Preprint
Article

Observation of the Effect of Gender on Children’s Concept of Motion; Sustainability Issue

Altmetrics

Downloads

309

Views

237

Comments

0

A peer-reviewed article of this preprint also exists.

Submitted:

26 August 2018

Posted:

27 August 2018

You are already at the latest version

Alerts
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.
Keywords: 
Subject: Social Sciences  -   Education
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
Prerpints.org logo

Preprints.org is a free preprint server supported by MDPI in Basel, Switzerland.

Subscribe

© 2024 MDPI (Basel, Switzerland) unless otherwise stated