✍ Scribed by Graham R. Parslow
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Gender determines the way we dress, the way we think, and the way we feel. In everyday matters, there are clear polarities to the preferences and behaviors of the two sexes. I am a male, so you can expect me to be biased toward believing that males will do better in tasks involving technology. For a decade, my department has issued a CD-ROM of multimedia for home use to our second year class of around 400 students. There are always people who cannot get the CD to work as intended and thereby cannot record assessable results on their home computer. When these people have trouble, they can knock on my door and ask for ways to fix the problem and also to get an extension of the due date for the blocks of tutorials to be completed. I checked my records over the years and found that three times as many females as males have been recorded in my extension and problems book. Are females genuinely less technically competent, or are they perhaps disadvantaged by inequalities in our society or simply more prepared to declare that they have a problem? More importantly, is there a gender bias in the learning outcomes? I know that the majority of the top students in my medical classes are male and that the majority of the top students in my science classes are female. Many factors, such as the nature of the course, can confound simple conclusions. In the many studies of class behavior at the tertiary level, I recall that very few observers included gender, so I was pleased to encounter an informative paper on this subject.
Lina Markauskaite [1] has studied students at the University of Sydney (Australia) who are preparing to become school teachers. Her literature review cites papers from the 1990s that largely see computers as a male domain, but this is now seen as old stereotyping of gender differences and not applicable in the current age of information and communication technology (ICT). 1 Multiple studies cited by Markauskaite, mostly from the 1990s, state that boys were more interested in ICT than girls, were heavier users of computers, had more positive attitudes about computers, and outperformed girls in ICT. Entering the new millennium, the new technologies became an indispensable aspect of learning, work, and everyday life equally relevant to both genders. Markauskaite cites recent papers implying that "gender gaps in the educational sector are disappearing and, probably, do not have any practical importance for the
📜 SIMILAR VOLUMES