This synthesis begins with an examination of the key findings of each paper, from which I proceed to draw connections between these findings, concluding this section with a summary of the main findings and what this piece of research tells us about gender and learning electricity. In this section, I will refer to the papers outlined as chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7.
Chapter 4: Gender differences in conceptual thinking amongst technology teacher trainees
This chapter provides insight into what conceptual difficulties students have on entry into a design and technology course. This paper had a quantitative emphasis where differences in performance in the diagnostic phase of the project which are recorded according to the overarching categories of gender, level of advantage in schooling and whether or not the students had opted to take physical science to the end of high school.
Three variables were considered in a statistical analysis using t-tests to determine whether or not there was a significant difference between the means of each of the groups tested. This was done at the start of the start of teaching intervention. It was found that there were significant differences based on gender, but not on how much science students learned prior to coming to university and also not on the relative educational advantage of their schooling. The significance tests were conducted on the performance on two diagnostic tests that were administered at the beginning of the study. The second test interestingly yielded no significant differences between
genders, kind of schooling (whether advantaged or disadvantaged) and whether or not
the students had studied science to the end of their high school. All students
performed equally poorly. In hindsight, this was to be expected, since the test items looked for models of current that were advanced from the unipolar model of current.
It seems that for this cohort of student, thinking about circuits hinged on whether or not they used the unipolar model.
The first four questions of the first test predicted quite clearly the kind of model that students used when interpreting circuit diagrams. These four questions differentiated between those students who used the unipolar model and those who did not. The fact that there is a difference in performance between advantaged males and females in the first four questions in the category that did not do science at high school suggests that schooling is not a factor in determining conceptual understanding in this case.
Proceeding from the assumption that there is no difference in academic ability
between the male and female groups (this is accepted since all students registered for this course gained a university exemption and were enrolled for university study which in South Africa puts them in the top 10% of academic achievement (Perry &
Fleish, 2006)), this difference in achievement can be explained through socialisation and the gendered way electrical knowledge is perceived as being "male", an issue I will discuss later when I examine the next two papers.
The data also tells us that for the category of students who have not done science, there is a difference in performance between advantaged and disadvantaged male students only. This is not true for the same categories of students who had taken science, suggesting that firstly, schooling does have an effect on conceptual models used and also, even if the schools are underperforming, ta.king physical science helps develop scientific models.
Generally speaking however, gender is identified as the most significant factor in determining performance on the first test, with males outperforming females. What is an unexpected result is the lack of effect the quality of schooling had on the
development of scientific thinking about circuits and also the lack of effect the taking of science had on the development of scientific conceptual frameworks. The literature
points to the level of educational advantage as being a significant factor affecting performance (Perry & Fleisch, 2006). However, whether or not a student used the unipolar model of thinking in responding to these diagnostic test items does not seem to be influenced by level of educational disadvantage in this study. Similarly, taking physical science to the end of school, as well as whether or not they had actually connected any circuits in their pre-university education appears not to have any influence on the model of electric current used for the students in this cohort. It appears that the most important factor in determining the development of scientific models of circuits is gender. Given the history of schooling in South Africa, one might have expected the relative level of educational disadvantage to have been a greater influence than gender. This could be an indication that few of the students gained much knowledge of electricity at school, but that the male students learned about electrical circuits from home, where they might have played more with electrical components. This is however speculative.
The paper also outlines the results of correlations between the initial pre-tests and the final assessments in terms of gender reveal further interesting results. The coefficients calculated for this are low ( < 0.5) indicating that the pre-tests do not have substantial predictive powers for the examination score and the Project mark. This is not
surprising and in fact is somewhat encouraging as it shows that the students have learned something in the course. This is supported by the fact that the advantaged females managed to perform as well as advantaged males on the house project.
In this paper, the analysis and interpretation of the data painted a picture of a major influence of gender on patterns of thinking when interpreting simple circuit diagrams.
This has implications for instructional design as well as for further research, which will be discussed later.