental emergence of stereotype threat effects in the domain of gender and math will be submitted this summer.

Project SINC has been busy making progress on four projects over the past few months. First, we are continuing work on our daily-log study to examine whether positive social interactions will help STEM co-op students feel supported and positively challenged in their work. We are continuing our collaboration with McMaster University for this project. We have also established a collaboration with the Centre for the Advancement of Co-operative Education at the University of Waterloo (WatCACE) and had to postpone to the spring co-op term due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Collecting data during the Covid-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to explore experiences among co-op students within the context of insecurity and crisis. Therefore, we will examine the coping strategies that co-op students are currently using to manage stress and uncertainty, the effectiveness of these strategies, and explore whether women in STEM face unique barriers to effective coping during the Covid-19 pandemic. We also have a unique opportunity to explore how students experiencing the most uncertainty are coping during the pandemic. Therefore, we will recruit students who would have had a co-op placement but no longer do because of the pandemic.

In addition, we have been working on a project examining nonverbal behaviours in diverse groups. The decoding of nonverbal behaviour is a crucial aspect of communication during any social interaction; however, past research has lacked participant diversity, leaving researchers less certain about the role of social categorization when decoding nonverbal behaviours. To address this in the context of Engineering, a new project at the University of Toronto aims to uncover the influence of social category membership on the decoding of nonverbal behaviours by observing Engineering students working in diverse groups. Ultimately, this project will shed light on how social categories interact with nonverbal behaviours to influence perceptions of other group members as well as the impact of social categorization processes for the success of working Engineering students. This study has been postponed until the 2020 fall term due to pandemic-related research stoppages and will now be run online via video conferencing. Using the software Face Reader and Noldus ObserverXT, we will code nonverbal behaviours of the face and body, including those related to emotions, attitudes and motivations and personality.

We have also continued working toward publishing the focus group data we collected last year with University of Toronto Engineering students. In this project, we explored how engineering students’ conceptualization of engineering identity and their identification with engineering changes and shifts as they progress through university. We find that students come into university with identification with an academic and technical conceptualization of engineering, but receive an identity shock in the first semester of the program, where they encounter very difficult exams and coursework, and are no longer able to easily excel academically and technically. In response to this shock, we find that students cope through building a “culture of suffering” which buffers against this lack of belonging. We also find that students increase their identification with engineering by reconstructing engineering identity to reflect not only technical and academic success, but rather social aspects as well. This then increases their identification with engineering. We also discuss the implications of such a strong sense of community and culture on discussions around gender bias and discrimination (i.e., system justification-like responses).

Finally, in collaboration with some RISE team members, we are working on a project on teamwork at McMaster University. This study’s primary aim is to test the effects of a group work intervention on female students’: a) feelings of fit in the engineering program, b) physiological responses of challenge vs. threat during group work, and c) amount of information-sharing and respect among group members. This study is taking advantage of a 2-term natural intervention occurring at McMaster University beginning September 2020. The purpose of this study is to determine whether the changes made in this restructuring improve experiences for women in engineering. Assuming that at least some aspect of group work is completed online, this study’s secondary aim is to study teamwork dynamics a) online and b) in transition between online and in-person. We are interested in how online work environments impact the psychological phenomena above, however we are also interested in novel questions about online teamwork experiences.