Female In-Class Participation and Performance Increase with More Female Peers and/or a Female Instructor in Life Sciences Courses

Abstract

Female students are less likely to participate in class than male peers in life sciences courses of all levels, but they are more likely to participate in classrooms with more female peers. Female students earn lower final course grades than males in classes taught by a male instructor and/or when female students are in the minority.

Call on me! Undergraduates’ perceptions of voluntarily asking and answering questions in front of large‐enrollment science classes

“…With regard to answering questions, we did not find any gender differences. These results are partly consistent with findings from a recent observational study of 34 courses showing that men are more likely to participate in life sciences courses [34]. However, this study did not examine whether there were gender differences based on the unique practices of either asking or answering questions.…”

“…All of these studies highlight a gender gap in course participation, but vary with regard to what practices result in participation differences. These inconsistencies in results may be due to factors such as instructor gender, immediacy of the instructor, what percentage of the class was comprised of women, or general classroom climate; alternatively, these contrasting results could be due to differences in methodology PLOS ONE [21,34,[64][65][66][67]. While observational studies can provide more exact insight into student behavior, we chose to take a self-report approach to this study because it negated the need to interpret student identities from physical appearance alone (e.g.…”

“…Previous studies have suggested that certain social identity groups, including women, Black students, and students with anxiety, are less likely to participate in class [10][11][12][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. For instance, studies have shown that women are less likely to participate in wholeclass discussions in large-enrollment college science courses compared to men [10][11][12][31][32][33][34]. While researchers have suggested that women's lack of confidence and the "chilly" environment of college science classrooms may partially explain this gap, few studies have documented what factors explain these gender differences [35][36][37][38][39].…”

Reconsidering the Share of a Think–Pair–Share: Emerging Limitations, Alternatives, and Opportunities for Research

“…Reconsidering Share of Think-Pair-Share number of high-quality perspectives, but men dominated the whole-group sharing (Ernest et al, 2019). While this paper and others (e.g., Hsi and Hoadley, 1997;Eddy et al, 2014;Ballen et al, 2019;Aguillon et al, 2020;Bailey et al, 2020) specifically investigated gender, one wonders whether we would find similar trends suggesting systematic exclusion of high-quality ideas among other groups of students during the share portion of the think-pair-share.…”

Does the Match between Gender and Race of Graduate Teaching Assistants and Undergraduates Improve Student Performance in Introductory Biology?

“…Similarly, matching the gender of instructors and students results in better grades in a course, and students are less likely to drop the course (Hoffmann and Oreopoulous, 2009). The gender gap is reduced when female students are taught by female professors in math and science courses (Carrell et al, 2010;Bailey et al, 2020). With female instructors, female students are more confident and more likely to major in a given subject and persist into their second year (Robst et al, 1998;Bettinger and Long, 2005;Cotner et al, 2011).…”