Abstract
The study compared male and female senior secondary school students’ learning outcomes in science in Katsina State, Nigeria. The sample consisted of 204 students randomly selected from the three geopolitical zones of the state. Two instruments were used viz: (1) Attitude towards Science Questionnaire (ASQ); (2) Science Achievement Test (SAT). The respondents were asked to indicate their gender on the instruments. Data collected were analysed using t-test. The findings of the research showed that there were no significant difference between male and female students in overall science achievement (t = -0.678, p>0.05), attitude to science (t =0.387, p>0.05) and also biology, chemistry and physics achievements (t = 0.502, 1.501 and 0.645, p>0.05 respectively). It is therefore recommended among others that teachers should evoke instructional strategies that will sustain the gender equality in students’ learning outcomes in science. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n2p517
Highlights
The promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women is the Goal 3 of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in which United Nations (UN) members have pledged to meet by the year 2015
The science achievement mean score of female students (Mean= 7.39) is higher than the science achievement mean score of their male counterparts (Mean =7.08). This reveals that though there is no significant difference in the mean scores of male and female students in science achievement, female students performed better than the male counterparts
The findings in this study show that gender disparity reported in many previous studies is not the case here
Summary
The promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women is the Goal 3 of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in which United Nations (UN) members have pledged to meet by the year 2015. Recent studies that attempted to evaluate the progress towards the MDGs pointed out the dismal progress made in bridging the gender divide in Nigeria (Ambe-Uva, Iwuchukwu & Jibrin, 2008). Gender refers to the social meanings associated with being a male or a female, including the construction of identities, expectations, behaviours and power relationships that derive from social interactions (Ambe-Uva, Iwuchukwu & Jibrin 2008). Studies on the biological explanation of gaps in performance between male and female learners suggested that differences in brain structure, hormone production, and/or maturation rates may account for differentiated performance in school-related tasks. Studies further show that the parts of the brain responsible for processing verbal information and permitting the exchange of information between hemispheres were more highly developed in girls (Kimura, 2005). The extent to which these biological differences manifested themselves in behavioural differences and their implications for learning was unknown
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