Gender bias in virtual learning environments: an exploratory study

Background Chou and Tsai (2007) found that a majority of Taiwanese high-school-aged students self-reported using virtual worlds (eg, video games) for entertainment, with males reporting higher frequencies of use over time than females. Additionally, findings from recent research (Lin, Tutwiler & Chang, in press) hint at the importance of considering student gender, prior use of virtual worlds, and perception of helpfulness of the technology being used when designing and implementing virtual-environment-based curricular interventions for Taiwanese students. Females in that study who reported less frequent past virtual-world use showed smaller learning gains, on average in the population, than their male peers when controlling for all other covariates (Lin et al, in press). However, a better control for performance within virtual learning environments might be a direct measurement of a student’s ability to navigate within virtual worlds. In addition, a better understanding of the factors that underlie student perception of helpfulness might help direct the development and effective implementation of virtual-environment-based learning interventions in the future. In the current study, therefore, we seek to first create a proxy measure for student comfort of navigation within virtual worlds and assess the effect of gender on said measure. We then explore the relationship between student performance within the contentbased virtual world and perception of helpfulness, when controlling for affective factors. Finally, we assess the relationship between learning gains, perception of helpfulness, and ability to navigate within virtual worlds, when controlling for pre-intervention content knowledge.