In his PhysLrnR post of 27 Jun 2005 18:38:02-0600 titled "research
article help," Rob Spencer wrote:
"I am looking for a research article (or journal entry perhaps) that studied
the performance of all-girl groups vs. mixed gender groups. I have not
been successful with Google or archive searches."
2. Some of the references in "Gender Issues in Physics/Science
Education (GIPSE) - Some Annotated References" [Mallow & Hake (2002)]
might be helpful.
3. Laws et al. (1999) [included in Mallow & Hake (2002)] discuss the
cognitive and affective impacts on females of an "activity based"
introductory physics program ("Workshop Physics" at Dickinson
College).
4. I discussed [Hake (2002)] the gender disparity in Force Concept
Inventory (FCI) normalized learning gains (higher on average for
males) in an "Interactive Engagement" mechanics course. There I wrote
[bracketed by lines "HHHHH. . . ."; see that article for references
other than Mallow & Hake (2002)]:
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A salient result of the present research is the demonstration of
gender disparity in normalized gains [Table I (row 2) and Fig. 1].
The effect size d = 0.68 is not far from the d = 0.8 that Cohen
loosely designates as "large." However, this gender effect size is
eclipsed by the very large d = 2.43 (Hake 2002a) for interactive
engagement vs traditional courses in the survey of Hake (1998a,b).
[Seven reasons for this unusually large d are given in Hake (2002a).]
Thus, in my opinion, **effort to increase the degree of effective
interactive engagement for ALL students should probably take a higher
priority than effort to reduce gender disparity in FCI <g> values**,
even despite the deplorable gender inequity in physics participation
(Mallow & Hake 2002).
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5. Fiona McDonnell (2005) has recently discussed the structural and
cultural aspects of high-school physics instruction that appear to
turn both females and males away from physics.
6. Paul Camp, in his PhysLrnR post of 6 Jul 2005 12:48:07-0400
mentioned articles by Sheila Tobias. There are about 10 Tobias
references in Mallow & Hake (2002). In the REFERENCES below I give
some online addenda to Camp's reference to "What Works for Women in
Undergraduate Physics?" [Whitten et al. (2003)].
REFERENCES
Hake, R.R. 2002. "Relationship of Individual Student Normalized
Learning Gains in Mechanics with Gender, High-School Physics, and
Pretest Scores on Mathematics and Spatial Visualization," submitted
to the Physics Education Research Conference; Boise, Idaho; August
2002; online as ref. 22 at
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake>, or download directly by
clicking on <http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake/PERC2002h-Hake.pdf>
(220 KB).
Laws, P.W., P.J. Rosborough, & F.J. Poodry. 1999. "Women's responses
to an activity-based introductory physics program," Physics Education
Research Supplement to the Am. J. Phys. 67(7): S32-37.