Gender differences in the Force Concept Inventory for different educational levels in the United Kingdom

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 compa...

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Autor principal:	Matthew Mears
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	American Physical Society 2019
Materias:	Special aspects of education LC8-6691 Physics QC1-999
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/50c8b95fc72648cba9cd39a66af951f1
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:50c8b95fc72648cba9cd39a66af951f12021-12-02T11:23:35ZGender differences in the Force Concept Inventory for different educational levels in the United Kingdom10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.15.0201352469-9896https://doaj.org/article/50c8b95fc72648cba9cd39a66af951f12019-10-01T00:00:00Zhttp://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.15.020135http://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.15.020135https://doaj.org/toc/2469-9896The 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.Matthew MearsAmerican Physical SocietyarticleSpecial aspects of educationLC8-6691PhysicsQC1-999ENPhysical Review Physics Education Research, Vol 15, Iss 2, p 020135 (2019)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	Special aspects of education LC8-6691 Physics QC1-999
spellingShingle	Special aspects of education LC8-6691 Physics QC1-999 Matthew Mears Gender differences in the Force Concept Inventory for different educational levels in the United Kingdom
description	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.
format	article
author	Matthew Mears
author_facet	Matthew Mears
author_sort	Matthew Mears
title	Gender differences in the Force Concept Inventory for different educational levels in the United Kingdom
title_short	Gender differences in the Force Concept Inventory for different educational levels in the United Kingdom
title_full	Gender differences in the Force Concept Inventory for different educational levels in the United Kingdom
title_fullStr	Gender differences in the Force Concept Inventory for different educational levels in the United Kingdom
title_full_unstemmed	Gender differences in the Force Concept Inventory for different educational levels in the United Kingdom
title_sort	gender differences in the force concept inventory for different educational levels in the united kingdom
publisher	American Physical Society
publishDate	2019
url	https://doaj.org/article/50c8b95fc72648cba9cd39a66af951f1
work_keys_str_mv	AT matthewmears genderdifferencesintheforceconceptinventoryfordifferenteducationallevelsintheunitedkingdom
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Gender differences in the Force Concept Inventory for different educational levels in the United Kingdom

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