Gender Performance Gaps Across Different Assessment Methods and the Underlying Mechanisms: The Case of Incoming Preparation and Test Anxiety

Abstract

A persistent "gender penalty" in exam performance disproportionately impacts women in large introductory science courses, where exam grades generally account for the majority of the students' assessment of learning. Previous work in introductory biology demonstrates that some social psychological factors may underlie these gender penalties, including test anxiety and interest in course content. In this paper, we examine the extent that gender predicts performance across disciplines, and investigate social psychological factors that mediate performance. We also examine whether a gender penalty persists beyond introductory courses, and can be observed in more advanced upper division science courses. We ran analyses (1) across two colleges at a single institution: the College of Biological Sciences and the College of Science and Engineering (i.e., physics, chemistry, materials science, math); and (2) across introductory lower division courses and advanced upper division courses, or those that require a prerequisite. We affirm that exams have disparate impacts based on student gender at the introductory level, with female students underperforming relative to male students. We did not observe these exam gender penalties in upper division courses, suggesting that women are either being "weeded out" at the introductory level, or "warming to" timed examinations. Additionally, results from mediation analyses show that across disciplines and divisions, for women only, test anxiety negatively influences exam performance.

Gender gaps in the performance of Norwegian biology students: the roles of test anxiety and science confidence

“…The participants answered on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (not at all true of me) to 7 (very true of me). Cronbach's alpha level for the composite scale was acceptable (0.841)-a finding consistent with prior work , Salehi et al, 2019. Since this measure was not proximal to any course assessment, we consider it a measurement of trait rather than state anxiety (von der Embse et al, 2018).…”

“…By contrast, male students experienced less test anxiety than female students, and the anxiety they did experience seems unrelated to their class performance. These findings echo those of Ballen, Salehi and Cotner (2017) and Salehi et al (2019), which suggest that female students may be subject to interference by test anxiety, "which explains depressed performance by identifying factors that disturb the process of information recall and utilization during testing situations" (von der Embse et al, 2018, p. 484). The ultimate impact of test anxiety in this sample of students did not contribute to a performance gap between men and women.…”

“…Studies in the USA indicate that underrepresented minority and female students in STEM courses exhibit more test anxiety than do their nonminority or male counterparts (Payne, Smith and Payne, 1983;Hembree, 1988;Cassady and Johnson, 2002;Chapell et al, 2005;Ballen, Wieman, Salehi, Searle and Zamudio, 2017;von der Embse et al, 2018;Harris et al, 2019). Further, Ballen, Salehi and Cotner (2017) and Salehi et al (2019) have demonstrated that test anxiety in women-but not in men-is negatively and significantly associated with performance on exams, possibly explaining some of the performance gaps that have been documented in STEM fields (e.g., Koester, Grom and McKay, 2016;Matz et al, 2017). Harris et al (2019) found nominal gender differences in reported test anxiety and no gender-specific effect of test anxiety on performance in a large biology class, but there was no gender gap in performance in the class under study, and hence no problem to be solved.…”

Grades, grade component weighting, and demographic disparities in introductory physics

“…In fact, there are credible reasons to believe that decreasing the exam component grade weight could also facilitate more equitable student performance in addition to the purely mathematical shifts shown in this paper. For example, test anxiety has been documented to influence exam performance for women more than men in several STEM areas [24], and decreasing the weight of exams has been shown to reduce the gap between men and women in biology classes [31][32].…”

“…In a more comprehensive study, Salehi et al [24] investigated the grade component performance of ∼6000 students in STEM courses including biology, physical science, and engineering courses. They reported a significant and persistent "gender penalty" for women in exam performance in first-or second-year physical science or engineering courses.…”