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Discussing underrepresentation as a means to facilitating female students’ physics identity development

2016; American Physical Society; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1103/physrevphyseducres.12.020101

2469-9896

Robynne Lock, Zahra Hazari,

Science Education and Pedagogy

Despite the fact that approximately half of high school physics students are female, only 21% of physics bachelor's degrees are awarded to women. In a previous study, drawn from a national survey of college students in introductory English courses, five factors commonly proposed to positively impact female students' choice of a physical science career were tested using multivariate matching methods. The only factor found to have a positive effect was the explicit discussion of the underrepresentation of women in physics. In order to explore this further, a case study of the classes of one teacher reported to discuss the underrepresentation of women was conducted. Two classroom underrepresentation discussions were recorded, students and teacher were interviewed, and relevant student work was collected. Analyzing the case study data using a figured worlds framework, we found that discussing the underrepresentation of women in science explicitly creates an opportunity for students' figured worlds of professional and school science to change, and facilitates challenging their own implicit assumptions about how the world functions. Subsequently, the norms in students' figured worlds may change or become less rigid allowing for a new openness to physics identity development amongst female students.Received 17 May 2016DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.12.020101This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasDiversity & inclusionProfessional TopicsK-12 studentsPhysics Education Research