Gender and Task Interaction: instant and delayed recall of three story types

ABSTRACT

Measures of immediate and delayed recall of stories were collected for pupils aged 8 and 11 years attending three primary schools. In the story where the protagonist was a violent male the boys performed better than the girls in both age groups. In the two stories which featured female protagonists the girls’ scores for both immediate and delayed recall were higher than those of the boys. The statistical analysis suggests that most of the variability on the recall measures is related to story type differences rather than to individual pupil differences.