The relationship between diligence and academic performance of university students with the focus on their gender

Introduction. The article examines the problem of the influence of gender differences on the peculiarities of students’ academic performance at the university. The purpose of the article is to identify gender differences in the properties of dependencies determined by the level of diligence and academic performance of first-year university students. Materials and Methods. The methodological basis of the research is the aspect and system approaches. The research utilized theoretical (analysis, synthesis, generalization and scholarly literature reviewing) and empirical (questionnaire) methods. Mathematical statistics methods were used to process the collected data. The experimental research was conducted at Tyumen State University and consisted of several stages. The total sample size was 633 people, including 335 male and 298 female participants. Results. The conclusion drawn by the authors in the previous study is confirmed: in the senior grades of secondary school and in the first year of university, the self-assessment of the diligence level by female participants in all disciplines is higher than the self-assessment of male students, and in most cases these differences are statistically significant. It is shown that in the first year at university, the academic performance of female students in most disciplines is statistically significantly higher than that of male students. It was found that the correlations between the level of diligence in the first and second terms in core and non-core disciplines in the group of male students are strongly expressed, and they are moderate in the group of female students. The same correlations were found between academic attainments in these semesters in the mentioned disciplines. The relationships between the level of diligence and student performance range from moderate (female students) to weak (male students). The reasons for the lack of strong correlations between diligence and academic performance require additional research. Conclusions. Based on the self-assessment of first-year university students and other collected data, statistically significant differences in the level of diligence and academic performance were revealed, as well as differences in the properties of correlations between diligence and academic performance in core and non-core disciplines in different semesters related to the students’ gender.