Male Under-performance in Undergraduate Engineering Mathematical Courses: Causes and Solution Strategy

TL;DR

This study investigates the underperformance of male students in undergraduate engineering math courses, identifies study time as a key factor, and proposes instructor strategies to address gender performance disparities.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence of gender-based performance differences and highlights the importance of targeted interventions and ongoing micro-level research.

Findings

Significant performance gap between males and females in calculus courses

Study time outside class significantly affects gender performance disparity

Proposed short-term solutions for instructors to mitigate gender performance gaps

Abstract

There has been an increasing trend of females performing better than males academically across the mathematical engineering courses. To confirm this assumption, final marks of two independent samples of students from Calculus courses across all fields within Engineering at a local university of UAE are considered. A two-sample t-test indicates a significant difference in the performance between the two genders. Accordingly, a survey was designed to identify factors that may yield to this scenario. Analysis of the survey found that the time spend studying outside the classroom is a statistically significant factor contributing to the disparity between the gender performances. Based on these results, we propose immediate short-term solutions that can be applied by instructors to address this issue. This study advocates the need of continuous research at micro level to identify gender-based student performance variance. Such researches can assist in immediate intervention thereby leading to the bridging of such a gap.