The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is one of the research-based assessments established by the physics education research community to measure students’ understanding of Newtonian mechanics. Former works have often recorded the notion of gendered mean FCI scores favoring male students notably in the North American (NA) based studies. Nevertheless, these performance gaps remain inconclusive and unexplored outside the NA context. This paper aims to fill this gap by meta-analyzing the mean FCI scores between gender based on the existing physics education research literature internationally. We analyzed the magnitude and direction on the mean FCI scores between gender based on primary international studies published over the last two decades. We also explored the moderating impact of international study characteristics on the meta-analytic findings by performing a subgroup analysis to study the different study regions stratified by two subgroups (NA vs non-NA authors). Thirty-eight studies reporting the mean FCI scores by gender were included in the present meta-analysis. We employed Hedges’ $g$ statistic to estimate to what degree the mean FCI scores may be different between male and female students on each study. Under a random effects model, we meta-analyzed the findings and conducted a subgroup analysis to answer the research questions. In summary, our meta-analysis indicated a significantly positive and moderate amount of gendered mean FCI scores in favor of male students both in NA- and non-NA based regions, and the performance gaps were wider in the NA-based studies. Suggestions are discussed while interpreting the mean FCI scores between gender for teaching, learning, and forthcoming studies.

中文翻译：

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使用国际研究的随机效应荟萃分析探索力量概念清单中的性别差异

力概念量表（FCI）是物理教育研究界建立的基于研究的评估之一，旨在衡量学生对牛顿力学的理解。以前的作品经常记录性别平均 FCI 分数对男性学生有利的概念，尤其是在北美 (NA) 的研究中。然而，这些性能差距仍然没有定论，并且在 NA 范围之外尚未得到探索。本文旨在根据国际上现有的物理教育研究文献，通过对性别之间的平均 FCI 分数进行荟萃分析来填补这一空白。我们根据过去二十年发表的主要国际研究，分析了性别之间 FCI 平均分的大小和方向。我们还通过进行亚组分析来研究由两个亚组（NA 与非 NA 作者）分层的不同研究区域，探讨了国际研究特征对荟萃分析结果的调节影响。本荟萃分析中纳入了 38 项按性别报告平均 FCI 分数的研究。我们雇用了赫奇斯$G$统计数据来估计每项研究中男女学生的平均 FCI 分数可能存在多大程度的差异。在随机效应模型下，我们对研究结果进行了荟萃分析，并进行了亚组分析来回答研究问题。总之，我们的荟萃分析表明，在基于 NA 和非 NA 的地区，性别平均 FCI 分数显着为正且中等，有利于男学生，并且基于 NA 的研究中的表现差距更大。在解释教学、学习和即将进行的研究的性别之间的平均 FCI 分数时，讨论了建议。