Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 15, 1990 TAG: 9004150331
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: NORTON, MASS. LENGTH: Medium
Detailed observations of thousands of hours of videotapes of college classrooms show that faculty members consistently take male students and their contributions more seriously than females and their ideas.
Moreover, they permit males to dominate discussions far out of proportion to their numbers.
"College catalogs should carry warnings: The value you receive will depend on your sex," she said.
Krupnick's conclusions are bad news for Wheaton College.
Until two years ago, it was an all-female institution selling itself as a place where women could flex their intellectual and leadership muscles before moving out into male-dominated work places.
Now Wheaton has bowed to economic necessity, become coeducational and taken up the challenge of providing what Alice F. Emerson, president of the college, calls "gender-balanced" education.
To do so, they have turned to Krupnick, a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, for help.
Krupnick's findings are among the latest in a steady stream of research over the last two decades showing that while they may be sitting side by side, male and female undergraduates have substantially different educational experiences.
In a survey of the literature on the subject for the Association of American Colleges, Roberta Hall argued that women face a "chilly climate" in most college classrooms.
Professors are more likely to remember men's names, call on them in class and listen attentively to their answers. By contrast, they feel freer to interrupt women and ask them "lower order" questions.
For example, an English professor might ask a woman for the year when Wordsworth wrote the first version of "the Prelude," but turn to a male student to ask, "What are the thematic differences between the 1805 and 1850 versions?"
A study released last month by Harvard Assessment Seminars reported that men and women often approach their studies with sharply different values.
The satisfaction men get from college years tends to correlate well with the grades they achieve, and they look for faculty advisers who will give them "concrete and directive suggestions."
Women, by contrast, tend to put the heart before the course. Their overall academic satisfaction, the study found, is shaped "far more by personal relationships and by informal encounters and meetings with faculty and advisers."
When she was hired by Wheaton as a consultant, Krupnick expected to find no problems.
"Half of the faculty members were women, and women still predominated in every class," she recalled.
"I assumed that they would still be holding their own. But I was wrong."
Detailed analysis of videotapes of Wheaton classes showed that in a class where they made up one-tenth of the students, male students would do a quarter of the speaking. They also tended to be more impulsive.
"You ask what's the meaning of life, and four hands will shoot up, most of them male," she said.
Krupnick said female students, by contrast, tended to want time to think about a question before offering an answer, and when they did respond, they were more likely than men to "enlarge on the ideas of a previous speaker rather than to challenge his or her initial assumption."
Women at Wheaton tend to do better than their male classmates on written papers, but, according to Krupnick, the cost of not becoming proficient in holding an audience can be high.
"In a vast number of careers, it's the ability to use language in public settings, like meetings, that leads to advancement, not the quality of work done in private," she said.
Krupnick suggested that the goal for Wheaton - or any college, for that matter - should be to promote all strengths in all students.
"Teachers should encourage women to initiate comments, resist interruptions and be willing to assume the risks of a public role," she said.
"Likewise, men need listening skills. They must also be shown that when they give instant answers to complicated questions, mostly for the sake of social posturing, they are not getting a very good education."
by CNB