need help research paper

> >

Girls and the Science>>

>>Just about everything one comes in contact with involves mathematics in one form or another. Most of the items one uses on a daily basis are so common that one may not realizes that they are all related to mathematics. The shirt one wears, the shoe one treks in, and the bulb that lightens one's dark room are all using mathematics. It takes arithmetic to calculate the size of the shirt, the shape of the shoe, and the wattage of the light bulb. At first sight the issue raised here seems amazingly easy to address, “mathematics is beautiful, even if it is, sadly, and more inaccessible than other forms of art. The second is that it is useful, that it is utility depends in part on its certainty, and that certainty cannot come without a notion of proof” (mathnews).  So, if without a proper understanding of math, and mathematical concepts, will today's students find themselves unable to compete in an increasingly technological world, will they be able to find jobs? Why should the non-mathematician care about things of this nature? Perhaps, we should study it to find out what it is. We owe it to ourselves to at least know what mathematics is before we claim that it isn’t really important in our daily lives. In the other hand, if there are differences between males and females in the area of logical thinking? A research paper published in 1980 suggested that girls have less mathematical ability than boys (gender).  Furthermore, will American industry be able to compete successfully against its foreign counterparts? Therefore, to look into the impact of culture on mathematics learning, why are there many Asian so much better at mathematics than the majority of American students? Thus, what if the U.S does without foreign students who are good in mathematics? To finding this attitude quite curious, as well as opportunities for students should discussion of the student's professional plans and intended contributions to the field of mathematics education.>>

> >

Labelle (2000), professor of mathematics at the Université du Québec à Montréal, says “I like mathematics because it is beautiful, full of surprises, and gives me complete freedom of thought.” Feelings of surprise and beauty are emotional. Doing mathematics is emotional. Students also express these attributes. “Math is just another way of both creating meaning and describing it. It's lovely. I'm lousy at it, but I love feeling my brain tumble over as it understands something for the first time.” The feeling of connectedness to stimuli that math provides this professor and student should not be mistaken for sentiment or mere personal expression (Lakoff 2000, 176).  Mathematics can give a new perspective when looking at architecture, music, plants, and sculpture. Mathematics is the gateway to many educational experiences and professions. However, math is a stumbling block for many people. >>

It is a subject that evokes more fear and anxiety than any other. It causes sweaty palms, shortness of breath, and panic. Math anxiety is real and is something that every adult education teacher needs to deal with (Nancy L. Markus). In response to such arguments that is mathematics can be beautiful, Principal Investigator Dr. Stephen Linton said, “Symmetry is everywhere and studying objects and ideas through their symmetries has been a central plank of mathematics and science since the early nineteenth century. Symmetry apply to very many other problems, laying out components on a circuit board or a chip, working out how to allocate orders to slabs of steel in a mill, planning computer networks and so on. In almost all of these problems, symmetry is an issue”.>>

> >

In particularly, the study of mathematics can satisfy a wide range of interests and abilities. It develops the imagination. It trains in clear and logical thought. It is a challenge, with varieties of difficult ideas and unsolved problems, because it deals with the questions arising from complicated structures. Yet it also has a continuing drive to simplification, to finding the right concepts and methods to make difficult things easy, to explaining why a situation must be as it is. In so doing, many professional in mathematics get even more interesting over the year. Therefore, Albert Einstein’s a great mathematician in the world; he’s European, he sought to understand beauty of nature. By 1911 Einstein was able to make preliminary predictions about how a ray of light from a distant star, passing near the Sun, would appear to be bent slightly, in the direction of the Sun (JOC/EFR Nov 94). Rate of change really is often found in practical, everyday problems, math is heavily used in business, economics, social studies, communication, etc. In reality math is the basic language of the world, Abraham Wald was born into a Jewish family in Hungary, he was the first to build it into a statistical theory, he also was the first to solve the general problem of sequential tests of statistical hypotheses, which is a paper for the seminar on the existence of a solution to the competitive economic model (J J O'Connor). Beside the beauty of mathematics, there are not a lot people realizes that, just because students feel that they shouldn’t feel this anxiety.  It’s a weakness which they should overcome, by brute force if necessary, when this effort doesn’t succeed (as invariably it doesn’t) the self-criticism becomes ever harsher, leading to a deep sense of frustration and often a severe loss of self-esteem Consequently, suppression of math anxiety is not only unconstructive, but can actually be damaging (Galileo). >>

> >

In college, learn formulas that are even more complicated and harder to remember. The deeper you go into mathematics, the more formulas and rote methods you have to learn, and the worse it gets. It’s not easy for everyone learns mathematics, Students who do well in mathematics have more positive attitudes about the subject, and thus they are likely to take more courses and may perform better. Especially, girls and young women do not tried to study mathematics, all the emphasis on technology meaning machine-related skills is something that keeps young women away from the field, while many articles had been poorly analyzed and/or included sexist interpretations, there was evidence to support the idea that there were differences between girls' and boys' learning of mathematics. According to the expert opinion of Leder, “they did believe much more strongly than did young women that mathematics was more appropriate for males than for females. The importance of these variables, their long-term influence, and their differential impact on females and males was reconfirmed in many of our later studies, as well as by the work of many others”. Also, Stage and Maple uses the evidence to suggest that “women drop out of mathematics at a higher rate than men, even when they are equally well prepared, particularly in the early years of their undergraduate careers. Women cite a variety of reasons for dropping out of mathematics and related fields. As the focus in upper level mathematics narrows, some women report being turned away by the very qualities that attract them in the first place”. >>

> >

Enrollment patterns of college undergraduates show that few students anticipate a career in science, mathematics or engineering, and very few major in mathematics, in fact, less than 1 percent of undergraduates (Haycock & Steen, 2002). The Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (Lutzer & Maxwell, 2000) showed that bachelor degrees granted in mathematics fell 19 percent between 1990 and 2000, although undergraduate enrollment rose 9 percent. This study was an effort to determine if there is gender differences in college, a level where there has been little research compared to that at the K-12 level. Recent research on brain function (through functional magnetic resonance imaging of the working brain) has shown small but revealing differences in how male and female brains process certain tasks. Moreover, Darwinian reasoning has long suggested that males, being more expendable in nature's scheme, may be over represented at the extreme ends of human behavior. That is, they may be more "experimental" in evolutionary design, while females tend towards moderation and stability.  Yet biology cannot be the whole answer -- nurture makes its claim as well. Different socialization of males and females certainly reinforces slight predispositions. We expect males to gravitate towards math and science, while girls may face social impediments that affect their classroom preparation. This argument is strengthened by the fact that girls in many other nations, such as lace>Singaporelace> or lace>Korealace>, do substantially better than American girls on math performance, suggesting that biology cannot be the whole story. Finally, this is not necessarily a question of greater intelligence or talent, and it is certainly not one of self-worth. Boys and girls simply have complementary skills and strengths; each group is stronger in certain areas than in others. Clearly, both boys and girls could benefit from more encouragement and better math instruction. But in the aggregate, genuine differences show up at the extreme ends of performance. It is this reality that the SAT legitimately captures. The most interesting finding, however, an intervention directed at changing social norms promises to reverse some of these circumstances. Psychosocial factors combine with social norms in creating perceived barriers to women's participation in mathematics. Even highly talented females report less self efficacy than males when completing mathematical tasks (Seegers & Boekaerts, 1996). Boys and girls have similar mathematics and science proficiency scores on tests at the age of 9, but a gap begins to appear at around age 13, or at least this has been the pattern from 1973 to 1994 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). However, in 1994 there was no measurable difference in the math proficiency of 13-year-old boys and girls (Campbell, Reese, O'Sullivan, & Dossey, 1996). If there was a problem in spatial visualization or other innate sexual-biological traits explaining math differences, they suddenly cleared up about a decade ago. >>

> >

Traditionally, men have outnumbered women in computer science and engineering, but that trend has been changing. Increasingly, women are becoming successful computer scientists and engineers, mathematics, challengers of this evidence are against the sexist, controversies surrounding the research should be looked at from both the positive and negative side, there are some research found that many women successes in mathematics. Stage & Maple pointed out that “the focus in upper level mathematics narrows, some women report being turned away by the very qualities that attract them in the first place”. To be successes in this field, research suggests that when women do pursue fields that require mathematics, they often do so because of successful early childhood experiences with parents or interested teachers (Hart, 1992; Jacobs, Finken, Griffin, & Wright, 1998). Most can name a particular person or persons responsible for their interest in their major. Without such individual mentoring, they would not have made it into the pipeline. Similarly, many women who succeed in undergraduate mathematics courses credit support networks and study groups created by faculty and administrators (Stage & Maple, 1996), women want to try to be able to be in the real world and be independent, especially some Asian students most better at science than other country, they know that despite however they may feel about the label of "Asian American' that they are predominantly perceived to be "different' from the dominant (white) culture. They know that to understand what these perceptions involve is having access to some important self-knowledge that can inform them about others behavior towards them. A survey of female students in Biology at Hanoi University showed that most are confident in their ability and the great majority have a passion for science, are willing to pursue a scientific path and aim to reach the highest level, women in Science Club aims to assist by raising the morale of students possibly by making an evaluation slightly higher than the students' actual capability so as to bring into play any latent ability and give an impulse to go forward (Dr Pham Thi Tran Chau and Dr Luu Lan Huong). Mathematics and science are generally considered disaster zones in American schools. Many people have heard, for example, that only the top 1 percent of American students score as high in math as the average student in Japan (Gerald W. Bracey). In math, American eighth graders finished slightly below average among the 40 nations. They got 53 percent of the items right, while the international average was 55 percent. American fourth graders, on the other hand, finished above average, ranking twelfth of 26 nations. In science, American eighth graders were slightly above average, scoring 58 percent correct compared to an international average of 56 percent. At the fourth-grade level in science, American students finished third among the 26 countries. However, only about 15 percent of American students scored as high on TIMSS math as the average Japanese student, while about 39 percent of American students scored as well as 50 percent of the Japanese students in science (Gerald W. Bracey). Similarly, children in lace>Vietnamlace> are taught two-digit multiplication as early as second grade whereas children in the lace>United Stateslace> learn multiplication more than a year later, around third grade (Daniel C. Orey & Kieu T. Nguyen . With these evidences to study sciences, mathematics, why don't American students do better? According to the expert opinion of Danial C. Orey & Kieu T. Nguyen, the content of the Vietnamese Educational system is more rigorous than that found in the lace>United Stateslace>.  Vietnamese schools do not allow every student to pass and move on to the next grade level unless they can demonstrate mastery of the material, it appears from our research, that the Vietnamese education system does not make it possible for every student to be successful, only the “smart and quick” kids are able to take advantage or overcoming the system.  As for the poor, or those who need some form of extra assistance, these students are left behind and drop out of school. For another reason, lace>U.S.lace> schools are much more likely to allow calculators in the early grades than schools in highest mathematics achieving countries. Singapore, Korea, Japan, Chinese Taipei, and lace>Hong Konglace> all score high on international mathematics exams and each restricts or prohibits calculator use in the elementary grades until mastery has been demonstrated. In addition, fourth graders who used calculators more frequently in their classrooms had lower scores on the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress in Mathematics.[ii] According to the Public Agenda’s 1997 survey, “seventy-three percent of teachers want students to memorize multiplication tables and do mathematics by hand before using calculators (lace>Washington, tate>DCtate>lace>). However, brain science can and indeed should inform the debate about gender equity and education policy.  But the first requirement is that the “brain science” should be science rather than stereotype.>>

> >

I would like to conclude by adding my own personal experience with “girls and the sciences” I mentioned above how Vietnamese study mathematics showing that among young children and gender, there are many more boys who are math geniuses than girls.  But if girls had the opportunity to learn math at their own pace, I think the odds are good, or better than good, that we would have many more teenage math geniuses who are girls.  Just as many boys are late bloomers with regard to literature and foreign languages, many girls are or could be late bloomers with regard to math and science. As I study mathematics, in adolescence that is I am a Vietnamese, the impact of culture on mathematics learning. I think Asian children do well in mathematics because they are hard working and have the persistence to keep trying and to not give up easily. Furthermore, they have been influenced the Vietnamese educational system, with the Chinese and the French making the greatest impact of all in the shaping of the current academic structure in lace>lace>Vietnamlace>lace>. So, what if the U.S does without foreign students who are good in mathematics? In fact, there are many Asian so much better at mathematics than the majority of American students. What if, as critics continue to claim, American schools have not improved and Asian schools are better, what is the relevance of the schools to economic performance? Pragmatically, overcoming widespread math phobia wouldn’t help Americans keep up with the Japanese (and in the near future, Koreans, Chinese, and Indians) in technological development. America can’t do better, and they can learn from other countries if they pay attention to what they actually do, but junking their whole system isn't the way.>>