Mears, M. orcid.org/0000-0002-2664-642X (2019) Gender differences in the Force Concept Inventory for different educational levels in the United Kingdom. Physical Review Special Topics: Physics Education Research, 15 (2). 020135. ISSN 1554-9178
Abstract
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is widely used to investigate the effect of education level on conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics but has only recently been scrutinized for gender effects and retention. This study examines both the gender gap in first year physics undergraduates compared to the gap for nonphysicists and the FCI retention after three months. All participants were either studying or working at the University of Sheffield in the UK and had completed a similar compulsory level of secondary education. As expected the results show that a greater level of education in physics is associated with a larger average FCI score. However, further analysis shows that there exists a gender gap at all levels of education. The size of the effect of gender is quantified using Cohen’s d and ranges from 0.84 to 1.17 which indicates a large effect due to gender for all levels of education. Despite the FCI having been used as a tool to measure learning gains immediately following instruction in Newtonian mechanics there has been little work to investigate whether this increase in FCI score remains after some time has elapsed. Here the increase in FCI scores is found to remain increased after a three month absence of mechanics-related teaching, and that this retention of FCI scores is independent of gender. Despite this, the gender gap still remains large and statistically significant after the three month delay.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Physics and Astronomy (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 01 Oct 2019 11:35 |
Last Modified: | 05 Nov 2019 12:02 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | American Physical Society |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.15.020135 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:151310 |