ABSTRACT
Little research has been carried out that examines how the two genders interact with software. This is of special importance in the case of educational software for mathematics, given the difficulties that girls and women have encountered while learning the subject (Eccles et al., 1993). We have observed the interactions of 350 elementary school students with a mathematics intelligent tutoring system, AnimalWatch (Beal et al., 2002). We found gender differences at two levels. At the coarse-grained level, there was a distinct impact of the amount of help on students’ attitudes towards mathematics: girls decreased the value they attributed to math after working with a version of AnimalWatch providing the right answer when students made mistakes. At the fine-grained level, we observed the amount of time students paid attention to help: boys were less willing to be helped. This gender difference was larger for the best students in the class.
