SOPHia Project School Visits Student Responses 2019-2022

All data was collected as part of the SOPHia Project: Science Outreach to Promote Physics to Female Students, run at the University of Limerick with support from the Department of Physics and Science Learning Centre at UL, the Institute of Physics and in years 2020-2022 also IT Carlow and Tait House Community Enterprise. 

This project aims to encourage more students, especially females, to take up physics as a Leaving Certificate subject through a mix of interventions. This dataset comes from the school visit programme whereby undergraduate students promote physics as interesting, fun and relevant to the lives of pupils in secondary schools. 

Data was collected with the use of pre-and post-intervention type questionnaires. In 2019-2020 and again in 2022 it was a classic pen-and-paper method, with the project team present in the room where the workshop was delivered. Data from 2021 was collected from students witnessing the school visit workshop online and answering the questions on their devices. Questions from all three questionnaires are part of the dataset. Approval from the relevant Ethics Committee at the University of Limerick has been obtained. Only answers from students who produced a signed consent form from their parent/ guardian are published in the dataset. 

Each questionnaire/ set of data consists of four parts: part A asks basic personal questions about the respondent, parts B and C ask questions about the respondent’s attitudes to physics with part B answered before and part C after the workshop. Question D asks about the usefulness of the intervention. Questionnaires are similar but not identical across the datasets. There are three files with data: collected between 2019 and 2020, in 2021 and in 2022 and three corresponding files with keys to the data and a Readme file.   

All data was collected as part of the SOPHia Project: Science Outreach to Promote Physics to Female Students, run at the University of Limerick with support from the Department of Physics and Science Learning Centre at UL, the Institute of Physics and in years 2020-2022 also IT Carlow and Tait House Community Enterprise. 

This project aims to encourage more students, especially females, to take up physics as a Leaving Certificate subject through a mix of interventions. This dataset comes from the school visit programme whereby undergraduate students promote physics as interesting, fun and relevant to the lives of pupils in secondary schools. 

Data was collected with the use of pre-and post-intervention type questionnaires. In 2019-2020 and again in 2022 it was a classic pen-and-paper method, with the project team present in the room where the workshop was delivered. Data from 2021 was collected from students witnessing the school visit workshop online and answering the questions on their devices. Questions from all three questionnaires are part of the dataset. Approval from the relevant Ethics Committee at the University of Limerick has been obtained. Only answers from students who produced a signed consent form from their parent/ guardian are published in the dataset. 

Each questionnaire/ set of data consists of four parts: part A asks basic personal questions about the respondent, parts B and C ask questions about the respondent’s attitudes to physics with part B answered before and part C after the workshop. Question D asks about the usefulness of the intervention. Questionnaires are similar but not identical across the datasets. There are three files with data: collected between 2019 and 2020, in 2021 and in 2022 and three corresponding files with keys to the data and a Readme file.