Evaluating the Impact of Mars and Venus Effect on the Use of an Adaptive Learning Technology for Portuguese and Mathematics

Abstract

Some recent studies discussed the pros and cons of gender difference in the use of intelligent educational technologies. According to these studies, there is a difference in behavior, attitude, learning and emotion. However, most of the studies were conducted for Mathematics and in a well developed ecological setting. In this work, we investigated the Mars and Venus Effect, by measuring together different variables, such as learning performance (in Portuguese and Mathematics), age, location area, and learning technology. The study was a random pre/posttest control group experimental design, on which 191 students from public schools in Brazil participated. The experimental group used an adaptive learning technology (called MeuTutor) for nine months, while the control group did not use any educational technology during the study. The most relevant results are: i) the use of the adaptive learning technology improves student's performance in Mathematics and Portuguese for both male and female students, ii) the improvement of male student's performance is more significant, against female students, iii) when we focus on technology, male students had better performance in mathematics, but no significant difference in Portuguese.