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Students from different socioeconomic backgrounds exhibit persistent gaps in test scores, gaps that can translate into unequal educational and labor-market outcomes later in life. In many assessments, performance reflects not only what…
Recent studies provide evidence that social constructivist pedagogical methods such as active learning, interactive engagement, and inquiry-based learning, while pedagogically more effective, can enable inequities in the classroom. By…
Is physics education research based on a representative sample of students? To answer this question we skimmed physics education research papers from three journals for the years 1970 - 2015 looking for the number of research subjects, the…
Societal biases are a major issue in school students' access to and interaction with science. Schools engagement programmes in science from universities, like independent research projects, which could try and tackle these problems are,…
In this study, we investigate student performance using grades and grade anomalies across periods before, during, and after COVID-19 remote instruction in courses for bioscience and health-related majors. Additionally, we explore gender…
Physics graduate teaching assistants (TAs) are often responsible for grading. Physics education research suggests that grading practices that place the burden of proof for explicating the problem solving process on students can help them…
It is widely agreed that exams must be fair; yet what this exactly means is not made clear. One may mean fairness of treatment, but this merely propagates the fairness or unfairness of pre-existing rules. Fairness of opportunity on the…
This research focuses on the experiences of seven undergraduate women who were majoring in physics in a medium-size physics department at a small liberal arts college. In the semi-structured, empathetic interviews we conducted, the women…
Identifying the relevant physics principles is a central component of problem solving. A major goal of most introductory physics courses is to help students discern the deep similarities between problems based upon the physics principles so…
In this study, headcounts of all personnel in Nobel Prize-winning labs were collected and sorted by gender. These results are used to determine gender representation of graduate students in elite institutions on the pipeline towards higher…
This article presents an overview, and recent history, of studies of gender gaps in the mathematically-intensive sciences. Included are several statistics about gender differences in science, and about public resources aimed at addressing…
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning can hinder them…
In this paper we put forth a model for physics course reform that uniquely uses proven, research-based active learning strategies to help students improve their physics knowledge and problem-solving skills. In this study, we compared the…
Reform documents advocate for innovative pedagogical strategies to enhance student learning. A key innovation is the integration of science and engineering practices through Engineering Design (ED)-based physics laboratory tasks, where…
The effect of class size on student learning has numerous policy implications and has been a major subject of conversation and research for decades. Despite this, few studies have been done on class size in the context of university…
Women and people of color remain dramatically underrepresented among computing faculty, and improvements in demographic diversity are slow and uneven. Effective diversification strategies depend on quantifying the correlates, causes, and…
We present results of a combined study from three UK universities where we investigate the existence and persistence of a performance gender gap in conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics. Using the Force Concept Inventory, we find…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than contexts, is considered a hallmark of expertise in physics problem solving. With inspiration from a classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser, we compared…
Engaging in meaningful collaborations with peers, both inside and outside the classroom, can greatly enhance students' understanding of physics and other STEM disciplines. We analyzed the characteristics of women and men who typically…
Reference classes in healthcare establish healthy norms, such as pediatric growth charts of height and weight, and are used to chart deviations from these norms which represent potential clinical risk. How the demographics of the reference…