The effects of the contexts of questions in assessment on the performance of boys and girls

Abstract

The present study investigates the effects of the contexts of questions in assessment on the performance of boys and girls. Three versions of Force Concept Inventory (FCI) were developed, each with decontextualiszed questions, male-familarized-context questions and femalefamilarized-context questions respectively. 119 Secondary Four science students in a secondary school in Hong Kong participate in the study. All students completed the decontextualised-FCI as a pre-test. The students were then divided into two halves according to their performance of the pre-test and gender so that the composition of marks and the average marks, and the proportion of girls and boys of the two groups were almost the same and. Five weeks after the pre-test, one group completed the male-familiarized-FCI while the other group completed the femalefamilarized-FCI. Paired t-tests were applied to compare the performance of girls and boys in the two groups for each question in the pre-test and post-test. This study shows that familiar contexts can help students activate appropriate schemas when the familiarity is in terms of what they have come across be it everyday life contexts or simplified contexts in textbooks. However, questions with too rich contextual data have a negative effect on students’ performance. For example, in problems dealing with ideal situations such as free falling, rich contextual data may distract students’ comprehension of the task and activate students’ schemas related to their common sense misconception rather than the learned correct concepts. Decontextualized problems may sometimes help students to consolidate some basic but abstract physical concepts, and facilitate them to bridge the concepts to the application of a wide range of different situations. The importance of decontextualized problems cannot be neglected. The findings of this study may inform teachers, textbook writers and examination setters to strike a balance between the amount of contextualized and decontextualized problems.