Male and female college students' learning styles differ: an opportunity for instructional diversification

College Student Journal, Sept, 2002 by Gabe Keri

Although males and females use different types of relationships to express social connectedness, Cross and Madson (1976b) discovered that women and men are motivated to social connectedness from varying perspectives. According to the authors, women develop connectedness through intimacy and physical proximity, whereas men seek relationships and enhanced individuation and separation from others through social competition. The extent of the dichotomy between how females' and males' are motivated to form social connectedness, in part, is characteristic of the differences found in the current investigation. The findings of the current study were quite consistent with the conclusions of other studies in which females were found to possess better study attitudes toward education than males (Keri, 1995; Pettigrew and Zalkrajsek, 1984).

As with Pettigrew and Zalkrajsek (1984), the results of the current study indicates that the common interest in terms of learning preferences between males and females is social; that is males and females prefer to work with people, and associate with others on learning tasks. The question is whether it would be helpful for students to be challenged through other forms of learning styles via their unique learning preferences? This way, students are better able to adapt to varying content areas expressive of specific instructional emphasis.

Implications

Where males and females are involved in a class, instructors need to realize that disparate learning styles are present. Instructors, therefore, must be encouraged to allow students to work in groups on assignments since teamwork seems to appeal to the learning style needs of both males and females. From these results, instructors need to accept the fact that instruction needs to combine both lectures and group exercises. Thus a singular teaching approach can no longer be perceived as the only conduit for imparting knowledge. In terms of class assignments, instructors need to consider allowing assignments comprising of a reasonable degree of reading, organized course content that applies to real-life situations. This way, both males and females feel encouraged to learn through their preferred learning styles.

In order to effectively measure classroom participation, instructors may have to make conscious efforts to elicit participation from females (as they would with males), particularly considering the fact that this study indicates that females do not participate as well in class. Learning style research indicates that the way instructors teach and interact with their students, and also how students' learn and interact with others affect students' general learning styles (Reiff, 1992). Perhaps, the point here is for instructors to develop relational skills facilitative of students' learning, gender characteristics notwithstanding.

In the absence of the current results, though, instructors could only assume that males and females alike prefer to apply their every-day-life situations to the learning process, as they also would like to have more reading assignments. In which case, female students who complained about the lack of structured reading assignment, or males who were concerned that a given course content did not allow for the application of real-life circumstances, for example, perhaps would have been both taken less seriously.