Sex differences in statistical reasoning

Despite considerable research having been done in the area of sex differences in mathematical ability, statistical ability has rarely been the subject of a major research effort. This study focuses on the question of whether there are sex differences in statistical reasoning for college students. Participants included 245 college students in Taiwan and 267 American college students. The Statistical Reasoning Assessment (SRA) was used in this cross-cultural study to assess students' statistical reasoning ability. While the original version of the test was administered to students in the United States, a Chinese version of the instrument was administered to participants in Taiwan. Statistical methods were used to ascertain whether there were mean differences between males and females and whether there was equality between the correlation matrices for males and females. All the analysis were based on both the correct reasoning scores and the misconception scores obtained from the SRA instrument. Results tend to support the general research findings that when sex differences appear, they are in the direction favoring males, particularly in higher cognitive task such as mathematical reasoning. Analysis of the correlation matrices suggests that there are no differences in statistical reasoning between males and females for both countries. However, it should be noted that the results may be due to low item intercorrelations.