As explained above, most participants were encouraged to participate in Bebras by their teachers. Yet, the students solved the tasks individually on the computer without direct control of their teachers. Therefore, the individual motivation of the students might play a dominant role for their performance. To investigate this role, we will analyze the tasks3 according to the motivation factors of Kellers ARCS Model [17], see Sect.2. As the effects of Satisfaction seemed relevant predominantly regarding subsequent challenges, we will drop this factor here.
3 www.informatik-biber.de/archiv/informatik-biber-2014.
How to Attract the Girls: Gender-Specific Performance 47
Fig. 1. Pictures of the tasks
6.1 Attention
According to the ARCS model [17], attention is a relevant factor for motivation and, in consequence, also for success. Assuming that attention has to be attracted by each task for itself, its first glance appearance is likely to be crucial. Therefore, most of all, its graphical elements like pictures or diagrams, will be relevant for the attention it gets (see Fig.1). Several task numbers are underlined to demonstrate that these tasks had produced differences in all four columns of Table4.
Looking at the graphical elements of the Girls Tasks, we find that these are mostly representing animals, jewelry or food. The only exceptions are task 294 (keyboard) and partly 327, which displays a beaver, but also the rest of an
48 P. Hubwieser et al.
id card. It is apparent that most of these pictures look at least partly lovely and likable, except task 294. Yet, the latter might be attractive for girls by the relevance of the picture, assuming that girls like to use their phones (see below). Regarding the Boys Tasks, the dominating elements are mostly abstract rectangular figures, graphs or technical apparel. The Neutral Tasks have an appearance that is more or less similar to the Boys Tasks, except task 309, which looks more like a girls task. Yet, this task is relatively difficult, which may have caused a low confidence level of the girls, see Sect.6.3.
6.2 Relevance
According to The Glossary of Education Reform [1], “in education, the term rel-evance typically refers to learning experiences that are either directly applicable to the personal aspirations, interests, or cultural experiences of students (per-sonal relevance) or that are connected in some way to real-world issues, problems, and contexts (life relevance)”. Applied to the Bebras tasks and the personal sit-uation of 10–13 year old students, these criteria might be represented by the closeness of the situation that is described in the Bebras task to the personal life and experience of the students. In other words, the relevance will be determined by the probability that the participants or their friends have experienced or will experience a similar situation. Keller [17] describes this by the term Familiarity.
In this sense, obviously, all of the Girls Tasks have a certain relevance, refer-ring to situations, which actually could occur to the children in their daily life:
– 294: How to write the name of a friend on a phone keyboard?
– 295: How to identify your bracelet?
– 296: How to order scoops of ice cream according your preference?
– 300: How to assemble stickers to the picture of an aquarium?
– 303: How to find out which photograph your friend wants to get?
– 308: How can kids get the proper toothbrush?
– 327: How to secure your id card?
On the other hand, all of the Boys Tasks lack this relevance based on everyday experiences in some regard, at least for girls:
– 292: How to cover a territory by mobile phone transmitting masts?
– 297: How can a robot cross a labyrinth?
– 299: How many friends can a Beaver visit in four days in a given rectangular (!) set of channels and ponds?
– 301: How can a draw bot draw a certain figure?
– 302: Which path can a Beaver travel in a polygonal river system with a certain amount of Energy?
– 304: How many mobile phone transmitting masts have to be installed to cover all houses of a certain village?
– 311: How to find the cheapest way over a set of toll bridges?
– 313: How to generate trunk patterns?
– 323: How to catch a monster in a labyrinth?
How to Attract the Girls: Gender-Specific Performance 49 – 333: How to arrange portholes of different colors?
– 335: How to move a robot on a certain path?
– 336: How to optimize the payload of a ship?
– 338: How to synchronize the events of an abstract ceremony?
The Neutral Tasks 307, 334 and 337 lack this relevance more or less, in contrary to the tasks 288, 309, 316 and 340. Yet, 288, 316 and 340 might fail to attract girls by their comparably abstract pictures, while 309 is quite difficult and thus could reduce the confidence level (see below).
– 288: How can Beavers cross potholes?
– 307: How to move a robot to a certain point – 309: How many pretzels have been sold?
– 316: How to optimize walking distance to hotel rooms?
– 334: Which number is represented by this constellation?
– 337: How to represent one- and two-way streets in a matrix?
– 340: Which flower gets water in this constellation of valves?
According to Kellers’ Model, for both genders relevance should support moti-vation. Yet, as shown by [23], boys tend to like problem solving for itself much more than girls, see Sect.2, which could explain the better performance of the boys in the comparably irrelevant tasks.
6.3 Confidence
One of the relevant factors of confidence is the likelihood of success with a given amount of effort and ability [17]. In consequence, the apparent difficulty of a task will influence the motivation to solve it. To assess the difficulty of a task before solving it, the participants can take this information directly from the classified level (as displayed by the Bebras system) or guess how difficult the solution might be. Therefore, we analyzed the empirical task difficulty (in other words the average performance over all participants) as well as the difficulty level classified by the Bebras board. As already mentioned in Sect.5.1, the Spearman Rank Correlation [6] between these two values varies strongly (0.76 in the youngest age group, but only 0.41 in the group of grades 7,8). Table5compares these two difficulty measures for the Boys and the Girls Tasks. Please note that a task is the more difficult so solve, the lower the values of empirical difficulty (solution
Table 5. Comparison of task difficulties Grades 5–6
Boys tasks
Girls tasks Grades 7–8 Boys tasks
Girls tasks Overall empirical difficulty 0.35 0.82 0.37 0.91
Classified easy 13 % 57 % 27 % 100 %
Classified medium 25 % 43 % 36 % 0 %
Classified hard 63 % 0 % 36 % 0 %
50 P. Hubwieser et al.
Table 6. Empirical and classified difficulties of the neutral tasks TaskNr Grades 5–6
Empirical diff
Classified Grades 7–8 Empirical diff
Classified
288 NA NA 0.58 Hard
307 NA NA 0,51 Medium
309 NA NA 0.47 Hard
316 NA NA 0,49 Medium
334 0,52 Medium 0,67 Easy
337 0,09 Hard NA NA
340 0,83 Easy NA NA
percentage) are. Apparently, the girls tend to perform better in easy and medium tasks. As an explanation, the self-efficacy of girls was found to be lower compared to boys [19], see Sect.2, therefore the girls might drop difficult tasks. On the other hand, the boys show higher willingness to deal with challenging problem solving activities by trial and error [16], see Sect.2.
Table6 displays the difficulties of the Neutral Tasks, which might explain, why both genders are comparably successful. Task 288 looks like a typical boys task, supported by its difficulty. Yet, its high relevance could have motivated the girls also. The tasks 307, 316 and 334 have medium difficulty and a quite abstract or technical appearance. While 316 is comparably relevant, 307 and 334 are not.
The task 309 looks like a girls task, but due to its difficulty, the confidence of the girls might have been low. In case of task 337, the extraordinary difficulty might explain the missing differences between boys and girls, as only 9 % of all participants have solved this task at all. The remaining task 340 seems to attract both genders equally, by combining easiness, a “male” picture and a situation comparably relevant for girls.