Memory: Does Gender Make a Difference?

Overview

Objectives/Goals My objective was to determine who had better short and long term memory, boys or girls. I predicted that girls would have better memory due to personal observation and experience. Methods/Materials My materials were 31 subjects (students in my class-VARIABLES), 31 long term memory tests (penny test-CONTROL), 31 short term memory tests and answer sheet (20 item test-CONTROL), a timer, and 31 candy bars(reward for subjects). I gave the subjects a folder containing the 2 memory tests. They were given 30 seconds to look at the items on the short term test and then 50 seconds to write down as many items as they could remember. They were then asked to look at the long term memory test and pick the answer they thought was correct. I collected the answer sheets, scored them, and then reported my results. Results The girls recalled an average of 8.55 items whereas the boys recalled and average of 8.05. There really was no difference between the 2 scores because the girls barely beat them by a fraction. The mode for the boys was 8 and for the girls it was 9. The highest number of items recalled for both girls and boys was 10 and the lowest number of items recalled was 5 items for the boys and 7 items for the girls. On the long term memory, 45% of boys picked the correct penny in contrast to less than 1% of girls. Conclusions/Discussion My hypothesis was not supported by my testing. I did not find a statistical difference between boys and girls in the short term memory category. However, I did fing a significant difference in the long term category. The boys scored much higher on the long term than the girls. I do believe that boys and girls remember different things better according to their different interests. So, although the boys did score higher, more tests are needed with several different areas of interests to determine if indeed boys have better long term memory.

Competition history

• CSEF 2008 Cognitive Science (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0606

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• CSEF Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2008 project