Men's College Classroom Environments

At the very time when many single sex institutions were becoming coeducational, in the largest study of American colleges undertaken until that time, Astin (1977) found advantages for both men and women at single sex colleges on such varied outcome measures as academic involvement, completion of the degree, and post-graduate educational aspirations and attainment. More recently, support for single sex education has come from large scale studies of secondary schools in Irelend (Cairn, 1990), Australia (Foon, 1988), and the United States (Lee & Byrk, 1986). These studies found that not only did adolescent men and women do better academically at single sex schools, but that the academic advantages were tied to higher career and educational aspirations and higher expectations of control over the outcomes of one's life (higher self-efficacy or a more internal locus of control). What these large outcome studies do not tell us is how single sex education produce these academic outcomes, these higher levels of aspirations, or these positive changes in self-concept and self-efficacy. This project has as its goal an examination of the climate of single sex college classrooms, both men's and women's, and has focused on Bandura's (1977) concept of self-efficacy as a plausible mechanism for the effectiveness of single sex colleges. This concept was chosen because of the repeated finding of enhanced self-esteem, self-efficacy, and internal locus of control in the outcome studies mentioned above. While these three concepts have different theoretical bases, there are many studies which have shown that the measures of these constructs are highly correlated (e.g., Taylor, 1992; Wilhite, 1990; Wolman & Stouder, 1991). Only the notion of self-efficacy specifies a clear-cut relationship between institutional structure, self variables and the positive outcomes that we see in single sex institutions. Bandura suggested that self-efficacy involves knowing one's goals clearly, knowing the steps necessary to achieve each goal, and confidence in one's ability to meet each goal. Bandura (1977) posited three mechanisms for the development of self-efficacy: behavioral accomplishment, modeling, and verbal persuasion. In this study of men's college clasrooms, we examined one form of behavioral accomplishment, class participation. We expected that inclusion of a large percentage of students into classroom dialogue would be more consistently a goal of instructional practices at single sex colleges than at coeducational colleges. With respect to verbal persuasion, we expected to find more positive comments after student participation in men's classrooms and more follow-up questions than in coeducational classrooms. We also expected to find fewer instances of negative comments by faculty and fellow students in single sex classrooms than in coeducational classrooms. Method Classrooms Fifty-two classrooms at seven medium-sized (1,300 - 1,900 students) colleges, four coeducational and three men's colleges, were observed. A total of 27 classrooms were observed at coeducational colleges and 25 classrooms at men's colleges. All colleges were located in the South. Three disciplines were observed, psychology (21 classrooms), English (17 classrooms), and mathematics (14 classrooms). At each college, at least one introductory and one advanced class were observed in each discipline. Twenty-eight classes were introductory (freshman), while 24 were advanced (junior or senior level classes designated for majors in the filed). All colleges had competitive admissions standards (mean SAT scores above 1100). Class enrollments were between 18 and 34. Procedures Freshman courses were observed twice during the first semester, once during the first five weeks of the semester and once during the last five weeks. Advanced courses were observed once. During the first five minutes of each class, no observations were made. …