Sex difference in achievement in year 12 mathematics and non-routine problem solving

Thesis(M.A.)--University of Melbourne, 1993This thesis is the first study of sex difference in achievement in the new VCE Mathematics study in Victoria which was introduced for year 12 students in 1991. It is particularly concerned with sex difference in non-routine problem solving. There were new assessment tasks in the course: two "take home" tasks, an investigative project (CAT1) and a challenging problem (CAT2), a multiple choice test on facts and skills (CAT3) and an analysis task under test conditions (CAT4). The study was conducted in two parts: a population study of almost 37,000 year 12 mathematics students and an explanations survey designed to test twelve possible explanations taken from the literature, for sex difference in achievement in CAT2, involving 582 year 12 students. The study found that for students who had taken the same amount of mathematics in year 12, females on average performed better than males for total mathematics score, CATI, CAT2 and CAT3. Males performed better than females on CAT4 and were more highly represented in the top achievers for total mathematics and for each CAT. The higher proportion of males not submitting work is likely to have been a major factor for the sex difference in favour of females for students taking only one mathematics block in year 12. The explanation study was not able to find any conclusive evidence to explain a superior performance by females. It did however establish that females performed better than males on problems which had a real world context and males performed better than females on problems with a mathematical context only. There was no evidence that either sex was disadvantaged by sex bias in the context and there was no sex difference in the degree of familiarity. Females who reported that they used their knowledge of computers performed better than others