  There is consistent and growing evidence that physics instruction
disproportionately harms female students' self-efficacy, their beliefs about
their ability to learn and do physics. This harm is problematic because
self-efficacy supports student learning and persistence. Nissen and Shemwell
(PhysRevPER, 12, 2016) investigated this harm using an in-the-moment measure of
student's self-efficacy states, which are dynamic judgments of one's ability to
succeed in the activity at hand. Their results indicated that female students
experienced much lower self-efficacy states in physics than male students did,
and that this gender difference did not occur in other STEM courses. A
limitation of their study was that it only investigated a single college
physics course. In order to further inform the generalizability of this
phenomenon I analyzed a large data set of 35,464 experiences from 4,816
students at 33 secondary schools collected between 1993 and 1997 that was
designed to be representative of high school students' experiences. Results
confirmed that there was a large gender difference in self-efficacy states in
high school physics courses and not in any other courses. The identification of
this phenomenon in two very different settings indicates that physics
instruction systemically harms female students' belief in their ability to
learn and do physics.
