Developing a Magnetism Conceptual Survey and Assessing Gender Differences in Student Understanding of Magnetism

TL;DR

This paper presents the development of a magnetism conceptual survey and investigates gender differences in student understanding, revealing gender disparities in calculus-based courses but not in algebra-based courses.

Contribution

It introduces a research-based magnetism survey and examines gender performance differences in different physics course formats.

Findings

No gender difference on pre-test in either course type.

Female students scored lower than males on post-test in calculus-based courses.

No significant gender difference in algebra-based courses.

Abstract

We discuss the development of a research-based conceptual multiple-choice survey related to magnetism. We also discuss the use of the survey to investigate gender differences in students' difficulties with concepts related to magnetism. We find that while there was no gender difference on the pre-test, female students performed significantly worse than male students when the survey was given as a post-test in traditionally taught calculus-based introductory physics courses (similar results in both the regular and honors versions of the course). In the algebra-based courses, the performance of the female students and the male students has no statistical difference in the pre-test or the post-test.