Students Who Learn About Famous Scientists' Struggles Do Better In School

If we want to attract young people to the sciences, we’ll need to show them that even people like Einstein and the Curies struggled.

Excerpt: "Classrooms lionize scientific greats like Albert Einstein—but the extent to which they do so may be harmful for today’s students.

A new study suggests that students who learn about famous scientists’ struggles will perform significantly better in their science classes than students who are just given a laundry list of the same scientists’ intellectual accomplishments.

The researchers studied a group of 400 freshmen and sophomores from the Bronx and Harlem. Some of the students read about scientists’ accomplishments, as they might read in a traditional textbook—while two other groups of students read about celebrated scientists’ personal struggles and professional hurdles, respectively. Here’s Melissa Dahl, writing for Science of Us:

After six weeks, the kids who’d read about these obstacles tended to improve their grades in their science classes, and the kids with the lowest scores at the start of the study benefited the most. Those in the control group—who read the typical, tidied-up version of the scientists’ accomplishments—were also more likely to tell the researchers that they believed Einstein and Curie had a natural talent for science.

In other words, the students who read about Einstein’s and Curie’s complicated lives full of tireless nights and unceasing challenges were much more likely to feel motivated to learn. The effect was especially strong for low-performing students, as the researchers noted in their paper , published in the Journal of Educational Psychology:"