Gender differences amongst South African senior secondary school learners’ geometric thinking levels

Abstract

This paper reports on the gender differences in the geometrical thinking levels of South African grade 10 learners and emanates from one part of a larger study. A total of 163 male learners and 196 female learners from five purposively selected schools from Umtata District in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province were involved in the study. Participants’ geometrical thinking levels were determined through a multiple choice test. The data were analysed using Microsoft Excel 2007 and IBM SPSS Version 19. The results showed that there was a slight difference in the performance in favour of the female learners in terms of the mean score obtained in the test. Nonetheless, the t-test showed no significant statistical difference between the genders in performance.