Gender Differences in Learning Strategy Use and Motivational Self-Regulation in University Students: An Analysis from Self-Determination Theory

Latin American literature is heterogeneous in terms of academic motivation differences, mainly because some studies have focused on mean differences without exploring the structure of the academic motivation construct in depth. The purpose of the present study was to investigate differences in the use of learning strategies and motivational self-regulation between male and female university students. Seven subscales of the self-determination continuum were used to operationalize the latter: intrinsic motivation to know, intrinsic motivation toward accomplishment, intrinsic motivation to experience stimulation, identified regulation, introjected regulation, external regulation, and amotivation. This non-experimental, descriptive, cross-sectional, and comparative study involved 126 students from the University of the Republic of Ecuador. The Spanish version, validated by Núñez et al. (2005), was used to measure the various types of motivation that drive students to enroll in and persist in college education. The interrater reliabilities for the subscales were acceptable to good (α = .75 – .89; overall = .92). Among the seven motivational dimensions measured (all p > .05), no differences were found between women and men in the study results, despite some gender stereotypes in the education system. However, there was a marginal trend towards greater outward extrinsic motivation for men (p = .063, d = −0.31). There were no differences between the groups in the relative autonomy index. These findings are discussed in the context of recent literature on gender equity issues in universities, and implications for the design of pedagogical strategies to address motivational self-regulation, irrespective of gender, are proposed.