The Effect of Classroom Diversity on Conceptual Learning in Physics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hundreds of students are required to take introductory physics each year at our mid‐size Canadian university. These students enter the course with diverse educational histories and demographic characteristics that reflect the diversity of the large, metropolitan city that the university is located in. In this project, we investigate how students’ demographic and educational diversity is related to their conceptual learning in introductory university physics. Students’ learning outcomes in introductory sciences courses often impact their later learning in undergraduate science degree programs. As expected, we found that the completion of a senior high school physics course is positively related to students’ conceptual understanding of physics. The unexpected result was that gender remained a predictor of the students’ conceptual understanding, even when the completion of high school physics was accounted for. Interestingly, other demographic characteristics, such as students’ mother tongue and country of birth, seem not to matter. The results suggest that the impact of completing high school physics may extend far beyond the first year and that the gender gap continues to persist in SMET disciplines.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".