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    Gender response to Einsteinian physics interventions in school

    Access Status
    Fulltext not available
    Authors
    Kaur, T.
    Blair, D.
    Choudhary, R.K.
    Dua, Y.S.
    Foppoli, A.
    Treagust, David
    Zadnik, Marjan
    Date
    2020
    Type
    Journal Article
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Citation
    Kaur, T. and Blair, D. and Choudhary, R.K. and Dua, Y.S. and Foppoli, A. and Treagust, D. and Zadnik, M. 2020. Gender response to Einsteinian physics interventions in school. Physics Education. 55 (3).
    Source Title
    Physics Education
    DOI
    10.1088/1361-6552/ab764d
    ISSN
    0031-9120
    Faculty
    Faculty of Humanities
    Faculty of Science and Engineering
    School
    School of Education
    School of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences (EECMS)
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/80815
    Collection
    • Curtin Research Publications
    Abstract

    © 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd.

    There is growing interest in the introduction of Einsteinian concepts of space, time, light and gravity across the entire school curriculum. We have developed an educational programme named 'Einstein-First', which focuses on teaching Einsteinian concepts by using simple models and analogies. To test the effectiveness of these models and analogies in terms of student attitudes to physics and ability to understand the concepts, various short and long interventions were conducted. These interventions were run with Years 6-10 academically talented and average IQ students. 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 programme duration. This paper reports an unexpected outcome with regards 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 female students enter our programmes with substantially lower attitude scores than males, while upon the completion of the programme, their attitudes are comparable to the boys. We discuss possible reasons for this effect. The overall results of students' conceptual understanding and attitudes from different interventions provide evidence that Einsteinian physics can be taught to high school students.

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