Understanding gender differences in STEM: Evidence from college applications✰

Delaney, Judith; Devereux, Paul J.

doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2019.06.002

Cited by 78 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Our findings are in line with the study of Paul and Hlanganipai (2014) who investigated probability misconceptions in secondary school students and reported that the males outperformed females. Some previous studies have shown that among the STEM students, males do better in mathematics than females (Delaney & Devereux, 2019;Ro & Loya, 2015), differently from our finding regarding third year students. Our finding is in line with the study of Hyde and Mertz (2009), who, through analysis of massive amounts of data, showed that females have reached parity with males in mathematics performance.…”

Section: Students' Test Score and Factorscontrasting

confidence: 99%

Evidence of probability misconception in engineering students—why even an inaccurate explanation is better than no explanation

2021

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Background In the rapidly changing industrial environment and job market, engineering profession requires a vast body of skills, one of them being decision making under uncertainty. Knowing that misunderstanding of probability concepts can lead to wrong decisions, the main objective of this study is to investigate the presence of probability misconceptions among undergraduate students of electrical engineering. Five misconceptions were investigated: insensitivity to sample size, base rate neglected, misconception of chance, illusory correlation, and biases in the evaluation of conjunctive and disjunctive events. The study was conducted with 587 students who attended bachelor schools of electrical engineering at two universities in Serbia. The presence of misconceptions was tested using multiple-choice tasks. This study also introduces a novel perspective, which is reflected in examination of the correlation between students’ explanations of given answers and their test scores. Results The results of this study show that electrical engineering students are, susceptible to misconceptions in probability reasoning. Although future engineers from the sample population were most successful in avoiding misconceptions of chance, only 35% of examinees were able to provide a meaningful explanation. Analysis of students’ explanations, revealed that in many cases majority of students were prone to common misconceptions. Among the sample population, significant percentage of students were unable to justify their own answers even when they selected the correct option. The results also indicate that formal education in probability and statistics did not significantly influence the test score. Conclusions Results of the present study indicate a need for further development of students’ deep understanding of probability concepts, as well as the need for the development of competencies that enable students to validate their answers. The study emphasizes the importance of answer explanations, since they allow us to discover whether students who mark the correct answer have some misconceptions or may be prone to some other kind of error. We found that the examinees who failed to explain their choices had much lower test scores than those who provided some explanation.

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Section: Students' Test Score and Factorscontrasting

confidence: 99%

Evidence of probability misconception in engineering students—why even an inaccurate explanation is better than no explanation

2021

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“…It is well established that there are large gender differences in preferences for field of study. Particular emphasis has been placed on females being much less likely to choose STEM fields in college (Delaney and Devereux, 2019;Speer, 2017;Card and Payne, 2017). We have verified that our findings do not simply result from a greater male preference for STEM -all our findings are robust to adding a control for whether the top ranked programme is in STEM, with just minor changes in the coefficient on female (Table 4).…”

Section: The Role Of Field Of Studysupporting

confidence: 71%

“…We also see in Table A2 that males do better than females in mathematics in the Leaving Certificate while females do better than males in English. While not reported in the table, there are also large differences in the subjects chosen by males and females for Leaving Certificate with, for example, males more likely to study physics and females more likely to study biology (Delaney and Devereux, 2019). These differences make clear that, in order to compare decision-making by gender, we need to control for a set of variables that capture the subject choices and subject grades achieved by students in the Leaving Certificate.…”

Section: Data and Institutional Detailsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender differences in college applications: Aspiration and risk management

Delaney

Devereux

2021

Economics of Education Review

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Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.

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“…For example, males outnumber females in Engineering and Technology fields, whereas occupations, such as medicine and life-sciences, are more gender balanced (Makarova, Aeschlimann, and Herzog 2019). Thus, like their international counterparts girls, who continue to study science at senior cycle in Irish schools, are more inclined to choose biology (Delaney and Devereux 2019) especially when the highly priced university courses they wish to pursue such as medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, physiotherapy and nursing all have a strong biology component. This is in line with Blickensta's (2005) findings that biology-related careers, which are more closely affiliated with caring, represent a femininity continuum of science disciplines.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Covid 19, school closures and the uptake of a digital assessment for learning pilot project during Ireland’s national lockdown

Judge

2021

Irish Educational Studies

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DALDIS is a three-year EU-funded Erasmus+ Project on Digital Assessment for Learning (2019)(2020)(2021)(2022) involving five European countries. DALDIS is pilot testing a digital assessment for learning solution focused on Science and Modern Foreign Language Learning in years 5-9. Underpinned by the Study Quest technology, which is designed to drive students' learning progression using well-designed question-sets and student feedback, DALDIS is built on the principle that formative assessment is one of the best methods to encourage student achievement. Although Assessment for Learning (AFL) using technology has great potential for learning, it is not widely used in Europe. As the project lead Ireland was responsible for the first adaptation of StudyQuest, known as JCQuest for its Junior Cycle science and French curriculum. Unexpectedly, the commencement of DALDIS coincided with school closures due to Covid-19 and this appears to have influenced the uptake in student usage of JCQuest to support online learning and exam preparation. This paper provides an insight into how students engaged with JCQuest, key usage patterns and types of devices used based on Google Analytics data during two crucial school closure periods during Ireland's pandemic.

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Understanding gender differences in STEM: Evidence from college applications✰

Cited by 78 publications

References 40 publications

Evidence of probability misconception in engineering students—why even an inaccurate explanation is better than no explanation

Evidence of probability misconception in engineering students—why even an inaccurate explanation is better than no explanation

Gender differences in college applications: Aspiration and risk management

Covid 19, school closures and the uptake of a digital assessment for learning pilot project during Ireland’s national lockdown

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