Girl-friendly high school physics is boy-friendly too
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010129
On the rare occasions that my wife shops for clothes at Nordstrom’s department store, she brings me along for sartorial advice. I don’t have to linger awkwardly amid the racks of women’s clothing while she tries on suits and other garments. For men who accompany female customers, Nordstrom provides a waiting area equipped with comfy chairs and a selection of men’s magazines.
Of course, women also make use of the comfy chairs. And the magazines on the coffee tables include women’s titles. Nordstrom’s waiting areas cater to both men and women.
The notion that looking after the interests of minorities benefits everybody popped into my mind yesterday when I read an opinion piece in the June newsletter of the American Physical Society. In that article, Marie-Claire Shanahan of the University of Alberta and Zahra Hazari of Clemson University ask whether efforts to redress the underrepresentation of women in science have achieved victory. Their answer in the case of physics is “not yet.”
Physicists are not put off by hard problems, including the underrepresentation of women. Even if not all physicists deem the underrepresentation problem as urgent and important, some of them are devising new approaches to tackle it.
I learned about one new approach from Shanahan and Hazari’s piece. Based at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the program Persistence Research in Science and Engineering (PRiSE ) aims to
examine the connection between the exposure of high school students to a variety of interventions and their later persistence in course-taking and selection of major for 7000 four-year and two-year college students nationwide, focusing deliberately upon predictors of persistence for women. This study has the capability to reveal and bolster the use of the most promising educational practices.
One finding that emerged from the PRiSE project surprised me. As you might expect, high school teachers who include cutting-edge physics in their classes, encourage discussion, and tie physics to the wider world were successful at promoting their students’ interest, ability, and confidence in physics. But those practices don’t benefit girls and boys equally. To quote Shanahan and Hazari:
Thus, sitting, on average, in the same types of physics classes, female students perceived less of a conceptual focus and less contextual relevance with their world than did their male counterparts, even though these associations were equally beneficial to the smaller number of females who did report them.
Physics is inherently conceptual. Its prime directive is to explain the universe in terms of abstract, general laws. Some boys and fewer girls “get” the conceptual nature of physics in their classrooms and enroll as physics majors. What about the rest of the boys and girls?
My hunch is that if the members of the PRiSE team—or anyone else—can discover a way to effectively teach the conceptual nature of physics to all girls, then not only might the number of female physics majors rise, but all nonphysics majors, males and females, will benefit from a greater understanding of physics.
