Shower, O. G. (1982). Sixth graders' perception of stereotyped story characters. Reading Improvement, 19, 117-122.

A study by Kingston and Lovelace (1979) was replicated to determine if sixth grade students, after five years in school, have continued to perceive males and females in stereotyped sex roles. Story segments, in which the protagonist was written in first person, was read to the 30 subjects. The rewritten stories were later used with proper names replacing the "I" in each story. It had been hypothesized that drawings of the characters in the four story segments would show the males larger and brighter colored than the females. The findings however did not support the hypothesis. Instead it was found that the foils height (male or female) was greater than the protagonist. The width was an even split between the foil and protagonist, agains sex of the characters was not an issue. It was also found that the colors used did not distinguish between the male and female for any of the four story segments. These results indicate that sixth graders did not necessarily perceive boys as larger than girls. This implies that if sex role stereotypes have developed prior to school entrance, they have partially diminished by grade six.