Student diversity and the persistence of gender effects on conceptual physics learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At Ryerson University every year, hundreds of science and engineering students enroll into required introductory physics courses. The diverse educational histories and demographic characteristics of these students reflect the diversity of Toronto as an urban metropolis and Canada more generally. In this study, we investigate how students’ demographic and educational diversity affects their conceptual learning in introductory university physics. As expected, we found that the completion of a senior high school physics course is positively related to students’ initial conceptual understanding of physics. The unexpected result was that gender remained a predictor of the students’ initial conceptual understanding, even when the completion of high school physics was accounted for. Other demographic characteristics, such as students’ mother tongue and country of birth, seem not to matter. Students’ initial conceptual understanding was the strongest predictor of students’ course learning outcomes, which makes understanding students’ initial differences particularly important. Since learning outcomes in introductory science courses often impact students’ later success in undergraduate science degree programs, these results suggest that the impact of completing high school physics may extend far beyond the first year. The persistence of initial gender differences in students’ learning outcomes remains an ongoing concern.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".