Relationship of Individual Student Normalized Learning Gains in Mechanics with Gender , High - School Physics , and Pretest Scores on Mathematics and Spatial Visualization

I. INTRODUCTION. In a previous survey (Hake 1998a,b; 2002a) the correlation of the average normalized gain on the FCI (Hestenes et al. 1992, Halloun et al. 1995) or Mechanics Diagnostic (Halloun & Hestenes 1985a,b) test for 62 courses with % was a very low +0.02. However, open research questions remain as to the existence of "hidden variables," a term evidently first used in an educational sense by Meltzer (2001). Hidden variables that might influence FCI 's are, to this question is to investigate the relationship of individual student learning gains g with such variables for single courses (Hake et al. 1994, Meltzer 2001), as is done below. One of the goals of such work is to discover student-profile characteristics or diagnostic tests that might alert teachers to potential low-g students. If such were known then corrective actions might be taken early in the course so as to improve its overall effectiveness.