Female students with A’s have similar physics self-efficacy as male students with C’s in introductory courses: A cause for alarm?

Self-efficacy can affect performance, career goals, and persistence. Prior studies show that female students have lower self-efficacy than male students in various science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domains, and the self-efficacy gap is a factor that contributes to the low representation of female students in STEM. However, prior research has not decoupled self-efficacy differences from performance differences. This study examines the self-efficacy of male and female students with similar performance in introductory physics courses and investigates whether gender gaps in self-efficacy are persistent across different instructors and course formats. Students filled out a self-efficacy in physics survey before physics 1, before physics 2, and at the end of physics 2. Students’ achievement was measured by their performance on research-based conceptual physics tests and course grades. The physics courses were taught by several instructors and varied in the type of pedagogy used, with some using a “flipped” format and others using a traditional, lecture-based format. We found that female students had lower self-efficacy than male students at all performance levels in both physics 1 and physics 2. The self-efficacy gaps continued to grow throughout the introductory physics course sequence, regardless of course format (i.e., traditional or flipped) and instructor. The findings suggest that female students’ self-efficacy was negatively impacted by their experiences in introductory physics courses, and this result is persistent across various instructors and course formats. Female students’ lower self-efficacy compared to similarly performing male students can result in detrimental short-term and long-term impacts.

Figure 1

Pre-self-efficacy (left column) and post-self-efficacy (right column) scores of female and male students binned by temporally proximal conceptual test score in physics 1 (top row) and physics 2 (bottom row) courses. Error bars represent standard error of the mean.

Figure 2

Post-self-efficacy scores of female and male students binned by course grade (A, B, C) in physics 1 (top) and physics 2 (bottom) courses. Error bars represent standard error of the mean.

Figure 3

The relative contributions of performance and biased perception to the post-self-efficacy gender gap in each course.

Figure 4

Gender standardized coefficients (${\beta }_1$ values) for different instructors and class types in physics 1 (top row) and physics 2 (bottom row) courses. Darker and lighter bars represent flipped and traditional physics courses, respectively. Error bars represent standard error of the ${\beta }_1$ values.