Gender response to Einsteinian physics interventions in School

TL;DR

This study shows that Einsteinian physics interventions significantly improve students' understanding and attitudes towards physics, with notable gender effects where females start with lower attitudes but catch up to males after the program.

Contribution

It is the first to demonstrate gender-based attitude improvements in Einsteinian physics education across diverse age groups and cultures.

Findings

Females start with lower attitude scores than males.

Post-intervention, females' attitudes are comparable to males.

Interventions improve conceptual understanding across all groups.

Abstract

There is growing interest in the introduction of Einsteinian concepts of space, time, light and gravity across the entire school curriculum. We have developed intervention programs and measured their effectiveness in terms of student attitudes to physics and ability to understand the concepts with classes from Years 6 to 10. In all cases we observe significant levels of conceptual understanding and improvement in student attitudes, although the magnitude of the improvement depends on age group and program duration. This paper reports an unexpected outcome in regard to gender effects. We have compared male and female outcomes. In most cases, independent of age group, academic stream and culture (including one intervention in Indonesia), we find that females enter our programmes with substantially lower attitude scores than males, while on completion their attitudes are comparable to the boys. This provides a strong case for widespread implementation of Einsteinian conceptual learning across the school curriculum. We discuss possible reasons for this effect.