Abstract

Background: A number of studies compare cognitive abilities of male and female students from elementary school through high school employing various test constructs and reported presence of gender-related differences having to do with the mode of assessment. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether there is a difference in the performances of male and female medical students. We employed two types of test constructs viz., constructed response (CR) and selected response (SR) examinations that use the same question stem. Materials and Methods: Two types of test questions, CR and SR, were studied. Each CR and SR question used the same question stem to assure all questions were matched. Study participants were incoming first year medical students enrolled in a six-week summer enrichment anatomy course prior to the start of the school year. Group 1 included 16 students (8 male and 8 female) and Group 2 19 students (7 male and 12 female). The course focused on study of the thorax and abdomen and the student performances were analyzed. Results and Discussions: Mean scores and statistical analysis showed comparable performance between male and female students. The independent sample t-test showed that, statistically, there were no significant differences in performances of male and female students in the CR or SR examinations, except in the Group 1 male and female abdomen SR examination [t (14) = 1.934, p< 05 1 tailed]. Collectively, these results show that male and female students in both the groups performed better in the SR test than the CR test. Conclusions: Gender poses no limitation to medical student performance, irrespective of the type of examination format. It is possible to adopt CR examination as a formative evaluation tool for students to identify their deficits and strategize effective learning.

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