Scientific attitudes: gender differences, impact on physics scores and choices to study physics at higher levels among pre-college STEM students

ABSTRACT

Scholars have suggested that student non-cognitive factors, such as attitudes, have contributed to the gender gap in STEM. Gender has been under investigation for students’ attitudes towards science/physics, but student scientific attitudes (SA) have meagre exploration. This study examined the relationships between gender, SA (in terms of rationality, open-mindedness, confidence in the scientific method, curiosity, and aversion to superstition), physics scores (PS), and students who chose to study college physics. The study involved 641 K12 pre-college STEM students in India. The results revealed that girls have lower PS and SA scores than boys. The PS and SA have a strong correlation for girls compared to boys. SA accounts for 34.8% of the variation in PS for girls and 18.1% for boys, including a further higher contribution from students’ aversion to superstitions than other SA under study. We consider that the students’ socio-cultural dynamics might have influenced these results. SA also impact students’ choice to study physics after K12, though gender is not a factor. Our study supports SA as another important aspect towards achieving gender parity in STEM learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientific attitudes
• STEM education
• choice to study physics

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the constructive comments/suggestions from two anonymous reviewers, which helped us to improve and clarify the manuscript.

Data availability

Data is available at the following address https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16538508.v1

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.