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Abstract
Whilst sex is considered to be one of the most significant factors influencing attitudes towards science, previous research seems to suggest that, at least in non‐science classes, there is no correlation between sex and motivation to learn science. The present study investigates a mixed group of science and non‐science students of upper secondary level. The data show that there is in fact no correlation between sex and motivation to learn science in this group, but that there is a highly significant positive correlation between the students’ so‐called brain type and their motivation to learn science. At the same time, male students show a more systemizing brain type whilst female students have a more empathizing one. Therefore, the brain type seems in fact to be a basic variable of motivation to learn science, as previous research suggests. Our intention was to explore if involving the science motivation questionnaire (SMQ) could be a strategy to confirm and extend this hypothesis, which seems to be the case. We consider this study as a pilot in preparation for a larger and more systematically sampled project.
Notes
1. In this article, we consistently use the term ‘sex’ instead of ‘gender’, because the concept of brain type is inherently biological. In most of the literature we quote, the authors use the word gender when clearly they are referring to biological sex, a phenomenon that can be frequently observed in the research of science education (Rennie, Citation1999).