Measuring and reducing the gender gap in students’ performance among non-Physics majors in an Introductory Physics Laboratory

Physics educators commonly refer to the apparent gender gap in performance among their students. However, this is usually based on anecdotal experiences derived from their courses. While there is no rigorous evidence to support these ideas, they are still present in many Physics departments worldwide and are reinforced by the gender distribution among different non-Physics majors. For example, engineering students (mostly males), are expected to perform better in Physics courses than students from Biology or Pre-med majors (mostly females). To test the existence of a gender gap in students’ performance, a quasi-experiment was designed and executed in a first Physics course at a US University. Participants were undergrads of two majors: (1) engineering, and (2) biology and pre-med, enrolled in an introductory physics lab course. Treatment groups of each major were exposed to a pedagogy based on the integration of theory and experiment. Results showed that while the gender gap was evident in the control group, the treatment group significantly reduced the differences between males and females within and between majors. This encourages further research to understand the reasons behind the measured gender gap and to identify more strategies to reduce it through innovative pedagogies.