f –efficacy in science. Self-efficacy is defined by O’Brien, Martinez-Pons & Kopala (1999) as ‘an individuals belief of how well he or she can successfully enact behaviour required to accomplish some task’. Self-confidence is a trait usually reported as being lower in females than males (Andre et al., 1999) and O’Brien, Martinez-Pons & Kopala (1999) have found that a deficit in self-efficacy in mathematics is a key contributor to their lowered career interest in science and engineering, and they suggest that in order to overcome this it may be necessary to rethink the way that mathematics is taught.Stewart (1991) also discussed girls’ confidence in relation to science. Girls appear to show a greater degree of learned helplessness when it comes to mathematics and science and Stewart (1991) suggests that this is in direct response to the teacher’s behaviour. It was found that although girls appeared to receive a lot less criticism from teachers, when they did receive criticism it was in most cases directed at the intellectual aspects of their work, whereas with boys it was mostly directed at neatness or instruction-following. It was also found that there was a tendency for boys to be praised for the intellectual aspects of their work more frequently than girls. Thus it is not surprising that girls tend to attribute success in science to good luck and failure to lack of effort. (Stewart, 1991) It is perhaps for this reason that girls tend to be more influenced than boys by the perceived difficulty of subjects (Johnston, 1984). Silins and Zarins (1987) found that girls perceived science as being one of the hardest subjects to learn and Johnston (1984) found that whilst boys also perceived science as being hard, they were less likely to let this affect their subject choices.When considering all these influences, it is not surprising that girls continue to be underrepresented in the physical sciences....
