By Dr Richard Walding, Griffith University
June 5, 2018 (revised March 2024)
The term “gender balanced” graces the back cover of many educational publications, and the first three editions of my Oxford University Press resource New Century Senior Physics make such a claim. The text has been sold in Queensland over the past 23 years, with some sold overseas to English-medium schools in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and China. As I have a keen interest in gender differences in the sciences, I have often wondered what students made of the claim ‘gender balanced’ in those countries, especially in rural areas.
The opportunity to find out whether gender differences, which I had studied in Australia in the past, were mirrored in a different culture arose during a program in which 66 science education professionals undertook studies at Griffith University in Brisbane as part of a Bangladesh government-supported program. Education lecturers, professors and principals from teacher training colleges and high school technical training institutes in Bangladesh visited Australia for an eight-week program of lectures, workshops, tutorials, excursions, private study and cultural exchange run by the university. I took various lectures and workshops including “gender differences in science education” tutorials.
The background to my interest in gender differences extends back to my earlier doctoral studies on sex differences in chemistry problem-solving at Griffith University (Walding, 2002). I was stimulated to make this my PhD topic after the Governor of Queensland, Sir Walter Campbell, was a guest at the official opening of the new Moreton Bay College laboratories. He visited my Year 12 Physics class and whispered an aside about girls and physics. It puzzled me for some time and thus began my doctoral studies.
Factors often cited as influencing achievement on classroom tests are the students’ interest in the topics being tested, and their prior experiences and knowledge deriving from their interests. As Tobias (1994) commented: “It is almost a truism that people know more about topics related to their interests than they do about others.” If boys and girls differ in their interests and associated knowledge, then tests that draw on that knowledge are likely to produce sex differences in their outcomes.
As part of my research, I developed a 72-item “science-related incidental knowledge” survey testing students’ familiarity with a range of contexts found in chemistry and physics exams.
Just over 1000 male and female senior chemistry and physics students throughout Queensland undertook the survey, which allowed me to categorise the items that girls were more familiar with, and those that boys were more familiar with. This was calculated as a “sex difference impact score” for each item, which was the percentage of boys getting the question correct minus the percentage of girls getting the question correct, along with the sex difference effect size.
The survey aimed to remove the problem of relying on the truthfulness of students responding to questions about their experiences by assessing incidental knowledge directly. For example, it would be expected that boys and girls who express interest and experience in certain activities should be familiar with the features (that is, the “knowledge”) of such activities. A person who claims interest and experience with cars should know an approximate tyre pressure; a person who claims experience with cooking should know the name of some cooking oils starting with the letter “s”. The results showed conclusively that boys and girls had many common interests, but also many differing interests that would have an impact on their physics knowledge. Boys were found to perform better in tests in which the themes included automobiles, tools and space, while girls performed better in tests relating to food, pets and flowers. Boys and girls performed equally well on questions with topics of metals, gases and dinosaurs.
With the encouragement of one of the Bangladesh participants at Griffith University, Ms Jesmin Naher, we decided to run scaled-down versions of the tests on students in Bangladesh. The test material was translated into Bangla and Jesmin tested students as part of her work at the Teachers Training College, Dhaka.
A total of 134 students (56 boys and 78 girls) were surveyed from seven schools in rural and city areas.
The question with the biggest sex difference favouring boys was “What is the voltage of an AA torch battery?”, followed by “Can a ball bounce higher than where it was dropped from?”. The questions most favouring girls were “How can you make flowers last longer in a vase of water?”, and “Is the vegetable crisper usually at the top or bottom of a refrigerator?”.
When we compared the effect sizes between Queensland students and Bangladesh students on the same questions we found a large correlation. This enabled us to make the claim that sex differences present in the incidental knowledge students bring to science classes in Bangladesh are similar to those brought to class by Australian students. The term “gender balanced” means the same thing in both countries.
Due to the similarities between Australian and Bangladeshi students, it seems no less likely that student performance on formal science assessment in Bangladesh will be influenced by their science-related incidental knowledge. Encouraging boys and girls to explore a wider range of contexts, both formally and informally, and in domains typically classified as “for boys” or “for girls’, and exploring a context they find interesting in further depth, seems likely to prepare them better for contextualised assessment.
Dr Richard Walding is a former physics teacher at Moreton Bay College, Brisbane, and a research fellow at Griffith University. The fourth edition of his senior physics text is soon to be published by OUP, learn more here.
Tobias, S. (1994). Interest, prior knowledge and learning. Review of Educational Research. 64, 37-44.
Walding, R. R. (2002). Sex Differences in Chemistry Problem Solving. Doctoral Dissertation, Griffith University, Australia.
