"I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it." - Lord Brabazon

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How Do Male and Female Students Approach Learning at NUS?

"Motive refers to the reason why students approach learning tasks and their studies, while strategy refers to the methods and habits they engage in to accomplish the task. Surface motives include fear of failure, or wanting just to obtain a paper qualification, and may drive students to employ such surface strategies as memorising learning material without first comprehending it. Deep motives, on the other hand, entail an intrinsic interest in the subject and a desire for understanding per se, which usually drives students to deep strategies like taking the initiative to find out more about a topic and seeing interrelationships among different concepts.

In addition to deep and surface approaches, Biggs also defined a third: the achieving approach. The achievement-motivated student is driven by competition with peers for the highest marks. As such, achieving strategies are engaged, such as: choosing modules that the student feels confident in, and studying material deeply insofar as it is pertinent to the examination...

On average, males scored higher than females: 3.56 (S.D.=.74) vs. 3.34 (S.D.=.67) respectively. A stepwise regression confirmed that gender is a significant predictor of CAP (adjusted-R2=.021, F=23.261, p<.001) and that gender differences in CAP are not due to differences in age (R2-change=.003, F-change=3.206, n.s.). However, it should be noted that the size of this gender effect is rather small...

Across genders, one-way ANOVAs revealed that males scored slightly higher than females on achieving motives (F=7.033, p<.01), although this effect was small. Males also scored slightly higher than females on deep strategies (F=10.362, p<.001)...

Males scored higher on the Abstract Conceptualisation scale, indicating a preference for logical thinking and rational evaluation, which are deep strategies; they were also found to excel in impersonal learning situations emphasising theory and systematic analysis (Severiens & Ten Dam, 1994). In contrast, female students using a deep approach (identified as ‘comprehension approach’) tend to look for personal connections and relevance (identified as ‘elaborative processing’) with learning material (Meyer et al., 1994).

These two findings could explain why female NUS students score lower on deep strategies, since they may find it harder to relate some course material to their personal experiences...

Finally, it is surprising to note that those who scored the highest on just deep motives or strategies performed no better than those who scored the highest on just surface motives or strategies, since deep learning is supposed to be a fundamental goal of education...

Males were more likely than females to engage the following deep strategies: thinking of real-life applications of subject material, and drawing links between previous knowledge and new information...

It was suggested earlier that female students may encounter difficulties with subjects that are not perceived as being personally relevant to them. To address this need for personal connection with subject material, instruction can be designed to create engaging experiences with course content. Examples include talks or seminars by renowned females in respective fields; role-play exercises [an example is described in Sivan et al., (2000)]; or even spending some time to introduce course material as a personal story...

The findings reported here are based on first-year students at NUS. It has been observed elsewhere that students tend to move toward a more surface approach to learning as they continue in their studies, and that gender differences become more apparent over the years at University"


Good luck role-playing an engineering problem.

Also interesting:

Learning Goals and Styles by Gender—A Study of NUS Students

"Compared with male students, female students also scored higher on socially oriented goals. It is further noted that the individually and socially based performance goals are positively correlated thus, lending support to the notion that female students obtain grades for socially oriented purposes instead of seeing grades as an achievement or an end in itself."