Study finds no link between gender and physics course performance

A new information-pushed examine from Texas A&M College casts major question on the stereotype that male pupils complete superior than female pupils in science—specifically, physics.

A workforce of researchers in the Division of Physics and Astronomy analyzed both equally the midterm examination scores and remaining grades of extra than 10,000 Texas A&M pupils enrolled in four introductory physics programs across more than a decade, acquiring no proof that male learners consistently outperform woman learners in these classes.

The get the job done was led by Texas A&M physicist and Presidential Professor for Training Excellence Tatiana Erukhimova.

With assistance of almost two dozen departmental colleagues, the Texas A&M workforce designed a databases reflecting the finish introductory physics instructional spectrum: the calculus-based mostly study course sequence principally taken by engineering and physics majors as perfectly as the algebra-centered class sequence normally taken by everyday living sciences and premed majors. Their last examination shows that exam efficiency and last letter grades are mostly independent of student gender—results which Erukhimova suggests display promise in ending gender stereotypes that negatively affect so many female students in STEM.

“There is no regular craze on male pupils outperforming female learners,” Erukhimova mentioned. “Our review also gives new understanding about whether statistically sizeable dissimilarities based mostly on gender occurred on each and every exam for 4 introductory physics courses as the semesters ended up progressing—an location that has not earlier been researched, at the very least not for these types of a substantial data established and in excess of a lengthy period of time.”

When variances in closing letter grades for a course have been observed, there were being no persistent dissimilarities throughout that course’s examinations, she said. Conversely, when scientists found dissimilarities on tests in a program, they noticed no differences for final letter grades in that study course. In algebra-primarily based mechanics, they identified that woman college students outperformed male learners by a tiny but statistically important margin.

Their findings were printed not long ago in the American Bodily Culture journal Actual physical Overview Physics Education Research and highlighted in a linked Physics Journal Information and Commentary attribute.

Prior to the team’s research and other folks identical to it, Erukhimova states it has been an open up issue as to whether or not significant discrepancies involving male and woman pupils could display up on specific examinations but continue to be slight plenty of so as not to affect closing study course grades. For the earlier 25 a long time, the physics education and learning profession has relied on stock tests—optional surveys supposed to assess conceptual understanding and retention of critical physics concepts—to remedy that dilemma, properly substantiating the argument for gender variances in college student performance by default due to the fact adult men are likely to score increased on them.

“In the subject of physics schooling research, the the greater part of current experiments report a persistent gender gap with males undertaking appreciably much better than females on introductory mechanics notion inventory assessments, these types of as the Force Notion Inventory,” Erukhimova mentioned. “The success of prior studies on the gendered discrepancies in college student performance based mostly on class grades and examinations are much less dependable. When a number of experiments suggest that male college students outperform feminine learners on the examinations and system grades, other teams found no major gendered variation in college student functionality.”

The group applied several statistical analyses to the training course-amount knowledge they collected to examine irrespective of whether there were being overall performance discrepancies centered on student gender. To see how their findings aligned with college student perceptions, they also took a snapshot of the students’ thoughts about program efficiency, inclusion and contributions applying a limited anonymous questionnaire distributed to 1,600 students in slide 2019.

“Responses indicated that woman students had reduced notion of their functionality than their male classmates,” Erukhimova reported. “The only class wherever woman college students perceived their overall performance as equal to their male classmates was algebra-dependent mechanics, in which ladies typically outperform males. Furthermore, we uncovered that despite the fact that male and female pupils may possibly sense otherwise concerning their general performance and in-class contributions, they truly feel equally included in course.”

While the team’s study signifies distinct progress to Erukhimova, she acknowledges it will come with its very own limitations—the most major becoming that it depends exclusively on study course-level knowledge collected from college and does not assess the possible impression of non-academic variables on student effectiveness. In the long run, she states the team would like to hook up as significantly of their information established as possible to college-stage records to see how prior preparation, this kind of as SAT scores, influences these results.

“We think that all learners ought to have equal chances and likelihood for achievements in physics,” Erukhimova mentioned. “The outcomes of this function could assistance with battling the gender stereotype risk that negatively impacts so numerous female college students. By contributing to the physique of know-how about how gender relates to scholar functionality, we hope that our function, which would not have been attainable without having our colleagues’ details, can be another stage in dismantling the preconceived idea of a societal bias dependent on gender in physics.”