Gender Differences in the Level of Engagement with Mathematics Support in Higher Education in Ireland

Abstract

Over the past couple of decades, mathematics support centres have become widespread in higher education, most notably in Ireland, the U.K. and Australia. These centres generally offer a range of free support services to students who feel they need additional help with their mathematics modules. A major large-scale survey of first-year higher education students was undertaken in Ireland to ascertain students' evaluation of mathematics support. There were significant differences in self-reported attendance between male and female students, with a binary logistic regression model showing that female students were almost two and a half times more likely to engage with mathematics support than male students, while controlling for other factors such as prior mathematical achievement, degree, and institution attended. In this paper, the engagement levels of 1633 students with mathematics support across nine Higher Education Institutes are analysed. The reasons given by both genders for either using or not using the services provided across a range of disciplines and higher education institutes are explored, with the aim of ensuring that the optimum support is provided to all students who may need such help.

Development and psychometric evidence of the Academic Engagement Scale (USAES) in Mexican college students

“…These findings align with previous research [ 2 – 4 , 12 ], indicating that student engagement has a second-order structure, with responses to the measurement of engagement grouped through three first-order factors (behavioral, emotional, and cognitive). Moreover, discriminant validity proved that each engagement factor (behavioral, emotional, and cognitive) assesses a different manifestation of engagement; these results align with previous studies [ 2 , 12 , 48 ]. Our findings suggest that focus group work led to the development of items for each engagement factor that effectively capture the attitudes and behaviors that reflect school engagement in college students.…”

“…Given that both factor loadings and interceptors resulted in invariance, we examined the latent mean differences in second-order factors (behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement). As other scholars [2,12,48] reported, our results from mean scores indicate that females have higher levels of behavioral engagement than males. Consistent with previous research [49], we found no significant differences between males and females regarding emotional and cognitive engagement.…”

“…Another essential issue that the literature still needs to address is the need to prove that engagement measurements function similarly across males and females. Although prior research indicates that levels of student engagement may vary significantly by gender [ 46 – 48 ], some research continues to report mixed results. Whereas a group of scholars [ 49 ] found that females are equally engaged as their male counterparts, a recent study [ 50 ] reported that males participate more in classes than females.…”