TeachME Professional Development

1. In general, women earn substantial proportions of the bachelor's degrees in math and the sciences, except in the areas of physics, engineering, and:

2. In the math and science disciplines, women earn 61-71 percent of the bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees in social sciences and 42-52 percent of the psychology degrees.

3. Although girls generally do as well as or better than boys on homework assignments and course grades in math and science classes, boys tend to outscore girls when tested on the same content in high-pressure situations, such as standardized tests with time limits.

4. Which of the following is NOT one of the areas where consistent gender differences have emerged for children and adolescents regarding math and science?

5. Students who view their cognitive abilities as fixed from birth or unchangeable are more likely to experience decreased confidence and performance when faced with difficulties or setbacks, so teachers should explicitly teach students that academic abilities are expandable and improvable.

6. Teachers should provide students with prescriptive, informational feedback regarding their performance and this feedback should focus on on strategies, ____________, and the process of learning.

7. Children who view intelligence as a fixed trait or believe that their own abilities cannot be changed tend to pursue 'learning goals' rather than 'performance goals.'

8. To help modify students' beliefs about their intelligence or abilities, teachers can expose students to neuroscience research that shows that brains grow new synaptic connections when new material is learned and practiced, thus making the brain more complex and 'smarter'.

9. Examples of prescriptive and informational feedback include identifying gains in children's strategy use and determining gaps or errors in:

10. Which is the following is an accurate statement about how providing informational feedback in the classroom helps create a positive learning environment?

11. Experimental work suggests that feedback given in the form of praise focused on global intelligence, such as saying 'You're smart' may have a negative impact on future learning behavior in comparison to praise about effort, such as 'You must have worked hard'.

12. Researchers have found that negative stereotypes can affect performance in test-taking situations, and have labeled this phenomenon:

13. Evidence indicates that even brief exposure to high-achieving women who are perceived to be experts in math can improve female students' performances on math tests.

14. While during the 1960s, women earned less than 1 percent of the bachelor's degrees in any engineering subfield, by 2004, women earned nearly one-half of the bachelor's degrees in chemical engineering (47%) and industrial engineering (49%).

15. In research on learning, long-term or individual interest is a relatively stable and personal preference toward certain types of activities, while __________ or situational interest, is a more immediate response to particular aspects of situations or problems.

16. When teaching math, science, and other subjects, teachers should strive to achieve a balance between incorporating some material that sparks interest while ensuring that content learning remains the primary goal of the lesson.

17. Gender differences in math test results indicate that:

18. One-third of the questions on the math portion of the SAT are comprised of algebra questions, and the largest differences between males and females are found on these items.

19. Research studies have determined that targeted training can serve to improve spatial skills performance beginning in early childhood and continuing into adulthood.

20. Each of the following is a recommended strategy that teachers may use to improve spatial skills with their students EXCEPT:

21. Since learners in any classroom will vary in their spatial abilities and it is difficult for teachers to know how to target their teaching in this domain, teachers should take advantage of tools, lesson plans, and other materials that can be used by learners at different levels of ability.

22. Teachers can help encourage girls and young women to choose career paths in math and science-related fields by helping to foster the development of strong beliefs about their abilities in these subjects.

23. In one example study, participating seventh-graders were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, including the ____________ condition, in which students learned that intelligence is an expandable capacity that increases with mental effort.

24. Findings from a series of studies indicate that fifth-graders who were praised for ability performed less well following subsequent failure, whereas students who were praised for effort did not, and those praised for effort showed greater task persistence, enjoyment, and orientation toward mastery learning.

25. One intervention indicated that students exposed to strategies designed to heighten their interest such as contextualization, choice, and ____________ showed significantly greater motivation, involvement, and learning of the target math skills than those students in the control condition.