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Essay on Gender Learning Differences and Higher Education
Over the past decade, the differences between males and females have been highlighted in the media, based on such popular literature as, "Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus" (Gray, 1992), the television show of the same name, as well as the one-man play, by Rob Becker, "Defending the Caveman". Much of the information about the sexes that has been disseminated in pop culture appears to be based on sex role stereotyping, gender bias, or myth. The scope of this paper is to examine the scientific research on the differences between the sexes, particularly in regard to the brain and cognitive functioning in young people.
Among a vast number of studies of gender differences in past decades, the greatest milestone was undoubtedly Maccoby and Jacklin’s (1974) book, The Psychology of Sex Differences. With regard to gender differences in abilities, their meta-analytic results showed that:
- Girls excel in verbal memory, verbal skills and school performance, and
- Boys have greater ability at quantitative skills and spatial activities. Since that time, verbal, spatial and mathematical abilities have been seen as the most differentiated cognitive abilities between the genders, and thus have received the greatest attention by subsequent researchers in this field.
However, the magnitude of the gender differences in these three ability domains has been found to be inconsistent across studies. Despite the traditional belief that girls outperform boys in the verbal domain, researchers have found that "the verbal skills of boys have shown improvement since Maccoby and Jacklin's work was published. So that female advantages in this area are becoming less" (Seldin, Associates, 1990)
Based on their meta-analysis of 165 studies, it is concluded that there are no obvious gender differences in verbal ability, and that the type of verbal test makes a difference.................
