Well done to James Trefil and Sarah Swartz for raising the issue of the effect of problem wording and context on the performance of women in physics.

Laura McCullough (http://uwstout.academia.edu/LauraMcCullough) has done some interesting work in this area, too, including reworking questions on the force-concept inventory to bias them toward women. Women tend to prefer contexts that are beneficial to society, or at least nondestructive. In a high school textbook I coauthored, I modified the traditional plane-drops-a-bomb question to a plane drops a food-aid parcel. Small change, big effect. Furthermore, in my work with students from disadvantaged backgrounds, I find that issues that tend to affect predominantly women from advantaged communities also affect men from disadvantaged backgrounds. Presumably, that is at least in part because many of these students, male and female, lack exposure to the contexts and general knowledge assumed by textbook authors and instructors.

Swartz asked, “What is a banked curve?” I once wrote a question about a boy kicking a soccer ball into a pond for a class of South African students for whom English was the second language. Some students asked me, “What is a pond?” In South Africa, questions involving snow and icy roads are unimaginable. For children from deep rural areas, bungee jumping, spacecraft, and slam dunks are incomprehensible.

So-called context-rich questions often require students to read long sentences containing a great deal of explanation of the context. For speakers of English as a second language, such questions are harder than questions that are short, direct, and simply written. Students may fail because they cannot extract the physics from the lengthy question statement. In a physics course I once taught for Zulu-speaking students, I devoted a whole class session to helping them do that extraction, with the assistance of an applied linguist. I am convinced that problem wording and context have a great influence on nontraditional students’ willingness and ability to do physics.