  Several prior studies in introductory physics have found a gender gap on
conceptual assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and the
Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) with male students
performing better than female students. Moreover, prior studies in the context
of mathematics have also found that activation of a negative stereotype about a
group can lead to deteriorated performance of the stereotyped group. Here, we
describe two studies in which we investigated the impact of interventions on
the gender gap on the FCI and CSEM in large introductory physics courses at a
large research university. In the first study, we investigated whether asking
introductory physics students to indicate their gender immediately before
taking the CSEM increased the gender gap compared to students who were not
asked for this information. We found no difference in performance between male
and female students in the two conditions. In the second study, conducted with
several thousand introductory physics students, we investigated the prevalence
of the belief that men generally perform better in physics than women and the
extent to which this belief is correlated with the performance of both female
and male students on the FCI and the CSEM in introductory physics courses. We
found that at the end of the year-long calculus-based introductory physics
sequence, in which female students are significantly underrepresented, agreeing
with a gender stereotype was correlated negatively with the performance of
female students on the conceptual physics surveys. The fact that female
students who agreed with the gender stereotype performed worse than female
students who disagreed with it at the end of the year-long calculus-based
physics course may partly be due to an increased stereotype threat that female
students who agree with the stereotype may experience in this course.
