Is agreeing with a gender stereotype correlated with the performance of female students in introductory physics?

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Is agreeing with a gender stereotype correlated with the performance of female students in introductory physics?

Alexandru Maries, Nafis I. Karim, and Chandralekha Singh

Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 14, 020119 – Published 15 November 2018

Abstract

Several prior studies in introductory physics have found a gender gap, i.e., a difference between male and female students’ performance on conceptual assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) with male students performing better than female students. Moreover, prior studies in the context of mathematics have also found that activation of a negative stereotype about a group or stereotype threat, e.g., asking test takers to indicate their ethnicity before taking a test, can lead to deteriorated performance of the stereotyped group. Here, we describe two studies in which we investigated the impact of interventions on the gender gap on the FCI and CSEM in large (more than 100 students) introductory physics courses at a large research university. In the first study, we investigated whether asking introductory physics students to indicate their gender immediately before taking the CSEM increased the gender gap compared to students who were not asked for this information. We found no difference in performance between male and female students in the two conditions. In the second study, which was conducted with several thousand introductory physics students, we investigated the prevalence of the belief that men generally perform better in physics than women and the extent to which this belief is correlated with the performance of both female and male students on the FCI and the CSEM in algebra-based and calculus-based physics courses. We found that at the end of the year-long calculus-based introductory physics sequence, in which female students are significantly underrepresented, agreeing with a gender stereotype was correlated negatively with the performance of female students on the conceptual physics surveys. The fact that female students who agreed with the gender stereotype performed worse than female students who disagreed with it at the end of the year-long calculus-based physics course may partly be due to an increased stereotype threat that female students who agree with the stereotype may experience in this course in which they are severely underrepresented.

Received 23 June 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.14.020119

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Concepts & principles Diversity & inclusion

Physics Education Research

Authors & Affiliations

Alexandru Maries¹, Nafis I. Karim², and Chandralekha Singh²

¹Department of Physics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221, USA
²Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260, USA

Article Text

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Issue

Vol. 14, Iss. 2 — July - December 2018

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Images

Figure 1
Female and male students’ pretest and post-test performance on the CSEM depending on the testing condition. The $p$ values are obtained using a $t$ test and $d$ refers to the effect size (Cohen’s $d$ [53]). The comparisons for the post-test have also been done via a nonparametric test due to small sample sizes, the Mann-Whitney U test [53], and the $p$ values obtained were 0.320 (female students) and 0.975 (male students). The error bars represent standard error.
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Figure 2
FCI performance of algebra-based female or male students who agreed or disagreed with the stereotype. The $p$ values ( $p$ ) and effect sizes ( $d$ ) were obtained when comparing the average performance of female or male students who agreed with that of female or male students who disagreed with the stereotype. These students answered the stereotype question after taking the FCI. The numbers on the bars represent the number of students in each group (e.g., 60 female students agreed with the stereotype in the pretest) and the error bars represent standard errors.
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Figure 3
CSEM performance of algebra-based female or male students who agreed or disagreed with the stereotype. The $p$ values ( $p$ ) and effect sizes ( $d$ ) were obtained when comparing the average performance of female or male students who agreed with that of female or male students who disagreed with the stereotype. These students answered the stereotype question after taking the FCI. The numbers on the bars represent the number of students in each group (e.g., 61 female students agreed with the stereotype in the pretest) and the error bars represent standard errors.
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Figure 4
FCI performance of calculus-based female or male students who agreed or disagreed with the stereotype. The $p$ values ( $p$ ) and effect sizes ( $d$ ) were obtained when comparing the average performance of female or male students who agreed with that of female or male students who disagreed with the stereotype. These students answered the stereotype question after taking the FCI. The numbers on the bars represent the number of students in each group (e.g., 19 female students agreed with the stereotype in the pretest) and the error bars represent standard errors.
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Figure 5
CSEM performance of calculus-based female or male students who agreed or disagreed with the stereotype. The $p$ values ( $p$ ) and effect sizes ( $d$ ) were obtained when comparing the average performance of female or male students who agreed with that of female or male students who disagreed with the stereotype. These students answered the stereotype question after taking the FCI. The numbers on the bars represent the number of students in each group (e.g., 20 female students agreed with the stereotype in the pretest) and the error bars represent standard errors.
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Figure 6
FCI performance of calculus-based female or male students who agreed or disagreed with the stereotype. The $p$ values ( $p$ ) and effect sizes ( $d$ ) were obtained when comparing the average performance of female or male students who agreed with that of female or male students who disagreed with the stereotype. These students answered the stereotype question before taking the FCI. The numbers on the bars represent the number of students in each group (e.g., 35 female students agreed with the stereotype in the pretest) and the error bars represent standard errors. There was a total of 917 students included in these data.
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