Assessing Level of Cognitive Functioning: A Possible Sex Bias

Recently, educators in the natural and behavioral sciences have become alarmed by the finding that many college underclassmen exhibit reasoning that could be characterized as being concrete in the Piagetian sense. This discovery was puzzling since it was generally believed that formal reasoning was developed and implemented at an earlier age (about 12). To alert educators to this potential problem several organizations have developed workshops to elucidate this situation and offer probable methods of remediation2 such as puzzles, which require various types of reasoning abilities; correlational thinking, proportional thinking. etc. Students who utilize appropriate reasoning strategies are classified as being formal. Students from general psychology classes (100 male, 116 female) were given three such puzzles. The age range of these students was roughly 17 ro 20 yr. and they were considered to be representative of the university population. One of the puzzles that was aiven to the students required determination of the number of miles in a specified number of kilometers. A second puzzle asked the students to approximate the number of frogs in a pond. They were given information about the number of frogs which had previously been banded and released into the pond, and the number of banded and unbanded frogs caught in a second capture. Finally, the "meal worm" problem was administered, asking students to determine whether the worms react to light and moisture, given several pictorial permutations to be used in their determination. Students were asked to write the method used to solve the puzzle and to show any mathematical work. A chi-squared analysis of sex by level of cognitive functioning (formal, transitional, concrete) indicated that males and females were differentially assigned to formal and concrete groups (X3 = 45.78, p < ,001) The numbers of males classified as formal, transitional, and concrete were 24, 71, and 5. respectively. The classification frequency for females was 5, 64, and 47, respectively. Males were more likely to be classified formal, while females were more likely to be classified concrete. It is difficult to explain why this apparent sex bias has been observed with this particular method of assessing level of cognitive functioning. An initial suggestion might involve the mathematical narure of the task. It has generally been observed that males tend to perform better than females on mathematical tasks (1). However, this explanation is not entirely supported by an additional observation. The "meal worm" problem involved no mathematical computation, yet a significant difference existed between males and females with respect to solving the problem correctly (X2 = 7.29, p < .01). The biasing effect was less reliable when no mathematical work was necessary. Regardless of the basis for this sex bias, one should be cautious when utilizing similar methods of assessment of cognitive levels. Since the biasing effect was reduced when no mathematical work was required, the addition of verbal items to the mathematicaltype items may provide an assessment of cognitive levels without introducing a sex bias.