My experience has been that female students are simply more likely to follow the advice given them by professors. Prof says read the book, read my online lecture notes, and do all the practice assignments at the end of the chapter, they do it. The guys think "Screw you, what is in it for me?" Maybe, if they find the material interesting or have been convinced that it will be useful for getting a job or other desired goal, they will do it -- otherwise not. Years ago I was involved in trying to find predictors of who would fail in physics classes required for science majors. To our great surprise, all of our predictors were significantly related to the class performance of the female students, none was for the male students.

McCammon, S., Golden, J., & Wuensch, K. L. (1988). Predicting course performance in freshman and sophomore physics courses: Women are more predictable than men. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 25, 501-510.



Cheers,

Karl W.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Steele [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2010 8:25 PM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Subject: Re: [tips] 2 x 2 contingency table du jour

Jim Clark wrote:

B. Two interesting questions implied by Ken's data, given significant effects shown above.

B1.  Why aren't males more motivated to  complete such assignments?


I would like to follow up on this question.  The course is
Learning and the assignment follows up on a (longish) digression
on what happens after Watson leaves Hopkins and ends up with the
J. Walter Thompson agency.  The history/causality is murky here
but Watson pushes for a strategy that involves an appeal to the
emotions and a connection of the object to be sold to that
emotional state, very similar to Watson and Rayner (1920). (This,
of course, is a selling strategy of interest only to historians
and antiquarians.)

I analyze an ad (Ivory Soap, of course) to show its construction.

My point here is to illustrate that this assignment is considered
 "fun" by both men and women, and my assignment of credit is
very lenient.

So I consider Jim's question of why males don't complete such
assignments at the same percentage as women to be a an
interesting question.

Ken

I find tht international students are more likely to get assignmemts done
and follow advice and do not blame teachers for their grades.
American students occasionally act like "cry babies".
The smartest women students I have taught were from Maine,Vermont,and
New Hampshire.My worse students were from New York and Boston.

Michael "omnicentric"Sylvester,PhD
Daytona Beach,Canada


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