Students: Can Optimism Hurt Your Test Scores?
Image by iStockphoto
Think positive — but only if you’re a woman.
New research from Ben Gurion University of the Negev concludes that optimism boosts performance for female students. According to a study just made available to journalists, female students who were more optimistic were found to achieve significantly higher grades than their less optimistic course mates. Not so for male students.
Among men, those who were the most optimistic got the lowest grades. “Optimism in male students can lead to overconfidence or an attitude of ‘things will work out for the best,’” said one of the researchers Tamar Icekson. “So instead of studying enough for a test, they go out and have a barbecue the night before.”
By contrast, “for female students, optimism alone was beneficial because they’re naturally more conscientious than their male counterparts.” Icekson added. “Women have a lower self-esteem and so if they are not sure things will work out, then they study for the test.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
