Do gender, task complexity, and prior knowledge predict academic achievement?

This study aimed to explore the influence of task complexity, prior knowledge, and gender on individual learning performance in the domains of knowledge and skills learning outcomes. The study examined task complexity (basic vs. advanced skills), and prior knowledge (less vs. more knowledgeable learners), involving 73 undergraduate students of varying genders. The findings indicated that male students outperformed female students in the skills domain for both low-complexity tasks (basic skills) and high-complexity tasks (advanced skills), but this was not the case in the knowledge-and-understanding (recall) domain. In these domains, females scored slightly higher across both complexity levels. In contrast, for high-complexity females' scores were lower, whereas males' scores remained unaffected. Furthermore, females' students with less knowledge generally did not score as highly. This decreased even more for high-complexity tasks. Conversely, males with less knowledge scored higher than their knowledge-and-understanding (recall) domain. Advanced prior knowledge promotes better performance in complex tasks, and there was gender difference.