Effect of Gender and Age on student score

Student performance and the grade point average are vital for the final grades that translate to better jobs in the future hence better-living standards. Likewise, a high student score is a motivating factor for parents, teachers, and students to work in harmony for the learning of the student. Equally, schools producing high-grade candidates are ranked high, making them to attract many students and general attention. Finally, high grades help evaluate the level of education system within a country (studyportals, 2020). Attaining high grades is influenced by socio-economic factors such as family income, student's class, parent's level of education, student-teacher ratio, the number of trained teachers in school, student sex, student age, and the distance of the school from student's residence. This research study sought to establish how gender, age, and gender-age interaction affect the scores of students in high schools. 

Study Design 

Participants in the study comprised 200 high school students. They included 101 females and 99 females between the ages of 15-19 years. All the study participants were volunteers. They were contacted by the use of email addresses that were acquired from email directories. Informed consent forms that contain procedural information, how to acquire research results and benefits and risks of participation were used. Also sent was a twenty-question mathematical test that was uniform to everyone. They were told to submit the paper upon completion. The research design for the study was non-experimental and correlational since it involved testing the relationship between the student score and age and the gender of students (Formplus, 2020). 

Hypothesis 

To test the impact of age and gender on student performance, the following null hypothesis was be tested at a 5% level of significance. The null hypothesis was rejected on p-values higher than 0.05.  

• Null hypothesis (H₀): There will be no significant effect of Gender on the student's score

      The alternative hypothesis (H_A): There is a significant effect of gender on student score 

• Null hypothesis (H₀): Age will not significantly affect the scores of students
• The alternative hypothesis (H_A): Age does not significantly affect the scores of students
• Null hypothesis (H₀): Interaction between gender and age will not affect students' score significantly
•  Alternative Hypothesis (H₁): Interaction between gender and age will affect student’s score significantly

 Tests  

Testing the effect of gender and age on student performance engaged the use of Two-Way Anova (General linear model-Univariate) in SPSS. This was done in the assumption that age and gender affected the student scores. 

Results  

The p-value was 0.56 ( a value greater than 5% level of significance), I, therefore, failed to reject the null hypothesis and concluded that there is no significant relationship between gender and student scores. Equally, the p-value of age was 0.920 ( a value greater than 0.05 significant level), like the previous case, I failed to reject the null hypothesis and concluded that there is no meaningful relationship between gender and the scores of students. An interaction result between age and gender had a p-value of 0.307 (a value that's greater than 5% significant level), same as the first two, I failed to reject the null hypothesis and concluded that interaction between age and gender had no substantial effect on the scores attained by students.

References

Formplus. (2020, January 24). Experimental Vs. Non-Experimental Research: 15 Key Differences. Retrieved from https://www.formpl.us/blog/experimental-non-experimental-research.

Studyportals. (2020). What is a GPA, and Why Is It So Important? Retrieved from https://www.mastersportal.com/articles/2126/what-is-a-gpa-and-why-is-it-so-important.html