Effect of Gender on Students' Scientific Reasoning Ability : A Case Study in Thailand

As scientific literacy is currently considered the central goal for development of the 21st century citizens, scientific reasoning ability is determined as an important factor for fostering student performance in science learning. Many science education researchers have reported that gender influenced students' understanding and their attitudes toward science. However, there are not much investigation in the area of the interactions between gender and scientific reasoning ability. In order to gain more understanding on issue, this study aims to examine the effect of gender on students' scientific reasoning ability in a context of Thailand. A total of 400 Grade 11 students from four co-educational schools in Northeastern region of Thailand participated in the study. The widely used and pre-validated Lawson Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (LCTSR) Lawson (2000) was administered to investigate students' scientific reasoning ability in six constructs namely (i) Conservation of Mass and Volume (CMV), (ii) Proportional Thinking (PPT), (iii) Control of Variables (CV), (iv) Probabilistic Thinking (PBT), (v) Correlational Thinking (CT), and (vi) Hypothetical-deductive Reasoning (HDR). The results indicated that the gender does not significantly impact on students' scientific reasoning ability for each construct. In addition, the lowest mean score for the students' scientific reasoning ability were HDR, CV, PPT, respectively, for both genders. The finding of this indicated that there is critical area for improvement of students' scientific reasoning ability. This also implied that instructional pedagogy in science classroom should be more emphasized on the way of teaching that (i) how to reason casually based on hypothesis generation (ii) how to design well fair science experiment, and (iii) how to determine correlation and conversation between target variables, in order to enhance the development of students' scientific reasoning ability. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.