Equity investigation of attitudinal shifts in introductory physics

We report on seven years of attitudinal data using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey from University Modeling Instruction (UMI) sections of introductory physics at Florida International University. University Modeling Instruction is a curricular and pedagogical transformation of introductory university physics that engages students in building and testing conceptual models in an integrated lab and lecture learning environment. This work expands upon previous studies that reported consistently positive attitude shifts in UMI courses; here, we disaggregate the data by gender and ethnicity to look for any disparities in the pattern of favorable shifts. We find that women and students from statistically underrepresented ethnic groups have gains that are comparable to those of men and students from well-represented ethnic groups on this attitudinal measure, and that this result holds even when interaction effects of gender and ethnicity are included. We conclude with suggestions for future work in UMI courses and for attitudinal equity investigations generally. We encourage researchers to expand their scope beyond simple performance gaps when considering equity concerns, and to avoid relying on a single measure to evaluate student success. Finally, we conjecture that students’ social and academic networks are one means by which attitudinal and efficacy beliefs about the course are propagated.

Figure 1

Overall favorable average CLASS scores for Modeling Instruction sections. Bars show standard error of the mean.

Figure 2

Average shift in overall favorable percentage CLASS score, with bars showing standard error of the mean. Shifts are shown overall and then disaggregated by gender (male or female) and ethnic representation (statistically represented or statistically underrepresented).

Figure 3

Effect sizes of disaggregated groups. In all cases, differences between group means are at or below the threshold for small effect size, with error bars crossing the axis indicating no meaningful effect.