Gender Fairness within the Force Concept Inventory
Adrienne Traxler, Rachel Henderson, John Stewart, Gay Stewart, Alexis, Papak, Rebecca Lindell

TL;DR
This study investigates gender bias in the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), revealing that removing biased items significantly reduces gender gaps and suggesting improvements for fair assessment in physics education.
Contribution
It identifies gender-biased items in the FCI using multiple psychometric methods and demonstrates that removing these items reduces gender disparities.
Findings
Six items are unfair to women, two favor women.
Removing biased items halves the gender gap.
Multiple psychometric methods confirm item bias.
Abstract
Research on the test structure of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has largely ignored gender, and research on FCI gender effects (often reported as "gender gaps") has seldom interrogated the structure of the test. These rarely-crossed streams of research leave open the possibility that the FCI may not be structurally valid across genders, particularly since many reported results come from calculus-based courses where 75% or more of the students are men. We examine the FCI considering both psychometrics and gender disaggregation (while acknowledging this as a binary simplification), and find several problematic questions whose removal decreases the apparent gender gap. We analyze three samples (total , ) looking for gender asymmetries using Classical Test Theory, Item Response Theory, and Differential Item Functioning. The combination of these methods…
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