Gendered Perceptions of Groupmate Contributions to Physics Lab Roles

While students are expected to use equipment, analyze data, and take notes within their lab courses, prior research has found gendered differences in who takes on these tasks. Other research has found that women students receive less classmate recognition than men for being good at physics. This study builds upon this prior work by investigating whether there are gender inequities in how students recognize classmate contributions to lab tasks. We compare men and women's perceptions of their own contributions and their group mates' contributions to tasks within introductory physics lab courses that utilize partner agreements. We asked students multiple times across the semester how much they perceived each group member contributed to three lab tasks. We used hierarchical linear modeling to compare the effects of gender on student perceptions and control for random effects from repeated observations. These results inform whether future interventions seeking to improve gender equity in physics lab group work should explicitly target student perceptions.