An investigation of gender differences in the components influencing the difficulty of spatial ability items

This study examines the role that gender differences play in the determination of the components influencing the difficulty of spatial ability items. Considerable research has examined the role of gender differences in spatial abilities, with sometimes contradictory findings. In general, the findings show that males tend to outperform females on spatial ability items. Other research has focused on determining the components of items that contribute to their difficulty. This research has usually been based on mixed-gender populations, however. The present study attempts to determine if gender influences the extent to which different components contribute to the difficulty of items. The results indicate that component difficulties show very little variation across gender. This finding supports the notion that any differences in raw scores observed for males and females are not due to differences in the manner in which males and females process spatial information or solve spatial ability items.