Nicole Green won a gold medal and more than $4,000 in scholarship money at this year's Canada-Wide Science Fair, held at McGill University in Montreal.
It was the Grade 10 student's fourth trip to the national competition. Green, a Sundre resident who attends Olds High School, has medalled every other time. She has now been awarded more than $8,000 for her projects since 2013.
Green has a strong interest in psychology and her project this year was titled, Gender Imbalance: The Influence of the Stereotype Threat on Women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math).
Her hypothesis was that women's test scores would be negatively impacted by belief that they are weaker in math and science.
Green recruited 259 college and university students to write science tests in three groups. First, a control group. For the second, she talked about women being weaker in the subject beforehand, expecting women to internalize those comments. When the results came in, they scored "significantly lower."
For her third group, Green went through a "self-affirmation" procedure with subjects.
"Self-affirmation is used on individuals with low self-confidence to help boost their self-esteem. So I created a procedure geared toward math and science abilities. And I asked them to list two skills they believed they possessed that pertained directly to math and science and a way in which they showed those skills in the past," she said.
After that, she found that women's test scores rose to being equal with men's.
"I believe it would be very beneficial to be in classrooms across Canada because it would help women achieve their fullest potential in math and science and it might increase the number of them entering STEM fields," Green said.
Representation matters as well, she said. Men are the ones who are portrayed as being logical and thoughtful.
"As young girls see more and more of them in these fields, they'll be more likely to pursue it as a career themselves."
As for herself, Green wants to become a human rights lawyer.
"I believe pretty passionately in all these different inequalities, not just in women but other groups as well."
"I believe pretty passionately in all these different inequalities, not just in women but other groups as well."NICOLE GREENGRADE 10 OLDS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT
