Dam-o, P.; Gondek, J.; Karbowiak, M.; Wibig, T. Observation of the Effect of Gender on Children’s Concept of Motion; Sustainability Issue. Sustainability2018, 10, 3076.
Dam-o, P.; Gondek, J.; Karbowiak, M.; Wibig, T. Observation of the Effect of Gender on Children’s Concept of Motion; Sustainability Issue. Sustainability 2018, 10, 3076.
Dam-o, P.; Gondek, J.; Karbowiak, M.; Wibig, T. Observation of the Effect of Gender on Children’s Concept of Motion; Sustainability Issue. Sustainability2018, 10, 3076.
Dam-o, P.; Gondek, J.; Karbowiak, M.; Wibig, T. Observation of the Effect of Gender on Children’s Concept of Motion; Sustainability Issue. Sustainability 2018, 10, 3076.
Abstract
Determination of the parameters of the movement of surrounding objects, and in particular their speed, is one of the basic skills of a human being. The study of development of basic concepts of motion has been done for years with different methods and in different contexts. We have analyzed the effect of the physical/scientific image of the world introduced to children by school education and its long- and short-term cognitive consequences. Our studies showed that children differentiate the concept of speed into two more specific concepts: average speed and instantaneous velocity. In the present work we present how the gender context is superimposed on this general picture. We found that initial, genuine pre-school concept of speed of girls and boys is, on average, different. Our analysis shows also that this gender effect vanishes quickly together with the appearance of physical definitions of kinematical quantities in physics/science curricula. We discuss also methodological aspect of the statistical ‘gender gap’ measure and we calculated the gender effect chance probability, p-value, to be slightly less than 0.001. The importance of observed effect for the sustainable science teaching processes is discussed.
Copyright:
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