In response to our article (Roychoudhury, Tippins, & Nichols, 1995), McArthur and Wellner make several points against the appropriateness of group work as a pedagogic approach. While we agree with McArthur and Wellner that instructional strategies should be based on "educational goals, rather than on gender," we would like to underscore the necessity of a genderinclusive nature for educational goals and pedagogic approaches. We highlighted the key point that science educators need to develop pedagogic approaches that take into account the diverse life experiences of learners.
Despite a plethora of studies affirming gender inequity as problematic in classrooms and offering various solutions for dealing with this problem, it continues to plague science classrooms, particularly from middle school onward. While we do not purport to generalize our interpretations (refer to page 916 of our article) of student participation in our study, and leave it for the readers to decide whether the theme of our paper is relevant to their contexts, we do suggest that studies such as ours need to be undertaken to provide new lenses to observe and understand the differential participation of males and females in science.
Differential participation of individuals, rooted in epistemologic disjuncture, is subtle and may not be perceptible to instructors of young boys and girls, because gender is constructed mostly through social interactions, expectations, norms, and representations. Thus, genderrelated propensities might not become apparent until later years of an individual's life. This probably accounts for the difference between our observation of undergraduate students and the two respondents' observation of young girls and boys. Furthermore, we contend the validity of the allusions made by McArthur and Wellner, in their citation of Tavris, that group methods tend to protect academically weaker students. Our findings contrast with such an interpretation as in our course, the academically high achievers, who needed no help from others, commended the use of group method (see p. 913 of our article). We hope that in addition to being aware of the pitfalls of group learning, McArthur and Wellner are conversant with features such as individual accountability that guard against self-protection and require all members of a group to contribute equally.