Does stereotype threat affect female students’ performance in introductory physics?

Abstract

Many prior studies have found a gender gap 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. Studies in other disciplines have also found that activation of a negative stereotype about a group, or stereotype threat, for example, asking test-takers to indicate their ethnicity, can lead to poorer performance of the stereotyped group. However, in a previous study, we found that in the context of a standardized conceptual physics assessment, asking introductory physics students to indicate their gender before answering the questions did not affect female or male students’ performance compared to an equivalent group not asked for such information. Here, we investigate differences in male and female students’ performance both on a pre-test (before instruction) and on a post-test (after traditional instruction in relevant concepts) on the CSEM survey in a large-enrollment introductory physics course. In this study students were either provided information that the performance on prior administration of the CSEM survey has been found to be gender neutral or were not told anything about the gender neutrality before taking the CSEM survey. We also report on another study of over 1,100 introductory physics students that investigated the prevalence of the belief that men generally perform better in physics than women and the extent to which this belief was correlated with the performance of both female and male students on the FCI and CSEM before and after instruction.