The Influence of Gender on Peer Assisted Learning in Athletic Training Students.

Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) is a process in which students work with one another to augment classroom/laboratory instruction for skill acquisition. This study seeks to the influence of gender on PAL and implications this relationship has on student success. 37 first year undergraduate athletic training students were placed in either same gender or opposite gender tutor pairings and were instructed to spend as much time as necessary to fully review the skill set in a manner resembling the informal nature of most PAL interactions. Participants were asked to complete two separate Likert scale surveys that were validated by previous research on PAL as well as indicate how much time was spent with their peer tutor. Multivariate ANOVAs lacked significance at the .05 level (p<.05) on Likert scale survey questions on time spent, however time spent does reveal trends approaching significance with gender difference. Planned comparison testing indicates opposite gender interactions have more time spent than same gender interactions (p<.001, t= 14.27) with females tending to spend less time with tutors of the same gender than males (p<.001, t= 8.16). Results showed some indication that opposite gender PAL interactions lead to more time spent on task.