Why Don’T Girls Think They’Re Good At Physics? Recognition In A High School Classroom
2024-04
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Why Don’T Girls Think They’Re Good At Physics? Recognition In A High School Classroom
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2024-04
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Women, especially Black and Latina women, are marginalized in physics, including in high school classrooms. Recognition is one of the ways women and girls experience marginalization in physics. This dissertation is comprised of three distinct but related studies examining how students experience recognition in an AP Physics 1 classroom. The first study is a mixed-methods study examining students’ sense of self-efficacy using a sequential explanatory design. This study first examined the relationship between students’ self-assessments and actual quiz scores and found no statistically significant difference between boys and girls in this class. I next used open-ended self-assessment prompts and semi-structured student interviews to identity classroom experiences that students felt contributed to or detracted from their sense of self-efficacy. While boys and girls talked about many experiences, such as the way labs in the course were structured, in very similar ways, only boys clearly discussed receiving consistent recognition from their peers, leading to the research questions in the subsequent studies. The second study examined how students provided each other with recognition, what kinds of contributions they recognized, and how peer recognition interacted with students’ sense of physics identity using small group video and student interviews. Recognition fell into two major categories: explicit, where students directly recognized a peer, and implicit, where the recognition was provided indirectly. Explicit recognition was primarily connected to correct answers while implicit recognition was connected to a much broader range of contributions. During interviews, when students discussed their personal physics identity, they primarily discussed correct answers and explicit recognition they had received, suggesting that their personal identity was primarily connected to explicit recognition. When discussing their conceptions of what it means to hold a physics identity, students referenced not only correct answers, but the much broader range of contributions connected to implicit recognition. They also described giving both explicit and implicit recognition. This suggests that students connected both categories of recognition to their conceptions of a physics identity. Third, I analyzed exchanges in which students positioned each other in terms of physics ability without directly referencing physics using video of a mixed-gender group and an all-boy group. The mixed-gender group engaged in many of these exchanges and primarily used them when the girl contributed a correct answer with the boys taking authoritative positions. Rather than providing the girl with recognition, these exchanges served to devalue her contribution. The all-boy group, by contrast, only had one of these exchanges and neither was clearly established as more authoritative. Together, these studies provide insights into the gendered dynamics of the recognition that students give and receive in physics classrooms with implications for instructional practice. There is a clear need for teachers to structure group work in ways that ensure all students are recognized by their peers for a wide range of contributions and to disrupt gendered patterns in the classroom.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. April 2024. Major: Education, Curriculum and Instruction. Advisor: Gillian Roehrig. 1 computer file (PDF); viii, 109 pages.
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