Women tend to be more passive in labs at coed colleges.
Observations of women at women's colleges indicate that they become more engaged in labs than their counterparts at coed colleges, suggesting that greater encouragement by faculty and careful planning of lab teams can increase engagement by women in labs. While labs give students the opportunity to apply their knowledge of the subject, students often fail to see the connection between lab and lecture. As a learning tool, students expect labs to reinforce the material learned in lecture. The correlation between what is learned in lecture and what is to be carried out in lab should be stressed by the professors and the teaching assistants. Some concepts may even be much easier to get across in lab than in lecture.