Abstract—Although extensive research has emphasized gender differences in empathy, the results have been mixed, and there is limited understanding of how these differences are reflected in students’ empathetic awareness within their research contexts. To fill in the gap, we apply narrative pedagogy using storytelling, analogies, and metaphors in a design thinking course for 236 science master students at China’s first interdisciplinary research university, and examine its effect on their empathy awareness in multi-modal presentation works through sentiment discourse analysis. Using Natural Language Process method with a Naive Bayes Classifier, we then conducted a discourse analysis of the 3 sequential multi-modal tasks and found that male students tended to use more words in the 3-minute video report than female students. Different from the previous research, there was hardly any marginal difference detected between male and female students in terms of emotional awareness. Both female and male students showed similar levels of emotional expression before empathy training, and both genders showed significant improvement after training. These results provide new insights into gender differences in empathy awareness among research students and highlight the effectiveness of innovative pedagogical approaches to promote empathy. 
 

Keywords—gender difference, storytelling, analogy, metaphor, science communication, Natural Language Process (NLP) 

Cite: Lan Luo and Qingqing Xing, "Gender Differences in the Use of Storytelling, Analogy, and Metaphor to Promote Empathy among Science Graduate Students," International Journal of Learning and Teaching, Vol. 10, No. 5, pp. 613-619, 2024.

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