Maybe it’s something in the water.
Or maybe, as a recent study suggests, men and women might truly be from different planets when it comes to soaking up knowledge in a college setting.
A study in the fall 2001 edition of “The Journal of Higher Education” used data from yearly tests given to both genders to infer that men learn more during their college years than women.
The findings in “How Much Do Students Learn in College?” detailed the results of the College Basic Academic Subjects Examination, a test measuring knowledge gained in four subject areas throughout the college years.
In all subject areas, women’s scores from the time they entered college until graduation increased about one-third less than men’s totals. The test was administered to 19,000 students at 56 public and private colleges and universities in 13 states after each year of college.
In a society fascinated with any data furthering the divide between men and women, observers and commentators instantly looked at the numbers as evidence of a true gender gap – to the disdain of the study’s authors.
Ernest Pascarella, the study’s co-author and an education professor at the University of Iowa, expressed surprise at the reaction to the findings.
Pascarella said people shouldn’t concentrate only on the difference in gender scores and ignore the rest of the study.
“People have interpreted (the findings) as substantive (only) if they fit their ideas about education,” Pascarella said. “I’m a bit skeptical of that finding.”
Northwestern psychology Prof. Alice Eagly found Pascarella’s comment unexpected.
“The authors can’t have been completely surprised by the public’s interest,” she said. “There is nothing more interesting than gender.”
The authors of the study used college grades, ACT scores and race as a statistical control on their data. Eagly said the control lowered the women’s test scores as it accounted for women having higher grade point averages.
Overall, women earn higher grade point averages than men in college, with 61 percent of women earning above 3.0 as opposed to 49 percent of men, according to a study in “Education Statistics Quarterly.”
“The control on grades may have biased the data against the women,” said Eagly, after examining the statistical methods involved.
“What I would like to see is the comparison of the uncontrolled scores, especially without the control on grade point averages,” she said. “Women and men in general may have learned the same amount in college if the researchers had examined simple averages.”
While some women may feel more pressure to achieve in the classroom, Eagly also pointed to a difference in priorities to explain the study’s findings.
A survey of Northwestern’s class of 2004 indicates differences in the educational and personal goals of men and women.
Conducted by the University of California-Los Angeles’ Cooperative Institutional Research Program, the survey shows men are more likely to anticipate careers as engineers, doctors and businessmen while women are more likely to aspire to be educators and artists.
Because men are more interested in careers requiring graduate work in highly competitive settings, they may be more focused on high test scores, Eagly reasoned, accounting for the difference in the study.
But other students said the study’s gender gap may not come from scientific reasoning alone.
Physics major Jessie Cassada said testing variations among her peers are based on the tendency of men to rely more on simple common sense.
“I definitely think guys and girls think and approach tests differently,” said Cassada, a Weinberg junior. “Obviously, some of it is what you learn, but a lot of it has to do with common sense.”
