Female-friendly Physics First
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010135
A frequent feature on Physics Today‘s Facebook page is the commemoration of distinguished physicists’ birthdays. For Leon Lederman’s on 15 July, I noted the Nobel laureate’s discovery of the muon neutrino and his advocacy of the Physics First movement.
According to Lederman and his fellow Physics First advocates, the traditional order of teaching science in high school—biology, then chemistry, then physics—is back to front. Biology makes better sense if you already know chemistry and chemistry makes better sense if you already know physics.
The argument is persuasive, but not convincing. One reasonable justification for the traditional sequence of sciences is that biology requires less math than chemistry does, and chemistry requires less math than physics does. By following the traditional sequence, students broaden their knowledge of science as they deepen their knowledge of math. Moreover, one Facebook commenter* who’d experienced physics first said it hadn’t helped him with chemistry:
Actually for me that wasn’t true. In high school I took physics before chemistry and found that after I took chem much of what I struggled with in physics made more sense. Everyone is different.
Physics First popped into my mind this morning when I read a report from the AIP Statistical Research Center entitled “Female Students in High School Physics.” The report, which was written by Susan White and Casey Langer Tesfaye, opens with the encouraging news that between 1987 and 2009, the number of girls taking physics in US high schools rose 161%.
Unfortunately, the further one delves into the report, the grimmer it becomes. In 2009, the most recent year that White and Tesfaye looked at, girls accounted for 52% of students who took the least math-intensive physics course, conceptual physics, but they accounted for 32% of the students who took the most math-intensive physics course, Advanced Placement Physics C.
The numbers look even worse for girls when you learn how many of them go on to take and pass exams in AP Physics C: 61% of girls and 78% of boys took the mechanics section of AP Physics C. They passed those exams at roughly those same rates.
Mathematical rigor alone cannot explain girls’ lower particaption and success in AP Physics. According to White and Tesfaye’s analysis, almost as many girls as boys take AP Statistics and AP Calculus. My hunch is that AP Physics, being more mathematical than conceptual physics, is closer to the true nature of physics. Somehow, girls are being put off physics qua physics.
In discussing their study, White and Tesfaye ask
Did something in the earlier science curriculum discourage girls from more advanced physics? Or was it the general belief, widely embraced in our culture, that girls just don’t “do” hard sciences?
Given that physics is traditionally taught in the last two years of US high schools, that “something in the earlier science curriculum” might be an inaccurate, prejudged impression of physics rather than physics itself—which makes me wonder: Would more girls take AP Physics if they encountered physics earlier in their educational careers, maybe even as their first science course?
*Full disclosure: The commenter is my brother-in-law, Todd Poston, of Dallas, Texas.
