Concept inventories are widely used in physics education research, yet numerous studies show that concept inventories measure dramatically different learning gains in different demographic groups. Prior studies show that the performance gaps between demographic groups are already present in their preinstruction responses, suggesting that the…

In this study, we investigated female and male students' sense of belonging and their academic performance measured by the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and course grades in a calculus-based introductory physics course at a large public university in the United States. We find that compared to male students, female students' sense of belonging was…

Over the course of instruction, not only does most introductory physics students' content knowledge evolve but their attitudes and approaches to problem solving are also likely to evolve. This change may depend on many factors including the curricula and pedagogies used, the degree to which instruction actively engages students in the learning…

Over the last decade, the "gender gap" in physics conceptual inventory scores has been extensively studied by the physics education research community. Researchers have identified many factors that influence the overall differences in post-test scores between men and women. More recently, it has been shown that the Force Concept…

This thesis explores impact of evidence-based active-engagement courses (EBAE) on student achievement and gender gap in introductory physics. The first study is about the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of the physics teaching assistants (TAs) at identifying introductory students' difficulties using the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and…