Gender bias in virtual learning environments: An exploratory study

A proxy measure for student comfort of navigation within virtual worlds is created and the effect of gender on said measure is assessed. The relationship between student performance within the content-based virtual world and perception of helpfulness, when controlling for affective factors, is explored. The relationship between learning gains, perception of helpfulness, and ability to navigate within virtual worlds, when controlling for pre-intervention content knowledge, is assessed. To explain the relationship between student learning, perception of helpfulness, and behavior in virtual worlds we let 99 10th grade students at the same senior high school in Taiwan use the 3DVLE(ft) system. The results show that the coefficient of the measure of if the student was female or not (FEMALE) has a positive and significant effect on the time to complete the pre-intervention assessment (FIRETIME). Prototypical females are found to have higher completion times than their male peers in the pre-intervention assessment, controlling for the path they chose to take.