Learning in a Database Course: The Same Regardless of Gender?

Abstract

Despite male and female students' equal performance in computer science courses that are gender-balanced in their design, gender differences can still appear in satisfaction, engagement and in academic help-seeking. Therefore, this paper aims to detect gender differences in behavioural engagement, academic help-seeking, satisfaction and attitudes in an introductory database course. The course is one of the introductory courses at the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Tartu, providing an overview of the theory of relational databases and SQL query language. A total of 239 students of 336 who participated in this course in 2024 filled in the questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of three main parts: satisfaction and attitudes, behavioural engagement with the course, and getting academic help. Among these respondents, 104 were female, 131 were male, and four students did not want to specify their gender. The Mann-Whitney U-test and the chi-square test were used with SPSS. The results indicate no statistically significant gender differences in satisfaction with the course and the attitudes toward databases. However, differences were observed in behavioural engagement with the course and in the use of academic help. As the differences emerged in these two areas, the results of the study might be helpful for course designers to provide different tools, which correspond to both male and female students’ needs.