Believe that they can achieve: How teacher attitudes toward physics impact student outcomes

Abstract

To address the longstanding problem of underrepresentation of women in physics, we developed two classroom interventions that encourage womens’ future physics intentions. In testing these lessons in a larger study, we found variance in gains between student sub-populations across several teachers. This prompted the current mixed methods analysis to follow up on potential contextual factors leading to these differences, including social and economic setting of the school and student population characteristics, as well as teacher-level effects. We drew upon multiple sources of data collected from both teachers and students including teacher interviews, teacher and student open response surveys, and student artifacts from the lessons. In our preliminary analysis, we found that the broader social and economic environments did not appear to affect how students received the lessons; however, individual teacher implementation of the lessons did.