Since it seems to be a good day for posting things that may be unwise, I’ll throw this out. In the middle of a news release dump from the APS, there’s a story about a new study of physics pedagogy that found gender gaps persisting in spite of “active learning” techniques. This is in contrast to a previous study from Harvard.
What moves me to post, though, is a sentence from the middle of the news squib:
On the bright side, both male and female students performed better in the interactive classes than students laboring in traditional lecture-based classes. Overall, however, male students benefited as much or more than females, which doesn’t help to narrow gender-based performance gaps.
That’s actually a pretty good consolation prize, and deserves better than an “Oh, by the way…” aside in the middle of a downer article.
Ultimately, the goal of physics classes in college is to teach students about physics. And, by and large, we do a piss-poor job of it, regardless of the configuration of their genetalia. Only 3% of students who take introductory physics take another class in the subject, and the majority of students who take introductory physics don’t actually learn very much. It’s well documented that a traditional introductory class produces an increase of about 15% in the students’ knowledge of basic mechanics concepts, which is pretty weak.
Given that context, I’ll take an across-the-board increase in scores. Yes, it would be wonderful if we could close the gender gap in performance, but given that both men and women are starting from a very low level, a technique that raises everybody’s scores is a major improvement, whether there’s any differential gender benefit or not.
Now, I understand the emphasis on the gender results in the paper itself: within the physics education community, the idea that active learning classes improve student performance is just not news. We’ve known that for years, so the new result here is that the Colorado study didn’t see the same gender-specific result seen at Harvard.
The news release, though, makes it sound like the fact that these techniques didn’t close the gender gap is a major failure. “Ooops– it worked for men, too. Well, onto the scrap heap with that idea…” That’s a ridiculous position to take– it’s a negative result for the particular study being done in this paper, but it’s a positive result for physics as a whole. The news release is going to a larger group than just the community of physics education researchers, and I wish they’d taken a different slant– someone who isn’t normally aware of the field might read this story and say “Well, active learning didn’t help with the gender gap, so there’s no point in trying it here,” and that would be the wrong message to take away.
This does not (I hasten to emphasize, probably in vain) mean that I think research aimed at closing the gender gap is illegitimate, or not worth pursuing. There should be lots of effort directed toward finding ways to close the gap by improving the performance of women in physics classes– it’s a significant problem, and deserves serious attention.
Until such time as we find teaching methods that accomplish that goal, though, a method that produces an across-the-board increase in student understanding of physics is a pretty good first step. Since that is, after all, what we’re trying to accomplish….