Demographic gaps in physics retention and attainment: Myth and reality
Demographic gaps in physics retention and attainment: Myth and reality
Physics and Astronomy Colloquium
Date: Wednesday 16 January 2019
Time: 15:00 - 16:00
Venue: Kelvin Building, Lecture Theatre 257
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: Professor Sally Jordan (Open University)
Website: www.gla.ac.uk/schools/physics/research/colloquia/
Demographic gaps in retention and attainment mean that certain groups of students, e.g. those of particular gender, socio-economic group or ethnicity or with a disability, are considerably less likely to continue in their study of physics. This contributes to the “leaky pipeline” whereby the percentage of students and workers in particular demographic groups declines further and further. Various factors have been hypothesised as contributing to these discrepancies in attainment and the talk will start by outlining these factors, including the possibility that other “hidden variables” might be at play, the impact of a lack of self-confidence and an absence of appropriate role models, and the possibility that something in our teaching or assessment might favour particular demographic groups.
The talk will then focus on research at the Open University into variation between demographic groups (in particular gender) in engagement with different types of assessed tasks and features within the tasks (Dawkins et al., 2017; Hedgeland et al, 2018) as well as describing some recent findings into variation in decision-making behaviours.
References
Dawkins, H., Hedgeland, H. & Jordan, S. (2017). The impact of scaffolding and question structure on the gender gap. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 13, 020117.
Hedgeland, H., Dawkins, H. & Jordan, S. (2018). Investigating male bias in multiple choice questions: Contrasting formative and summative settings. European Journal of Physics, 39(5), 055704.