Abstract
A persistent ‘gender penalty’ in exam performance disproportionately impacts women in large introductory science courses, where exam grades generally account for the majority of the students’ assessment of learning. Previous work in introductory biology demonstrates that some social psychological factors may underlie these gender penalties, including test anxiety and interest in course content. In this paper, we examine the extent that gender predicts performance across disciplines, and investigate social psychological factors that mediate performance. We also examine whether a gender penalty persists beyond introductory courses, and can be observed in more advanced upper division science courses. We ran analyses (1) across two colleges at a single institution: the College of Biological Sciences and the College of Science and Engineering (i.e., physics, chemistry, materials science, math); and (2) across introductory lower division courses and advanced upper division courses, or those that require a prerequisite. We affirm that exams have disparate impacts based on student gender at the introductory level, with female students underperforming relative to male students. We did not observe these exam gender penalties in upper division courses, suggesting that women are either being ‘weeded out’ at the introductory level, or ‘warming to’ timed examinations. Additionally, results from mediation analyses show that across disciplines and divisions, for women only, test anxiety negatively influences exam performance.
Highlights
To effectively promote student groups who have been historically underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), we need to provide students from different backgrounds equal opportunities to perform in these fields
We studied how underlying social psychological mechanisms that have been previously studied in the context of student performance in STEM courses change over time, and how they function as mediators of the gender gap in exam performance
We address two multi-part questions as they apply across different fields and divisions: 1. Gender gap in different assessment methods (RQ1): (A) Do we observe a gender gap in performance across different assessment methods? (B) To what extent can these potential gender gaps be explained by incoming preparation?
Summary
To effectively promote student groups who have been historically underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), we need to provide students from different backgrounds equal opportunities to perform in these fields. Demographic gaps in performance in higher education can be partly explained by demographic gaps in student incoming preparation (Sun, 2017; Salehi et al, 2019) They can be due to biased education structures such as methods used to assess student performance in STEM fields (Stanger-Hall, 2012), introductory gateway courses that “weed out” students (Mervis, 2010, 2011), traditional uninterrupted lectures rather than high-structure active learning methods (Haak et al, 2011; Ballen et al, 2017b), feelings of exclusion (Hurtado and Ruiz, 2012), stereotype threat (Steele, 1997; Cohen et al, 2006), and discrimination (Milkman et al, 2015). Anxiety did not impact male student performance or female student performance on nonexam assessments such as homework and in-class assignments
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