The Influence of Gender Grouping on Female Students' Academic Engagement and Achievement in Engineering and Biology: A Case of Small Group Work in Design-based Learning (Work in Progress)

摘要

During the past 30 years, much attention has been drawn to the lack of women in STEM fields and the need to attract and retain them in these fields. In the relevant literature, the influence of gender grouping on variables such as female students' interest, self-efficacy, participation/engagement and achievement in STEM subjects has been a salient line of research. However, researchers have arrived at mixed findings. Also, while researchers have investigated the influence of gender grouping on female students in various instructional contexts, such as authentic engineering design tasks and collaborative learning in inquiry-based science, little has been done on design-based science (DBS), a relatively new pedagogy in which students construct scientific and engineering knowledge and problem-solving skills through designing components, artifacts or systems (Fortus, Krajcik, Dershimer, Marx, & Mamlok - Naaman, 2005). This paper is an effort to address these inadequacies.