AN INTERPLAY OF GENDER AND MULTIMEDIA INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS ON ENHANCING HIGHER-ORDER COGNITIVE SKILLS

摘要

This research investigates the perceptions of female versus male students on improvement of their higher-levelcognitive skills when they participated in a multimedia based case study that used an expert system to modela complex engineering and technical problem. Two groups of students, female and male, participated in anexperiment where they analyzed two case studies and made their recommendations. Two questionnairesmeasured their perceptions on the improvements achieved on different constructs. A structural equationsmodel was developed in order to test the research hypotheses with female students being the experimentalgroup and male students as a control group. The major findings are: no significant relationship betweengender and higher order cognitive skills improvement, female students perceived more higher-order skillsimprovement compared to male students, both groups perceived an improvement in learning-driven factor, andfemale students valued learning-driven factors compared to male students. These results show that multimediainstructional materials were found to be very helpful in making multicriteria engineering and technicaldecisions. In particular, they were more effective for female students if they included learning-driven factorssuch as challenging the participants, providing self-learning opportunities, making it possible to learn fromothers, and enhancing learning interest.