Do males learn slower than females?

1. Do males learn slower than females? By Esther Gibbons, Daisy Corke and Iram Shan

2. Hypothesis Our team think boys do learn slower than girls, this is backed up by the evidence that Elizabeth Lonsdorf collected when she went into the rainforest to study chimps, a common ancestor of humans. After observing them she noticed that the females spent more time watching their mothers catching termites which meant they learnt the skill quicker. Whereas young male chimps spent their time playing and swinging around, mimicking the adult males, who hunt and struggle to become dominant. As our experiment we have taken 4 girls and 4 boys and written 25 words for them to type on the computer. We will be observing the time it takes them to type the words. Because of the evidence shown above I think that girls will have a shorter total mean time than boys.

3. Method • We will use 4 girls and 4 boys to participate in our experiment, they will be different ages, 3 sets of mums and dads and a brother and sister of the same age, all from different backgrounds and families. 2) They will take it in turns to write the same section of 25 words. These are: One beautiful day Miss Tucker had a massive milkshake from the Shaken Cow. But she spilt it all over her brand new top. OH NO! They have to get all punctuation right and include all the capital letters. 3) We will time each person and then they will repeat the same exercise with the same words another two times. This will show how quickly they can memorise the words or learn by repeating. By asking them to repeat the test two extra times we will be able to find the mean and a more accurate time for each person.

4. Variables • Our independent variable is the people we use, we will use a different person each time. We will take them from 3 different families and each boy and girl will be another a similar age to themselves, this way we can investigate how different family backgrounds and ages affect how quickly we learn. • Our dependent variable will be the time it takes for each person to type the 25 words, this will vary depending on each person and whether doing the exercise 3 times will help them type better. • Our controlled variables are the words we ask each person to type and how many words there are. We will also keep the same computer so if we had one good computer and another faulty it wouldn’t harm the results.

5. Results - Boys

6. Results - Girls

7. Conclusion • In both boys and girls it showed that the more they repeated the task, the quicker their time got. Learning from repeating and looking at the card seemed to help. • Overall the girls were quicker at typing. But most people whether a boy or girl got quicker the more times they typed the words, showing that they were learning the paragraph as they repeated it. • In conclusion we think that girls learn faster than boys. This is backed up by the evidence researched by doctor Elizabeth Lonsdorf and the research we have done during this project.

8. Evaluation WWW: Overall we think we worked well as a team. We all contributed ideas and worked together to develop them EBI: If we did this experiment again I think we would meet up more often so we could work all together as well as talking about it at school and get the results for our experiments quicker.