Gender Differences in Attitudes towards OBOW Exams: The Case of a Developing Country

Despite the increased research interest on the implementation of Open Book Open Web exams in developed countries, there has been very little systematic studies that investigated the difference in gender experience and the cognitive process that could affect attitude towards OBOW exams compared to the traditional ones in developing countries. This paper aims at filling this gap in knowledge by comparing OBOW and traditional exam methods. Several exams in two different contextual settings were done and in three different high schools. The exams were divided into two phases, midterms and finals and several methods were adopted. The sample included 307 students in addition to three focus groups that helped us to identify important factors. Factors such as gender, emotional tension/anxiety, technology self-efficiency, perceived ease of use were important cues that predicted academic performance. At the end of this research paper, we propose a preliminary model that could be detested further with a larger sample. [For the full proceedings, see ED621620.]