Impact of introducing single-gender classrooms in higher education on student achievement levels: A case study in software engineering courses in the GCC region

Changing from a co-education to a single-gender learning environment could be an opportunity and a challenge to any institute. Software engineering is one of the fields that could be affected by gender-segregation policies. Teaching the subject involves group and individual activities which could be dramatically affected in single-gender settings. In this paper, we present our experience in teaching software engineering in gender segregated classes. We will compare the performance of students before and after gender segregation. We will show samples of the activities and the findings. We will have a discussion about the impact of gender segregation on the overall course performance. Our findings could be useful in providing strategies to enhance the higher education learning experience and to eliminate future gender divide issues in the workplace.