Academic Achievement
Gender
Gap Education Next: What’s the evidence that boys are doing less well in school than girls? Richard Whitmire: Dropout and graduation rates, grades, and many test scores show boys faring poorly compared to girls (see Figure 1). But I prefer a simpler measure. Students need at least one year of post–high school study to survive in today’s marketplace, the goal wisely set this year by President Obama. In truth, they should complete two years of college. When that level of achievement is broken out by gender, men are faring badly. They go to college at lower rates and then graduate at lower rates. Let’s take Minnesota as an example. The (St. Paul) Pioneer Press just published an article on the gender gaps in that state. As of fall 2007, degrees earned by gender were bachelor’s: 58 percent female; master’s: 69 percent female; PhD: 53 percent female. Nationally, 58 percent of those earning bachelor’s degrees and 62 percent of those earning associate’s degrees are female. For the most part this is happening because K–12 schools are shortchanging boys. Far too many boys drop out before earning a high school diploma. Worse, too many boys who do make it through high school are either unprepared for or unmotivated to do college-level work. The conventional wisdom that women need a college degree more than men was true at one time, but is no longer. Economists at both the College Board and the U.S. Department of Education agree: men and women may earn different average salaries, but they get almost exactly the same percentage bump-up in earnings for each degree earned. Those manufacturing jobs that men could secure with only a high school degree have been slipping away for years. In the current recession, that trend picked up speed, with more than 80 percent of the layoffs involving men. Now more than ever, men and women have equal needs to earn degrees past high school, but far more women than men are getting that message. Susan McGee Bailey: Clearly, all our students need strong preparation for the demands of a high-tech, global world, but international data such as those provided by TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) show U.S. students of both sexes performing in a mediocre fashion in comparison to their counterparts in other industrialized nations. Focusing on the lower college completion rates for boys and blaming K–12 educators is too easy. First, the much smaller college-enrollment gap compared to the larger degree gap raises questions about college. College enrollments have been increasing for both young women and young men since the 1970s, but the increase for young women has been larger (see Figure 2a). In 1972, 53 percent of males and 46 percent of females enrolled in two- or four-year colleges immediately after graduating from high school; in 2007 the comparable figures were 66 percent of males and 68 percent of females. Women now outpace men in BA, MA, and PhD completion, but are significantly behind men in MBAs and earn law and medical degrees at slightly lower rates than men. Studies suggesting that men and women get the same benefit from a degree obscure the critical reality that women still earn less than men at every level (see Figure 2b). During the past 20 years, discussions of educational equity have often fallen into an either/or paradigm in which one group of students has been singled out as the only group needing attention. Dropout rates illustrate the dangers of focusing too narrowly. Dropout rates have been declining for both girls and boys, with the rate of decrease greater for girls as a group. But simply looking at gender differences is not enough. Rates vary considerably by race, ethnicity, and social class, and large numbers of girls as well as boys leave school before earning a high school diploma (see Figure 3). Educators are rightly focused on ensuring high-quality instruction, developing new and improved curricular materials, and creating more engaging school environments. But educators alone cannot address the multiple factors that influence students who drop out, nor can they conduct the kinds of community outreach that can help young people find alternative routes to completing their education. EN: Is it all boys who are struggling or particular subsets of boys (like poor minority boys)? RW: That’s the challenge raised by those who question whether boys are in trouble: this is all about income and race, not gender, they argue. It’s true that the gender gaps are especially sharp in urban areas. In July 2009, the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University released a study that tracked the students who graduated from Boston Public Schools in 2007. The conclusion: for every 167 women in four-year colleges there were only 100 men. Is poverty the cause? The male and female students came from similar streets and neighborhoods. Is race the only issue? That’s not what the study uncovered. In fact, black females were five percentage points more likely to pursue further study after high school, including community colleges, four-year colleges, and technical or vocational schools, than white males. Gender gaps are especially profound for poor and minority males. It’s what Chicago researcher Melissa Roderick calls the “genderization of race.” Roughly translated: you won’t solve racial learning gaps unless you tackle the gender gaps. Unfortunately, school accountability regimes such as No Child Left Behind keep educators fixated solely on learning gaps associated with race and income. Now let’s shift to the comfortable suburban districts, where both boys and girls go on to college at a high rate. Educators there see few problems, so they rarely break out the numbers by gender. There are a few exceptions. When school officials in two districts serving wealthy families—Edina outside Minneapolis and Wilmette outside Chicago—took a hard look at their gender numbers, they found wide and growing gaps. The Wilmette data were very specific, showing girls ahead in both grades and test scores. If nearly all the students there go to college anyway, does this matter? I argue that it does. A considerable number of those boys get into selective private colleges due to gender preferences granted males by admissions officers, a practice that is both concealed and widespread. Uncovering the preferences is relatively easy. Take the U.S. News & World Report data and sort admission rates by gender. Still skeptical? Look at the most recent freshman class and break out high school grade-point averages by gender. To win admission at many private colleges (and some publics willing to risk lawsuits), females had to be more academically adept than males. Colleges are about to be ”called out” for these admissions preferences that discriminate against women and mask the problem of boys falling behind in school. In November, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced an investigation into the practice. Although the commission lacks the legal authority to act on the discrimination, mere exposure—triggering outrage from high school girls—may force colleges to curtail the favoritism. What happens to these less-qualified males once they’re in college? Many continue their slack habits from high school, explaining much of the gender gap in college persistence rates, which count those who earn degrees within six years. SMB: Race, sex, and income issues interact in complicated ways. NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) data indicate that income and race gaps are larger than gender gaps in reading and in math scores at 8th grade, and this pattern holds for other comparisons as well. In fact, socioeconomic status has long been the single best predictor of educational success. Teachers may be encouraging all students to continue their education beyond high school, but the message may be heard differently by male and female students, and moderated by race and income. Recent data from a study we are doing here at Wellesley Centers for Women with a large, racially diverse sample of low-income students in a large urban school district found that 95 percent of students, both boys and girls, aspired to attend college when asked in 9th and 10th grade. But if their actual college enrollment rates are in line with past district figures, far fewer will enroll in college and the numbers for young men will be lower than for young women. Higher male dropout rates are part of the problem, but the wider range of better paid jobs open to young men immediately after high school has also been influential. Enlisting in the military after high school is an option for both sexes, but more young men than young women sign up for the armed forces. Many of these recruits are attracted by the higher education benefits the military offers. They may not be rejecting postsecondary education, but rather simply choosing a different pathway. EN: Isn’t the problem more complex: boys are learning more math and science and girls are learning more reading? RW: When you examine state tests, which are far better than NAEP for measuring gender gaps because they test every student every year in most grades, you see that girls have pulled even with boys in math and science. In some cases, they outscore boys in those subjects. At the same time, you see wide gaps in reading and very wide gaps in writing. Haven’t boys always lagged behind girls in literacy skills? Yes, but literacy skills never mattered so much as they do today. In 1989 the nation’s governors met in Charlottesville, Virginia, to launch the school reforms we see today. Essentially, the goal was to put as many students as possible on a college preparation track. The key tools needed to succeed in college courses, arts or sciences, are the abilities to read quickly and accurately and write with precision and accuracy. The governors were right to set that goal, and educators were right to respond by teaching those skills in kindergarten and 1st grade. The problem arose when nobody realized that boys are ill-equipped to acquire those skills that early, at least not with the teaching methods used in the past. As a result, too many boys fall behind, conclude that school is for girls, and never try to catch up. Once boys shift their attention to video games or hip-hop music, parents and educators erroneously conclude those factors trigger the problem. In fact, boys bury themselves in games after seeing few rewards for them in school. Educators haven’t even started redesigning the early grades to help boys absorb early literacy skills. Why this is not happening is unclear. Why has the Department of Education refused to launch a single research project into boy’s academic problems? The most likely answer: at a time when men rule the White House and Wall Street, helping males, including young boys, would amount to a political correctness violation. SMB: I differ with Richard on NAEP. NAEP tests are specifically designed to produce reliable, comparable data over time. State tests are not. And the NAEP data are clear, if not as dramatic as some selected state data: boys, on average, perform less well than girls on tests of reading and writing skills and low-income boys do less well than higher-income boys. NAEP data also show that the gaps favor boys in science and math. While smaller than those favoring girls in reading, the gaps have by no means disappeared and they grow larger as students age Despite widespread concern about boys’ literacy skills, we rarely look seriously at the lingering gender stereotypes that play out every day in our schools, homes, and communities. As Richard indicates, gendered assumptions about literacy are at the heart of the problem, in much the same ways that gendered assumptions about science and math have inhibited girls’ persistence and achievement in these areas. It’s a “girl thing” to read; real boys don’t sit around with a book. Parenting practices contribute to this; from an early age mothers read more to their children than do fathers. In fact, as Lise Eliot delineates in her new book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain, the way people interact with babies is based on assumptions about gender differences that have little basis in biology, but are part and parcel of our earliest socialization. “Little boys need more physical activity,” “little girls are more social,” “boys are better at math than girls”—the dichotomies are endless, and they are as dangerous as they are baseless. Girls who do what boys have traditionally done, who become astronauts, scientists, firefighters, or soldiers, are doing things that almost everyone sees as “moving up.” The reverse is not true. It is no longer legal to advertise job openings under “female” or “male” headings, but our culture still tends to classify many jobs this way. Women make up 83 percent of librarians and 92 percent of nurses; only 15 of the Fortune 500 companies are headed by female CEOs; and women hold only 17 of 100 seats in the U.S. Senate. Gender expectations limit both boys and girls, and at this point they may constrain young boys even more than they do girls. One of the most damaging expectations is that doing well in school is for girls. Until we confront the reality that many boys fear being viewed as less than “all boy” when achieving academically, we will only be playing around the edges of the problem. EN: Are the problems more apparent in elementary or secondary schooling? Are there particular subjects or activities where boys are faring especially well or especially poorly? RW: In general, girls arrive in kindergarten far more ready than boys to engage the verbal-rich curriculum that awaits them. By the end of elementary school, the gaps become significant, and in middle school they widen, in part because many schools don’t teach literacy skills after 6th grade, only “literature.” In 9th grade, where poorly prepared boys first encounter the full force of the college-readiness curriculum, you can see a pileup, or bulge, as 9th-grade classes are far larger than 8th-grade classes, the result of students being retained before entering 10th grade. Nationally, there are 113 boys in 9th grade for every 100 girls, according to the Southern Regional Education Board. Among African Americans, there are 123 boys for every 100 girls. States are discovering that 9th grade has become their biggest dropout year. By 11th grade many boys begin to revive academically, but it’s too late to recover from their poorer grades in 9th and 10th grades. Gender gaps are not an issue that can be easily sorted out by subject. High school girls outperform boys in many of the Advanced Placement subjects, including many of the sciences. The exceptions are physics and computer science, where boys tend to do better. Skeptics of the “boy troubles” point to SAT scores, where males outperform females, without acknowledging the gender imbalances in the test-takers: far more poor and minority girls than boys take that test. SMB: The differences between boys and girls as they enter school have been vastly exaggerated. Yes, girls, on average, are more verbally adept at age five, but this difference is not particularly large, and many young boys are as ready to read as the girls sitting next to them. Often lost in the discussion of girls’ advantages is the reality that boys outperform girls on tests of visual and spatial abilities, and do at least as well on tests of mathematical skills at this age, and these differences widen as they advance in school. However, on measures of fine motor skills and self-control, girls usually perform better than boys, and these skills clearly contribute to early school success. Classrooms that use manipulative materials to practice spatial skills are as necessary as those that give special attention to literacy skills for students in need of help in that area. Literacy is critical and boys need encouragement and support, but this does not mean that all girls are fine readers and it certainly does not mean that gaps in science and math that show girls at a disadvantage should be dismissed. When more than 75 percent of undergraduate degrees in the highly paid fields of computer science and engineering are awarded to young men, the majority of them white, the idea that we no longer need focus on these issues for girls and for students of color does not hold up. Looking carefully at the gendered assumptions that underlie our education system gives us a clearer picture not only of the problems confronting boys in attaining competencies in reading and writing, but of a range of school problems that include gender violence, the continuing imbalance favoring boys in school athletics, and the over-referral of boys—particularly boys of color—and the under-referral of girls, to special education programs. Each of these issues reflects assumptions about the “appropriate” roles of men and women. No discussion of educational equity can ignore the rising rates of dating violence, sexual harassment, and bullying in our schools. When young men and boys think that it is acceptable to verbally harass or physically attack girls under the guise of “manliness,” something is decidedly out of kilter. Educators must do more to help both boys and girls see beyond this dangerous construction of masculinity. EN: Do boys learn differently than girls? Are schools better organized for the ways in which girls learn? Or is the problem something in American culture writ large? RW: This is not an American issue. In England and Australia, the gender gap is a topic of regular newspaper stories. What’s interesting in England is the attention paid to the especially sharp decline in educational performance among white boys from blue-collar families. You can see that in this country as well, with steeply growing college-going gender gaps within that group. The issue in Australia came to a head in 2003 when the government issued a lengthy report on the topic. The conclusion: literacy skills are the culprit. Researchers in England have reached roughly the same conclusion. In the United States the federal government has never investigated the issue, most likely because it is considered “controversial.” When the issue arises, the basic premise that boys are in trouble gets attacked by national feminist groups or professors from women’s studies departments. Their attitude is understandable: the first to point out that boys were in trouble were conservatives, who blamed the feminists for creating school environments that were hostile to boys. I find no evidence that feminists are to blame for the problem. Their only “fault” lies in continuing to deny that the problem exists. SMB: Different children learn differently, but differences between individual boys and between individual girls are much larger than those between girls as a group and boys as a group. Expectations based on gender remain rampant in American culture, and indeed, in cultures around the world. As Richard notes, there has been significant attention paid to the boy half of gender issues in England and Australia. Researchers in England who have studied a range of sociocultural approaches to the problem of boys’ achievement report that one of the most successful involves directly addressing the “lad culture.” By helping boys who are seen as leaders in their peer group improve in school, they create a climate where other boys see academic achievement as “cool.” Exam grades for boys in schools in the study increased significantly. Creating an environment where academic achievement is seen as something all boys, as well as all girls, should aspire to is critical. In those U.S. school systems where boys do well, this is invariably the case. The majority of these schools are in more affluent districts, where parents have college degrees and encourage their sons and their daughters to do well academically, or in less advantaged communities where the community itself has rallied behind educational goals. The culture of the school reflects the culture of the surrounding community. We need more public discussion of the value of education and its multiple individual and societal benefits. When we talk only of test scores and economic rewards, we present too narrow a view. EN: Is it a problem that so few teachers are men? RW: Male teachers continue to disappear from classrooms. Their numbers are at 24 percent, a record low. What’s interesting is the rapid disappearance of male teachers from the middle school classrooms. Elementary schools never had many male teachers and high schools still retain a respectable number of males. In some middle schools, however, you simply won’t find a male teacher. Combine that with the fact that middle school is the time when the gender gaps widen the most and you have an obvious culprit, right? I don’t buy it. It wouldn’t hurt to have more male teachers, especially in the middle school years, but I’m not convinced that suddenly boosting the number of male teachers would close any gender gaps. Some researchers (see “The Why Chromosome,” research, Fall 2006) have documented modest gains made by boys taught by male teachers, but in researching my book I found that the schools that educate boys as well as girls pay little or no attention to the gender of the teacher. Rather, they pour enormous resources into how literacy is taught. SMB: It is not surprising that there are so few male teachers. K–12 teaching remains a “woman’s job,” with a limited career path and poor pay considering the preparation required. Questions laced with homophobia about why a man would want to teach children are rampant. The more advanced the education level, the more men in the teaching ranks. At the university level the balance has shifted entirely, with women significantly underrepresented among tenured faculty. Excellent teaching is not a matter of gender, but the absence of men in K–12 classrooms sends subtle messages about what is “female” and “male,” influencing students in ways that remain largely invisible and understudied. EN: Is single-sex education a viable strategy for addressing the problem? SMB: Research that examines the effectiveness of single-sex K–12 education and controls for socioeconomic background and degree of parental involvement, both crucial factors in educational attainment, is woefully lacking. We must examine curricular programs and teaching practices used in successful single-sex and coed programs, the kinds of students they help most, and how these programs and practices can work for more students in a wider range of settings. An example of this approach is research showing that girls benefit from science instruction that relates the material to real-world problems—and so do boys. When evaluating single-sex education, we must not ignore a crucial purpose of public education—developing effective citizens. We need to consider the tradeoffs we may be making in sex-segregating students, closing off opportunities for learning from and with each other. RW: Here’s my problem with single-sex education: The Bush Department of Education flipped on the green light for public schools to carry out single-sex education, but never commissioned a single study that would instruct schools on how to do it. (I’m choosing my words carefully here: meta-analyses of single-sex education don’t guide classroom instruction.) Some states—South Carolina comes to mind, which was determined to do something for their flailing boys—gave that green light a broad embrace, unleashing several hundred programs. Unfortunately, not that many of those programs are first-rate. And if academic breakthroughs don’t materialize, those single-sex programs will be dismantled, perhaps prematurely. EN: Are there programs that are much more effective for boys? What are the traits or approaches that they have in common? RW: Most important is a refusal to let students slip behind. I see a lax attitude toward males, “Don’t worry, Mom, boys will be boys. Your son will catch up,” as the single biggest problem. In fact, a lot of boys never do catch up. Two of the schools I profile in Why Boys Fail weren’t even aware they were closing gender gaps; that wasn’t their goal. Their goal was to focus on literacy skills and refuse to let any child slip behind. They took great pride in their success and seemed surprised when it was pointed out they had leveled the gender gaps. SMB: Research studies on effective schools have shown remarkably similar findings for 30 years. Schools that set high standards for all, involve parents, provide firm discipline and an orderly, encouraging environment, and where teachers are respected and engaged are more successful. Such schools do not as easily fall into the black hole of differential expectations for girls and boys, or one racial or ethnic group over another. EN: What other options might policymakers or reformers consider? SMB: We should take a page from the successful, ongoing efforts that address the lingering lag in girls’ and women’s participation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields and leadership positions: 1) mentoring and role-modeling programs that involve more men in schools, particularly men who hold other than traditionally male jobs so that students see men in a variety of careers; 2) a national fathers’ reading campaign to engage more fathers in reading to their children; and 3) increased funding for innovative programs that engage students in literacy activities in and out of school. When “reading like a girl” is as acceptable for boys as doing science and math well is becoming for girls, we will begin to make real progress toward gender-equitable education for all our students. RW: The U.S. Department of Education needs to launch an Australian-style investigation into the boys problem. Once the key issues are identified, follow-on research projects can target specific teaching strategies for teachers. One critical need: national research into what works and doesn’t work with single-sex education. Not all the solutions lie within the
K–12 world, however. Colleges should eliminate from
high school grade-point averages the results from 9th
grade—when many boys struggle to make the transition
from middle school. And colleges need to step in to help
make badly needed adjustments to K–12 accountability
systems. State high school graduation standards don’t
match college readiness requirements. Given the higher
college dropout rates for men, that mismatch appears to be
hurting males the most. Girls Make
Higher Grades than Boys in All School Subjects, Analysis
Finds “Although gender differences follow essentially stereotypical patterns on achievement tests in which boys typically score higher on math and science, females have the advantage on school grades regardless of the material,” said lead study author Daniel Voyer, PhD, of the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada. “School marks reflect learning in the larger social context of the classroom and require effort and persistence over long periods of time, whereas standardized tests assess basic or specialized academic abilities and aptitudes at one point in time without social influences.” Based on research from 1914 through 2011 that spanned more than 30 countries, the study found the differences in grades between girls and boys were largest for language courses and smallest for math and science. The female advantage in school performance in math and science did not become apparent until junior or middle school, according to the study, published in the APA journal Psychological Bulletin®. The degree of gender difference in grades increased from elementary to middle school, but decreased between high school and college. The researchers examined 369 samples from 308 studies, reflecting grades of 538,710 boys and 595,332 girls. Seventy percent of the samples consisted of students from the United States. Other countries or regions represented by more than one sample included Norway, Canada, Turkey, Germany, Taiwan, Malaysia, Israel, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Slovakia, United Kingdom, Africa and Finland. Countries represented by one sample included Belgium, Czech Republic, Estonia, Mexico, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Jordan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and Slovenia. All studies included an evaluation of gender differences in teacher-assigned grades or official grade point averages in elementary, junior/middle or high school, or undergraduate and graduate university. Studies that relied on self-report and those about special populations, such as high-risk or mentored students, were excluded. The studies also looked at variables that might affect the students’ grades, such as the country where students attended school, course material, students’ ages at the time the grades were obtained, the study date and racial composition of the samples. The study reveals that recent claims of a “boy crisis,” with boys lagging behind girls in school achievement, are not accurate because girls’ grades have been consistently higher than boys’ across several decades with no significant changes in recent years, the authors wrote. “The fact that females generally perform better than their male counterparts throughout what is essentially mandatory schooling in most countries seems to be a well-kept secret, considering how little attention it has received as a global phenomenon,” said co-author Susan Voyer, MASc, also of the University of New Brunswick. As for why girls perform better in school than boys, the authors speculated that social and cultural factors could be among several possible explanations. Parents may assume boys are better at math and science so they might encourage girls to put more effort into their studies, which could lead to the slight advantage girls have in all courses, they wrote. Gender differences in learning styles is another possibility. Previous research has shown girls tend to study in order to understand the materials, whereas boys emphasize performance, which indicates a focus on the final grades. “Mastery of the subject matter generally produces better marks than performance emphasis, so this could account in part for males’ lower marks than females,” the authors wrote. Article: “Gender Differences in Scholastic Achievement: A Meta-Analysis,” Daniel Voyer, PhD, and Susan D. Voyer, MASc, University of New Brunswick, Psychological Bulletin, online April 28, 2014. Daniel Voyer can be contacted by email or by phone at 1-506-453-4974. The American Psychological
Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific
and professional organization representing psychology in the
United States. APA's membership includes nearly 130,000
researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and
students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of
psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and
Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance the
creation, communication and application of psychological
knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives. How do we help
boys close the academic gender gap? parenting now logoGirls are more attentive, more organized and perform better socially and academically, according to recent research published by the Third Way, a centrist policy institute. And the gap between girls and boys exceeds that of any other two groups. “The social and behavioral skills gap between boys and girls is considerably larger than the gap between children from poor families and middle class families or the gap between black and white children,” the study reads. Some attribute the growing divide to a learning environment structured to favor girls. “Girls have become the gold standard,” Michael Thompson, author of “It’s a Boy!” and “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys,” told NewsHour. “We, as parents, have decided that we need earlier reading scores. Then we’ve made kindergarten the new first grade. There is more emphasis on learning earlier and earlier. Boys just aren’t programmed like that — that’s obvious from a physical and psychological standpoint.” By the 8th grade, 48 percent of girls receive a mix of A and B grades compared to 31 percent of boys, the research shows. The gap remains through high school and in college. Nearly 60 percent of college graduates are women. The academic gap takes a psychological toll on boys too. Boys are far more likely to be suspended or expelled from school, in fact they account for 71 percent of all school suspensions according to the U.S. Department of Education and the Schott Foundation Report. Boys are also far less likely to ask for help when they don’t understand a subject. “If you treat girls as the gold standards and boys as defective girls, that’s going to be demoralizing,” Thompson said. “What do elementary and junior high girls always say about boys their age? ‘You are so immature.’ If that’s the norm, then this system is just rigged against the boys.” So, how can parents help turn this around? We have tips from two experts on how to help boys keep up with their female counterparts and succeed in school. Marie Roker-Jones founded “Raising Great Men” and is the senior editor at The Good Men Project.
Michael Thompson is the author of “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys” among other books and is a psychologist specializing in the emotional development of boys.
We must all recognize that boys, even
more than girls, are relational learners. They only work
hard for teachers who are interested in them as people, who
are curious about a boy’s life outside school, and who
have a sense of humor about some oppositional behavior on
the part of boys. Boys work hard for teachers who trust boy
development. The Reverse
Gender Gap For years, women lagged behind men in educational attainment. More boys went to college, and Census data shows that twice as many men as women got bachelor’s degrees in 1960. Two decades later, a funny thing began to happen. By the mid-1980s, women not only caught up but also started to gain on men, not just by inches, but miles. Now, 57 percent of college students are women, and women earn about one-third more bachelor’s degrees than men, says the National Center for Education Statistics. As attention focuses on girls and women in STEM fields and they skyrocket ahead, however, some argue that the boys and men are getting left behind. In fact, a Mt. Everest of evidence points to an entrenched reverse gender gap—boys lagging behind girls— that surfaces as early as kindergarten. Here’s a sample: According to U.S. Department of Education data, boys receive 71 percent of school suspensions. Boys make up 67 percent of special education classrooms. Boys are five times more likely than girls to be labeled hyperactive and 30 percent more likely to flunk or drop out of school. “It’s a story about females’ real gains, but also about stagnation in education for males that raises daunting challenges for American society,” write sociologists Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann in their new book The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools. One of the most talked about issues in education, the widening achievement difference between boys and girls has been debated vociferously for more than a decade. In the popular press, four words encapsulate the crux of the matter: Are schools failing boys? The question has a way of raising hackles and attracting polarizing expositions on the state of American schooling that are often fraught with political agendas. It suggests that there is a war against boys, as author Christina Hoff Sommers argued in her 2001 book of that title, and that gains by girls have been at the expense of boys. Other experts reject framing the conversation in terms of winners and losers. One of those is Adam J. Cox, a clinical psychologist who earned his doctorate in counseling psychology at Lehigh University. He has written extensively on the social and emotional development of children and adolescents based on his experiences in his private practices in Pennsylvania and, more recently, Rhode Island. “The anxiety that lies beneath much of the gender consternation is a zero sum mentality that leads some to believe that if we devote resources and attention to boys, those resources and that attention must result in a concomitant reduction for girls,” says Cox, author of the 2006 Boys of Few Words: Raising Our Sons to Communicate and Connect and the 2012 On Purpose Before Twenty. “I think that’s erroneous.” While the data exposes an indisputable gender gap, the reasons why this is the case are anything but settled. Some researchers point to biological differences between boys and girls in the way they learn. Others say the gap all but dissolves when race and socio-economic factors are considered. Some advocate single-gender schools; others see little value, and perhaps even disadvantage, in that approach. Some writers even argue that the gender gap has not truly resulted in any disadvantage to boys in the long run. They point to a wage gap that persists, with women earning on average only 77 cents to every $1 men get, according to Census data. Men also run the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies; women hold only 4.2 percent of those CEO positions, according to the nonprofit Catalyst. And women are under-represented at all levels of government. For example, women hold only 18 percent of the seats in Congress, says the Center for American Women and Politics. However, Hoff Sommers contends, those data have little to do with educational attainment in school and instead are often used as a way to distract people from the very real effects of the three decade- long focus on girls and their needs. In reality, there is not a single explanation or fix, as is often the case. The roots of the gender gap are much more complex and nuanced than often reported. Many factors can account for the discrepancies between the academic achievement of boys and girls. It is a picture that continues to emerge, and most recently, has focused on social norms for boys and girls and the way those standards impact educational success. In Boys of Few Words, Cox argues that many boys face communication challenges—born of innate brain differences and learning styles as well as social pressures and stereotypes—that hurt their chances of success in traditional classrooms, and ultimately the workplace, now more than ever. “In your son’s twenty-first-century education, career, and relationships, he’ll be expected to participate in highly social networks,” he writes in his book. “His success will hinge on how well he can access and join those networks.” According to Cox, boys often feel alienated in school from the earliest grades. “They feel as though it’s a place they don’t belong, where their particular ways of processing are not valued,” he says. “Very often, we’re pathologizing boys for being boys. They are being treated as less-than members of a classroom, and people who are deficient or insufficient in a number of ways.” The key, Cox says, is to teach boys at young ages strategies to connect and communicate, to build their communication competency. That might involve learning how to give compliments or cultivating a conscience. In schools, Cox advocates social-skills groups, where teachers and students have conversations and students learn to voice their opinions. “This is a huge social issue,” he says. “We are so much more of a social culture. It seems your success in the world, whether you’re accepted and liked by other people, the degree to which others see you as smart and successful—a lot of that has to do with your ability to read subtle social signals. It is important that boys be oriented to those things at a time when their brain still has neuroplasticity, when there is still learning going on.” To be fair, many boys excel in traditional schools, and there is more variation among boys and girls than between the genders. Researchers also agree that the overall academic prowess of girls is not due to more smarts. In fact, boys and girls share very similar cognitive abilities. In non-cognitive skills, however, differences are significant. A 2012 study by Christopher Cornwell, head of the economics department at the University of Georgia, and colleagues found that boys on average score 15 percent lower on an assessment of non-cognitive skills (engagement in class, ability to sit calmly, interpersonal skills) than girls. The study falls short of calling teachers sexist, but points to the fact that the majority of elementary teachers are female, for the first time suggesting that a gender gap persists as a function of educators’ behavioral perceptions of their students. In addition, more girls like their teachers and schools. According to 2007 data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ECLS-K), 67 percent of eighth-grade girls report enjoying school compared to 59 percent of eighth-grade boys. The difference in engagement, in particular, could explain the gender gap. Interestingly, boys tend to start school as eager and as excited as girls, often with similar connectedness to teachers, says James Earl Davis, a professor of educational leadership at Temple University in Philadelphia who studies gender and education. “Then it’s squelched early on, by third or fourth grade.” Why the change? Boys “continue to get the message they’re not doing right,” Davis says, echoing Cox. The Cornwell study also found that primary school teachers generally graded boys lower than girls, even though the boys scored similarly or better than the girls on standardized tests. For example, the data show that although boys out perform girls on math and science test scores, girls are assigned the higher grades by their teachers. The misalignment, the researchers say, is because teachers factored behavior and comportment into the mix. Besides social norms, some observers have attributed boys’ lower interest in school to biological differences. Cox, for example, points out that girls in general interpret language better than boys, an advantage that can carry over to the classroom. “Girls hear language more deeply, using more of their brain to process and understand language than do boys,” he writes. “The expanded processing capability adds up to additional social perception and the versatility to use that knowledge in social communication.” Learning styles, in general, also vary between boys and girls. While many girls absorb academic lessons by listening and looking, many boys rely on kinesthetic learning, that is movement and touch, to master new information, Cox says. The typical classroom, however, rarely involves moving around. In fact, students are expected to sit still in rows of desks while the teacher delivers the lesson. Many kinesthetic-oriented boys are the ones getting in trouble at school for fidgeting and worse. “At an all-boys school, a lot of that is let go,” Cox says. “People don’t constantly provide a correction.” At the Fenn School, an independent, 4th to 9th-grade boys school in Concord, Mass., the Lower School day includes “flop,” a few minutes break to “just flop on the ground,” Cox explains. “That is an ideal intervention for boys. It’s highly effective in helping them to cope with restlessness and excessive energy.” He also urges more male teachers in the lower grades to serve as role models, more boy-friendly books (sci-fi, action and adventure) and more projects that involve doing something “heroic.” “Where is the room to be Harry Potter?” he asks. The answer could be as simple as allowing older students to mentor younger ones, he says. While research shows that male teachers in the lower grades improve the likability of school for boys, it does not necessarily translate into stronger academic outcomes. All-boys schools also have mixed results. “There’s been a proliferation of same-sex schools and classrooms in public schooling,” Davis says. “We would love to see more achievement outcomes.” He reminds that urban schools, in particular, struggle with issues of teacher competency—and that issue does not go away simply by reorganizing the students into single sex groups. DiPrete, who also is the Giddings professor of sociology at Columbia University in New York, says his research shows that the gender gap diminishes in relation to the strength of the academic climate in a school—and that often depends upon the girls. “Girls, as a group, tend to be more academic-oriented,” he says. “When you take all the girls out, you are simultaneously, in general, making the classroom environment less academic. And that hurts boys.” Still, many schools are seeing positive results from single-sex options. In South Carolina, for example, more than 100 co-ed public schools are experimenting with segregating boys and girls for large chunks of the school day when core subjects are taught. Overall, reports suggest increased academic performance and decreased disciplinary issues for boys and girls in these single-gender classes. “There should always be opportunities for girls to be among girls and for boys to be among boys, and hopefully for girls to be nurtured by women and boys nurtured by men,” says Davis, who likes the idea of co-ed schools that use gender pullouts for academics, not just to address social and health issues. However, the opportunities for boys to be exposed to male role models are distinctively disadvantaged across the nation by the dominance of women in teaching. Some have posited, not without warrant, that female teachers instinctively reinforce “female” behavior and fail to acknowledge, or even punish, the gender-specific behaviors of boys. Peter J. Kuriloff, research director of the Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives in Philadelphia and a professor of teaching, learning and leadership at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that public schools in general are failing both boys and girls. “The way the kids are taught in most ordinary public schools is boring,” he says. “That’s not good for boys or girls.” DiPrete says schools have not kept pace with a changing economy and that boys have suffered more for it. “The economy has changed fundamentally,” he says, as manufacturing jobs have given way to an information age that requires higher education. “Boys as a group are still operating in this old world that doesn’t exist anymore. Girls have made a more successful transition.” Schools, he says, need to help all students, but particularly boys, see clearer pathways, the practical value of education as a way to improve engagement. Cox would agree. He has spent two years interviewing boys from around the world, the basis of On Purpose Before Twenty. “We cannot hope to educate the next generation for the good life,” he writes, “without making a more considered life part of that equation. Schools are an essential catalyst for this growth, and for shaping people whose strength should be manifest more in their citizenship than consumption. “Because the education of youth has become unbalanced,” he adds, “favoring an intake of content over a plan of action, young people are searching for a sense of agency.” Those words resonate with Alexander Kopelman, co-founder and head of the Children’s Arts Guild in New York. The after-school, nonprofit program seeks to help boys develop emotional skills by way of art.“We feel gender socialization is very detrimental to boys,” he says, noting the gender gap. Boys and men, he says, are often taught to swallow their feelings. Consider the classic, boys don’t cry. “What we’re learning is to cut away a very essential part of ourselves, and to view it as the other, and as something that’s weak and undesirable,” he says. “As we get older, we sort ourselves into what boys and girls do and don’t do.” That can impact interest in books—and ultimately academic performance. Or it can impact love of art—and creative expression. Many boys, Kopelman says, will not pursue art because it’s viewed as something girls do. At the guild, the goal is to break down those stereotypes. Boys aged pre-K through fifth grade are exposed to male role models and creative projects. They might have a contest to see which team can build the tallest structure, or they might cook together or draw with pastels. The fundamental question, he says, should not be focused on whether schools are failing boys. That only stirs hard feelings and controversy, he says. Others posit that it was exactly this type of focus (i.e., “are schools failing girls?”) that resulted in the impressive gains made by girls over the past several years and should be used as a model for boys. Conservative author Kate O’Beirne contends the past two decades have seen many classrooms turn into reeducation camps for young boys. Kopelman asks what is the practical value of an education and how should that education look. “What,” he says, “are we preparing students for?” The answer when it comes to boys may well demand schools of the future that look quite different from current, traditional models.< As Cox says: “We are a diverse
species, and we have a range of differences. We ought to
have schools, which are so important, that accommodate some
of those differences.” Social
Networks Influence Academic Performance: Study Students tend to perform better with high-performers among their friends, as some people are capable of inspiring others to try harder, according to the researchers from the HSE Centre for Institutional Studies in Russia. The recent studies indicate that the role of the social environment may be underestimated, as classmates can greatly influence one another's behaviour and academic success. Using 2013-2023 data on the social networks of 117 first-year students examined whether students consider academic success in choosing friends among their classmates and whether friends influence each other's academic performance. Students do not usually consider academic performance, but over time - often in the middle of the academic year - all members in a peer group tend to perform at about the same level. Thus, most students who surrounded themselves with high-achievers improved their performance over time. The opposite was also true - those who befriended underachievers eventually experienced a drop in grades. According to the authors, while underachievers have a stronger influence on their networks, high performers tend to gain popularity and expand their influence over time, particularly by helping other students with their studies. Men were found to have larger networks than women, and all students were more likely to be friends with those whom they had known before college, classmates of the same gender, and members of their study group. The findings
were published in the journal Educational Studies. Girls lead
boys in academic achievement globally Considerable attention has been paid to how boys' educational achievements in science and math compare to girls' accomplishments in those areas, often leading to the assumption that boys outperform girls in these areas. Now, using international data, researchers at the University of Missouri and the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland, have determined that girls outperform boys in educational achievement in 70 percent of the countries they studied—regardless of the level of gender, political, economic or social equality. "We studied the educational achievement levels of 1.5 million 15-year-olds from around the world using data collected between 2000 and 2010," said David Geary, Curators Professor of Psychological Sciences in the College of Arts and Science at MU. "Even in countries where women's liberties are severely restricted, we found that girls are outperforming boys in reading, mathematics, and science literacy by age 15, regardless of political, economic, social or gender equality issues and policies found in those countries." According to the data, boys fall behind girls in overall achievement across reading, mathematics, and science in 70 percent of the countries studied. Boys outperform girls in only three countries or regions: Colombia, Costa Rica and the Indian state, Himachal Pradesh. Boys and girls had similar educational achievements in the United States and United Kingdom. In countries known for relatively low gender equality ratings, such as Qatar, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, the educational achievement gap is relatively large and favors girls. The one exception worldwide is among students in economically developed nations where high achieving boys outperform high achieving girls, researchers said. "With the exception of high-achievers, boys have poorer educational outcomes than girls around the world, independent of social equality indicators," said Gijsbert Stoet, reader in psychology at the University of Glasgow. "Results show that a commitment to gender equality on its own is not enough to close the achievement gaps in global education; the gap is not increasing. Although it is vital that we promote gender equality in schools, we also need to make sure that we're doing more to understand why these gaps, especially among boys, persist and what other policies we can develop to close them." The study also has important implications for educational policy, the researchers said. "The data will influence how policymakers think about the options available," said Geary. "For example, to increase levels of equal opportunities in education. We believe that policymakers and educators should not expect that broad progress in social equality will necessarily result in educational equality. In fact, we found that with the exception of high achievers, boys have poorer educational outcomes than girls around the world, independent of social equality indicators. Therefore, in order to effectively close the gaps in achievement, education policymakers should consider factors other than political, economic and social equality, and especially as related to boys' overall achievement and high-achieving girls' interest in mathematics and science." The study, "Sex differences in
academic achievement are not related to political, economic
or social equality," recently was published in the peer
reviewed journal, Intelligence. Why
Girls Tend to Get Better Grades Than Boys Do You can help shape The Atlantic’s future—and it’ll only take you 10-15 minutes. Tell us what you think in our 2016 Atlantic Audience Survey. As the new school year ramps up, teachers and parents need to be reminded of a well-kept secret: Across all grade levels and academic subjects, girls earn higher grades than boys. Not just in the United States, but across the globe, in countries as far afield as Norway and Hong Kong. This finding is reflected in a recent study by psychology professors Daniel and Susan Voyer at the University of New Brunswick. The Voyers based their results on a meta-analysis of 369 studies involving the academic grades of over one million boys and girls from 30 different nations. The findings are unquestionably robust: Girls earn higher grades in every subject, including the science-related fields where boys are thought to surpass them. Less of a secret is the gender disparity in college enrollment rates. The latest data from the Pew Research Center uses U.S. Census Bureau data to show that in 2012, 71 percent of female high school graduates went on to college, compared to 61 percent of their male counterparts. In 1994 the figures were 63 and 61 percent, respectively. In other words, college enrollment rates for young women are climbing while those of young men remain flat. This begs a sensitive question: Are schools set up to favor the way girls learn and trip up boys?
Let’s start with kindergarten. Claire Cameron from the Center for the Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia has dedicated her career to studying kindergarten readiness in kids. She’s found that little ones who are destined to do well in a typical 21st century kindergarten class are those who manifest good self-regulation. This is a term that is bandied about a great deal these days by teachers and psychologists. It mostly refers to disciplined behaviors like raising one’s hand in class, waiting one’s turn, paying attention, listening to and following teachers’ instructions, and restraining oneself from blurting out answers. These skills are prerequisites for most academically oriented kindergarten classes in America—as well as basic prerequisites for success in life. As it turns out, kindergarten-age girls have far better self-regulation than boys. A few years ago, Cameron and her colleagues confirmed this by putting several hundred 5 and 6-year-old boys and girls through a type of Simon-Says game called the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders Task. Trained research assistants rated the kids’ ability to follow the correct instruction and not be thrown off by a confounding one—in some cases, for instance, they were instructed to touch their toes every time they were asked to touch their heads. Curiously enough, remembering such rules as “touch your head really means touch your toes” and inhibiting the urge to touch one’s head instead amounts to a nifty example of good overall self-regulation. The researchers combined the results of boys’ and girls’ scores on the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders Task with parents’ and teachers’ ratings of these same kids’ capacity to pay attention, follow directions, finish schoolwork, and stay organized. The outcome was remarkable. They discovered that boys were a whole year behind girls in all areas of self-regulation. By the end of kindergarten, boys were just beginning to acquire the self-regulatory skills with which girls had started the year. This self-discipline edge for girls carries into middle-school and beyond. In a 2006 landmark study, Martin Seligman and Angela Lee Duckworth found that middle-school girls edge out boys in overall self-discipline. This contributes greatly to their better grades across all subjects. They found that girls are more adept at “reading test instructions before proceeding to the questions,” “paying attention to a teacher rather than daydreaming,” “choosing homework over TV,” and “persisting on long-term assignments despite boredom and frustration.” These top cognitive scientists from the University of Pennsylvania also found that girls are apt to start their homework earlier in the day than boys and spend almost double the amount of time completing it. Girls’ grade point averages across all subjects were higher than those of boys, even in basic and advanced math—which, again, are seen as traditional strongholds of boys. What Drs. Seligman and Duckworth label “self-discipline,” other researchers name “conscientiousness.” Or, a predisposition to plan ahead, set goals, and persist in the face of frustrations and setbacks. Conscientiousness is uniformly considered by social scientists to be an inborn personality trait that is not evenly distributed across all humans. In fact, a host of cross-cultural studies show that females tend to be more conscientious than males. One such study by Lindsay Reddington out of Columbia University even found that female college students are far more likely than males to jot down detailed notes in class, transcribe what professors say more accurately, and remember lecture content better. Arguably, boys’ less developed conscientiousness leaves them at a disadvantage in school settings where grades heavily weight good organizational skills alongside demonstrations of acquired knowledge. These days, the whole school experience seems to play right into most girls’ strengths—and most boys’ weaknesses. Gone are the days when you could blow off a series of homework assignments throughout the semester but pull through with a respectable grade by cramming for and acing that all-important mid-term exam. Getting good grades today is far more about keeping up with and producing quality homework—not to mention handing it in on time. Gwen Kenney-Benson, a psychology professor at Allegheny College, a liberal arts institution in Pennsylvania, says that girls succeed over boys in school because they tend to be more mastery-oriented in their schoolwork habits. They are more apt to plan ahead, set academic goals, and put effort into achieving those goals. They also are more likely than boys to feel intrinsically satisfied with the whole enterprise of organizing their work, and more invested in impressing themselves and their teachers with their efforts.
On the whole, boys approach schoolwork differently. They are more performance-oriented. Studying for and taking tests taps into their competitive instincts. For many boys, tests are quests that get their hearts pounding. Doing well on them is a public demonstration of excellence and an occasion for a high-five. In contrast, Kenney-Benson and some fellow academics provide evidence that the stress many girls experience in test situations can artificially lower their performance, giving a false reading of their true abilities. These researchers arrive at the following overarching conclusion: “The testing situation may underestimate girls’ abilities, but the classroom may underestimate boys’ abilities.” It is easy to for boys to feel alienated in an environment where homework and organization skills account for so much of their grades. But the educational tide may be turning in small ways that give boys more of a fighting chance. An example of this is what occurred several years ago at Ellis Middle School, in Austin, Minnesota. Teachers realized that a sizable chunk of kids who aced tests trundled along each year getting C’s, D’s, and F’s. At the same time, about 10 percent of the students who consistently obtained A’s and B’s did poorly on important tests. Grading policies were revamped and school officials smartly decided to furnish kids with two separate grades each semester. One grade was given for good work habits and citizenship, which they called a “life skills grade.” A “knowledge grade” was given based on average scores across important tests. Tests could be retaken at any point in the semester, provided a student was up to date on homework. Staff at Ellis Middle School also stopped factoring homework into a kid’s grade. Homework was framed as practice for tests. Incomplete or tardy assignments were noted but didn’t lower a kid’s knowledge grade. The whole enterprise of severely downgrading kids for such transgressions as occasionally being late to class, blurting out answers, doodling instead of taking notes, having a messy backpack, poking the kid in front, or forgetting to have parents sign a permission slip for a class trip, was revamped.
This last point was of particular interest to me. On countless occasions, I have attended school meetings for boy clients of mine who are in an ADHD red-zone. I have learned to request a grade print-out in advance. Not uncommonly, there is a checkered history of radically different grades: A, A, A, B, B, F, F, A. When F grades and a resultant zero points are given for late or missing assignments, a student’s C grade does not reflect his academic performance. Since boys tend to be less conscientious than girls—more apt to space out and leave a completed assignment at home, more likely to fail to turn the page and complete the questions on the back—a distinct fairness issue comes into play when a boy’s occasional lapse results in a low grade. Sadly though, it appears that the overwhelming trend among teachers is to assign zero points for late work. In one survey by Conni Campbell, associate dean of the School of Education at Point Loma Nazarene University, 84 percent of teachers did just that. Disaffected boys may also benefit from
a boot camp on test-taking, time-management, and study
habits. These core skills are not always picked up by
osmosis in the classroom, or from diligent parents at home.
Of course, addressing the learning gap between boys and
girls will require parents, teachers and school
administrators to talk more openly about the ways each
gender approaches classroom learning—and that
difference itself remains a tender topic. Why Do More
Women than Men Go to College? That women have grown more likely to graduate from college in the past few decades seems natural: We have access to a far wider range of careers than our great-grandmothers did, and the economy favors the well-educated now more than ever. In light of the rising value of a college degree, it’s just strange that men haven’t prioritized their education as much as women have. Why haven’t they? Why do women increasingly outnumber men on college campuses? In a new article in Family Relations, William Doherty, Brian Willoughby, and Jason Wilde provide evidence for a thesis not many have considered: Changes in family structure have contributed to the growing gender gap in college enrollment. Growing up with stably married parents makes children of both sexes more likely to succeed at school, even controlling for socioeconomic status, but the absence of a father seems to hurt boys more than it does girls. Thus, as father absence becomes more prevalent, girls gain a relative advantage in the classroom. Doherty and his coauthors share two major findings that support this theory. First, because they noticed that “the college enrollment gender gap . . . began to emerge about 18 years after the beginning of major population shifts in family structure,” they compared nonmarital birth rates from 1948 to 1993 with the gender difference in college enrollment from 1966 to 2011. They discovered “a near-perfect linear relationship” between changes in the two measures: “The higher the nonmarital birthrate grew, the lower the ratio of males to females [enrolled in college] became as each birth cohort reached age 18.” Since correlation does not prove causation, the three researchers then sought to replicate that basic finding at an individual level. For this investigation, they used longitudinal data from Add Health on more than 15,000 young people who were in middle or high school in the mid 1990s. Unfortunately, because the questions about family structure in the Add Health survey were not very detailed, respondents had to be divided into two simple categories: those whose biological father had been absent since birth, and those who, as of their adolescence, had lived with their biological father at some point (whether for a short period or their entire childhood). The data on educational attainment — measuring whether respondents had attained at least some college education, whether or not they had completed a degree — came from a later wave of the survey, when respondents were 24 to 32 years old. Boys get in more trouble than girls from elementary school onward, and the gender difference is greater among children from fatherless homes. The results showed that among young people who had lived with their fathers at some point, 72.1 percent of women and 63.1 percent of men had some college education, meaning men enrolled at 87.5 percent the rate of women. Among those with no father present, the figures were 61.3 percent for women and 49.2 percent for men; the men enrolled at 80.3 percent the rate of women. In other words, a gender gap favoring women was evident in both groups, but the gap was larger among young people whose father was absent. The ratio of the relative risks (0.918) indicated that the finding was statistically significant: “Males were disproportionately less likely than females to attend college if they came from a family in which the father had been absent from birth.” The method Doherty et al. used to analyze the Add Health data did not allow for controlling for the usual background characteristics; however, the relative education levels of the Add Health sample’s male-female sibling pairs, who would share many socio-demographic traits, were consistent with those of the overall sample. The study does not go into much detail on exactly why father absence appears to undermine boys’ academic achievement more than that of girls. In “Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education,” a 2013 report from Third Way, David Autor and Melanie Wasserman provide some answers. First, long before gender and family-structure differences in college graduation appear, there emerge differences in academic performance and behavior at school. Boys get in more trouble than girls from elementary school onward, and the gender difference is greater among children from fatherless homes. That may be due, Autor and Wasserman write, to parents’ usage of time. More-highly-educated parents have increased the amount of time they devote to child-care activities in the last 20 years. Less-educated parents — who are more likely to be low-income and single — have done so, too, but not to the same extent. “If boys are more responsive to parental inputs (or the absence thereof) than are girls,” Autor and Wasserman summarize, “then it is possible that the gender gradient in behavioral and academic development could be magnified in single-parent households.” And then, of course, there is role modeling: “If children aim to emulate the adult roles of their same-sex parent, then girls may increasingly expect to fully support both themselves and their children whereas, conversely, males may come to anticipate a less central or more transient role.” Doherty, Willoughby, and Wilde make a similar point: As more boys grow up without their father in the home, and as women (especially in low-income and working-class communities) are viewed as the more stable achievers, boys and girls alike [may] come to see males as having a lower achievement orientation and less aptitude for higher education. In the context of persistent influences of family structure, public policy, and macroeconomic forces, at some point social norms regarding academic goals become self-reinforcing within peer groups and perhaps even with parents. Stated simply, college becomes something that many girls, but only some boys, do — the opposite of the earlier cultural norm. Sure, plenty of men (and women) who
don’t go to college still find decent jobs and lead
happy lives. But in light of the many benefits associated
with college degrees — from higher income and a lower
unemployment rate to greater marital stability and better
health — we shouldn’t rest easy when any group
finds them increasingly difficult to attain. The Cost of Gender
Inequiality There are many potential variables that could account for this inequality – societal norms, gender discrimination, or the challenges surrounding childcare – but what is becoming more obvious is that this gap is negatively impacting entire populations. Beyond issues of gender equity and human development, research points to damaging economic consequences for regions with large gender gaps in education and employment. In their empirical analysis of regions around the world between 1960 and 2000, authors Stephan Klasen and Francesca Lamanna expound upon the growing body of research indicating that gender gaps in education and employment have negative economic consequences. Overall, the authors find that reducing gender gaps is correlated to positive regional economic growth. The authors compare economic growth rates to education and employment gaps for several regions including the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, East Asia and the Pacific, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They confirmed that gender gaps in education and employment create statistically significant regional economic inefficiencies. They also provide insight into which regions have been hurt the most by their respective gender gaps and why this may be the case.
The authors outline several explanations for why a gender gap in education and employment could lower economic development. Previous studies suggest that two primary reasons the education gap is harmful to the economy are inefficient uses of human capital and increased fertility rate. By excluding women from various forms of higher education, regions reduce their productivity. Women that could be valuable assets to the economy are not achieving their full capabilities in the labor market, and the economy suffers because its human capital is limited and competition is reduced. Arguably more vital to economic success is the population shift due to fertility rates. Previous research shows that low levels of education are highly correlated with higher pregnancy rates. This leads to populations with a labor force that cannot support the rest of the population. By contrast, regions with a low education gender gap have shown what Bloom and Williamson (1998) call a “demographic gift,” meaning there will be more active than inactive individuals in the labor force, thus boosting economic productivity. Klasen and Lamanna also note that previous research indicates that a high employment gender gap reduces the talent pool for prospective employers. This underutilization of human capital and labor has a negative impact on overall economic efficiency. Research suggests this is especially true of manufacturing export-based economies that depend on a high degree of labor. There is also evidence to suggest that women with the ability to make financial decisions tend to save more, are less prone to corruption, and tend to spend money on investments like healthcare and education, which leads to positive economic growth. The study by Klasen and Lamanna reveals that South Asia (SA), the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have large economic and education gender gaps correlating with weak economic growth. MENA and SA are reducing their education gaps and could see a demographic gift soon, but the countries have suffered more than regions near them, likes East Asia, that have done a better job reducing their gender gaps. In addition, the MENA region has reduced its education gap faster than SA, leading to more economic growth. In SA, only Bangladesh worked to reduce its gender gaps and has experienced an economic boom similar to East Asia.
Given the current data, it would be advisable for countries to enact policies that reduce their economic and education gender gaps. Persistent gender gaps not only impact women, but are damaging to the socioeconomic development of entire populations. From this perspective, gender inequality is a disadvantage to societies that must compete in global markets where countries around the world are taking steps to decrease gender gaps and improving their economies. Article Source: The Impact of
Gender Inequality in Education and Employment on Economic
Growth: New Evidence for a Panel of Countries, Stephan
Klasen and Francesca Lamanna, Feminist Economics, 2009. Teachers
unaware of growing gender gaps in classrooms Using national longitudinal data to perform their analysis, Joseph P. Robinson and Sarah Lubienski investigated male and female achievement in math and reading, looking for when gender gaps first appeared and where in the distribution the gaps were most prevalent. Except for kindergarteners in the 99th percentile, boys and girls generally start out on equal footing in math competency. In elementary school, girls throughout the distribution lose ground to boys in math achievement before eventually regaining some ground in middle school, according to research published by the professors in the American Educational Research Journal. "If you just look at the average gap, there is no gap in math between boys and girls when they start kindergarten," Robinson said. "But when you start to break it down throughout the distribution, taking a look at the low- and high-achieving girls and boys, that's where we see that there's a gap favoring boys at the upper-most extreme of the distribution. The 99th percentile of boys is outscoring the 99th percentile of girls." Over time, as students progress through elementary school, the gap "begins to widen, favoring boys in the lower part of the distribution," Robinson said. "By third grade, you can see it throughout the whole range of kids." Robinson and Lubienski also compared teachers' assessments of boys and girls. They discovered that teachers seem to overestimate girls' mathematics achievement relative to boys, rating girls higher than boys in both subjects, even when cognitive assessments suggest that boys have a math advantage. "Our results suggest that there is still a gender gap, not only with achievement, but with teachers' perceptions," Lubienski said. Based in part on other research, the professors suspect that teachers might be mistaking girls' compliance in the classroom for comprehension, a topic that the researchers are exploring in a forthcoming study. "We thought that teachers might rate boys higher in math, but we found that even when boys are outscoring girls, the teachers think the girls are outscoring the boys," Lubienski said. "This might be because girls tend to be perceived as 'good girls' in the classroom, and then teachers assume that they understand the material because they complete their work and don't cause trouble." The researchers say that there's also a gap in reading that favors girls. Although the gap favoring girls generally narrows over time, it also eventually widens among low-achieving girls and boys, who struggle to keep up with their classmates. "Clearly, the boys start out behind the girls in reading achievement," Lubienski said. "In general, the mid-achieving boys eventually catch up, but the lowest-achieving boys don't. In other words, if you're a boy and you're really struggling to read, you most likely won't catch up with your peers. It's those boys at the bottom that teachers should be most concerned about when it comes to reading." The issue of gender gaps in math and reading in U. S. schools has been an ongoing one in education circles, with some researchers arguing that a gender gap doesn't exist in math anymore, something that was concluded from looking at test results from several states. "There have been debates about whether there really is a gender gap in math," Lubienski said. "But our research looked at national data, and they show that there is indeed still a gender gap in math. It's small, but it's there, and it grows between kindergarten and fifth grade." As a country, the U.S. seems to have more of a gender gap in early elementary education than in most countries, the researchers say. One hypothesis to explain the gap could be that the U.S. has first and second grade female teachers who are "math-anxious." "I've seen a surprising number of teachers who want to teach in the lower grades because they're scared of math," Lubienski said. "Other research has shown a link between math-anxious teachers and girls' math performance, so that could also account for the early gender disparities that we found." Instead of having one teacher for all of the subjects, Robinson and Lubienski believe that having math specialists teaching in the elementary grades, and not just generalists who teach every subject, could help to close the achievement gap. "If you have a teacher who actually likes math, rather than one who just wants to get it over with, then I think it would be helpful, especially considering that we have these early gaps and other countries don't," Lubienski said. "There's some debate about whether kids need to stay with one teacher because it nurtures them. But from a math education standpoint, having dedicated math specialists is certainly worth exploring." For education policymakers, the professors say their research suggests that teachers need to intervene earlier when students struggle. "We should target effective interventions for the content domains where we see gaps, and we must ensure that these interventions are in place by the grades in which we start to see gaps emerge, which our research suggests is earlier than previously thought," Robinson said. "We can't just ignore the gender gap and think that it's done," Lubienski said. "There's been some concern about boys being short-changed in school, and our research supports that claim for boys who have difficulty with reading." "But teachers might also underestimate
the attention that young girls need in math," Lubienski
said. "So we need to pay attention not only to the
low-achieving boys who are struggling with reading, but also
to the girls – both the high-achievers as well as the
low-achievers – as they learn math in the early
grades." The
Link Between Sports and Academic
Performance Most studies show that the more exercise one gets, the higher one’s mental faculties and cerebral performance. Yet, the picture is somewhat more complicated when it comes to college students who are also serious athletes. When these high-level athletes have to stay in shape, attend practices, travel to meets or games away from home, and still fulfill all the requirements of other college students, things can get tricky, and the measure of academic performance is no longer just a grade on a single exam. While some college athletes experience difficulty balancing the responsibilities of their sport with the responsibilities of their academics, many student athletes actually find that the high degree of organization required to accomplish both leads them to be highly successful in both areas. In general, it has been scientifically demonstrated time and again that physical exercise is tightly correlated with mental acuity. A 2010 article in the Washington Post cited John J. Ratey, a Harvard University psychiatrist who synthesized volumes of research for his intriguing 2008 book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. In his book, Ratey describes taking MRI scans of the brains of sedentary people who have suddenly improved their fitness – and increased volume in the hippocampus and frontal and temporal lobes, the regions of the brain associated with cognitive functioning. The hippocampus in particular is associated with memory and learning. (1) Moreover, a recent article of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) cited a university study carried out on about 5,000 children and adolescents, which found links between exercise and exam success in English, mathematics and science and discovered an increase in performance for every extra 17 minutes boys exercised, and 12 minutes for girls (2). The study was carried out by the universities of Strathclyde and Dundee, and found physical activity particularly beneficial to girls’ performance at science; the authors said this could be a chance finding or reflect gender differences in the impact of physical activity on the brain. Overall, though, children who carried out regular exercise, not only did better academically at 11 but also at 13 and in their exams at 16, the study suggested. Dr Josie Booth of Dundee University in the UK, one of the leaders of the British study, said: “Physical activity is more than just important for your physical health. There are other benefits and that is something that should be especially important to parents, policy-makers and people involved in education.” (Ibid) In addition, a 2010 report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stated that across 50 studies undertaken on the subject of physical activity and academic performance, as reported in 43 separate academic articles, there were a total of 251 associations between physical activity and academic performance, which represented measures of academic achievement, academic behavior, and cognitive skills and attitudes (3). In the studies examined by the CDC report, “increased time in physical education appears to have a positive relationship or no relationship with academic achievement. Increased time in physical education does not appear to have a negative relationship with academic achievement. Eleven of the 14 studies found one or more positive associations between school-based physical education and indicators of academic performance; the remaining three studies found no significant associations.” (Ibid.) It is important to note that most of the scientific literature on the link between sports or physical exercise and performance in specifically academic settings are in reference to children and adolescents. However, for people of all ages, the overall connection between keeping the body in shape and the brain in tip-top shape cannot be denied. A Complex Picture: Elite-Level Athletes in College Sports While universities across the country offer a large number of collegiate sports for students, only a handful get wide recognition. Often those big-business sports – mostly football and basketball – feature students who sometimes having difficulty making the academic cut, for various reasons. For this reason, sometimes sports have gotten a bad rap as a negative factor in college academic performance. Yet this may be an unrelated issue – some students’ mediocre grades may simply reflect those students’ sharper focus on excelling in sports than in academics – which is not surprising in sports that offer the possibility of professional recruitment post-college. The Global Post remarks that although student athletes’ performance can vary by sport, with the athletes in the most competitive and popular sports tending to exhibit lower academic performance, gender also plays a role (4). Female athletes consistently outperform both male athletes and male non-athletes, says the piece, citing an article in The New York Times. Worth noting too is that even women recruited specifically for their athletic prowess earn high marks, with average GPAs just .06 points behind female non-athletes, suggesting that the mere fact of participating in elite-level college athletics may bear little relationship to academic success. Yet grades and GPA averages are not always the only measure of academic success. Many student athletes work hard to find a balance between their responsibilities. While some students may not have personal responsibilities, athletics, or the need to earn a living outside their studies, and post straight A’s, other students may have any or all of these other responsibilities and yet manage to post 3.9 GPAs throughout college. With all those responsibilities outside the classroom, no one could deny that 3.9 to be an impressive achievement. In short, while there are no comprehensive data that compare student athletes’ grades to those of their non-athlete peers, it is clear that the difference really comes down to personal drive, determination, and ability to organize and balance. Getting Some Exercise Means Getting More Done Ultimately, countless health benefits are brought on by physical activity – be it devotion to practicing an individual sport, team sports pick-up games, the weekend trip to the gym, or simply a daily walk around the block. When we take care of our bodies, our minds follow the positive pattern, and we are able to be the best we can be at academics – and beyond. Footnotes Bernstein, Lenny. “A growing body of evidence links exercise and mental acuity”, published May 25, 2010 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/24/AR2010052402608.html . Access date: February 26, 2013. “Exercise ‘boosts academic performance’ of teenagers”, published October 21, 2013 at http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-24608813 . Access date: February 26, 2013. “The Association Between School-Based Physical Activity, Including Physical Education, and Academic Performance”. July 2010, available at http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/health_and_academics/pdf/pa-pe_paper.pdf. Access date: February 26, 2013. “Academics of College
Athletes vs. Non-Athletes”. Global Post. Available at
http://everydaylife.globalpost.com/academics-college-athletes-vs-nonathletes-16678.html
. Access date: February 26, 2013. A Degree Goal:
To Close a Gender Gap That Favors Women “Early on, I’d get a lot of questions,” said Mr. Sáenz, who in 2010 started a mentoring group for male Hispanic students called Project Males — Mentoring to Achieve Latino Educational Success. “I wouldn’t say criticisms, but certainly apprehension or resistance to focusing on this issue.” But as degree attainment among men has continued to lag that of women, more state policy makers are looking at the issue in a bid to prevent the gap from significantly affecting the state. National interest is also rising. Last month, Mr. Sáenz helped lead an online seminar hosted by the White House, which has started initiatives on the education of Hispanic and black men, the populations with the lowest rates of higher education success. “If half the population is systematically lagging behind the other half, that’s going to be a real drag on our ability to meet our goals and secure any kind of prosperity for our future,” said Mr. Sáenz, adding that the increased attention, particularly in a state with rapidly changing demographics, is probably driven by economic imperatives. (The University of Texas at Austin is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.) David Gardner, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s deputy commissioner for academic planning and policy, said he expected the issue to be a plank in the state’s next long-term higher education plan. Narrowing the gender gap was not an explicit goal in the state’s previous 15-year plan, which expires next year. When it comes to getting their degrees, female students outperform their male peers in every ethnic and socioeconomic group. But attainment is particularly low among Hispanic and black men. Of the Texas students who enrolled in eighth grade in 2001, about 23.3 percent of the female students had earned some sort of higher education credential, compared with 15.7 percent of the male students. Fewer than 10 percent of the black and Hispanic male students had earned a degree or certificate. A report released this year by the Austin-based Center for Community College Student Engagement said black male students reported the highest level of participation in educational and support programs at community colleges. But when compared with their white and Hispanic peers, they had the lowest success rates. Kay McClenney, the center’s former director, said this “conundrum” might result, in part, from well-intentioned but ineffective support services. “Way too often,” she said, “the programs are designed to fix the student rather than designed to fix the institution so that it is more effective at serving the student.” Richard Rhodes, the president of Austin Community College, agreed. “At times, not intentionally, we think we’re doing the right thing, but we create barriers to opening up pathways for students.” (Richard Rhodes is a donor to The Tribune.) Austin Community College is a member of the Texas Education Consortium for Male Students of Color, which Mr. Sáenz and his colleagues created last year. The group hopes to develop more effective strategies for boosting student achievement among minority men. “Right now, there are a lot of
homegrown or boutique programs,” Mr. Sáenz said.
“But there has not been a very good culture of
evidence.” Does
Gender Diversiity Improeve Performance In the latest Credit Suisse Research Institute study, the issue of gender diversity and performance is considered from a global perspective. The study analyses the performance of close to 2,400 companies with and without female board members from 2005 onwards. Women on the Board Contribute to Outperformance The key finding is that, in a like-for-like comparison, companies with at least one woman on the board would have outperformed stocks with no women on the board by 26 percent over the course of the last 6 years. However, there is a clear split between relative performance over 2005 to 2007 and the post 2008 performance. In the middle of the decade when economic growth was relatively robust, there was little difference in share price performance between companies with or without women on the board. Almost all of the outperformance in the back-test has been delivered post 2008, since the macro environment deteriorated and volatility increased. In other words, stocks with greater gender diversity on their boards generally look defensive: they tend to perform best when markets are falling, deliver higher average ROEs through the cycle, exhibit less volatility in earnings and typically have lower gearing ratios. The bottom line is that relative outperformance of stocks with women on the board looks unlikely to be entirely consistent, but the evidence suggests that a bit more balance on the board brings with it a bit less volatility and a bit more balance through the cycle. Why Do Women on the Board Enhance Performance? The report identifies seven key reasons why greater gender diversity could be correlated with stronger corporate performance: (1) A signal of a Better Company There is a body of research that suggests that appointment of women to the board is a sign that the company is already doing well rather than a signal of greater things to come. The Research Institute's analysis found that it was indeed the larger companies that, to some extent by definition, have already performed well, that were more likely to have women on the board representatives. However, the strong outperformance of companies with women on the board, even in an exclusive comparison of the large caps, suggests there may be other facets to the relationship. (2) Greater Effort Across the Board Evidence suggests that greater team diversity (including gender diversity) can lead to better average performance. Research conducted by Professor Katherine Philips at Columbia University has shown that majority groups improve their own performance in response to minority involvement producing better average outcomes in more diverse environments. (3) A Better Mix of Leadership Skills McKinsey and NASA have conducted various studies on leadership skills and have shown that women are particularly good at defining responsibilities clearly as well as being strong on mentoring and coaching employees. Hence, the idea that a degree of gender diversity at the board level would foster a better balance in leadership skills within the company may hold merit. (4) Access to a Wider Talent Pool Data from UNESCO shows that by 2010, the proportion of female graduates across the world came to a median average of 54 percent. This compares to a median average of 51 percent female graduates in 2000. The trend towards an even greater proportion of female graduates looks set to continue if female success at primary and secondary school level is any guide. Hence, any company that achieves greater gender diversity is more likely to be able to tap into the widest possible pool of talent that is implicit in these graduation statistics. (5) A Better Reflection of the Consumer Decision Maker To the extent that women are responsible for household spending decisions, it makes sense that a corporate board with female representation may enhance the understanding of customer preferences. Not surprisingly, consumer-facing industries already rank among those with the greater proportion of women on the board. (6) Improved Corporate Governance There is unusually strong consensus within the academic research that a greater number of women on the board improves performance on corporate and social governance metrics. The Research Institute's analysis of the MSCI AC World constituents showed that stocks with women on board are more likely to have lower levels of gearing than their peer group where there are no women on the board. Lower relative debt levels have been a useful determinant of equity market outperformance over the last four years, delivering average outperformance of 2.5 percent per annum over the last 20 years and 6.5 percent per annum over the last four years. Gender Diversity and Senior Management Culture,
Socialisation And The Gender Education Gap Studies have shown that from birth, boys and girls are treated differently by their parents. Often baby and toddler girls will be spoken to and read to more often. In addition when they cry, parents are quicker to rush to their aid. It is not surprising then that girls often have wider vocabularies and reading ability than boys when they start school. It is not unexpected either that boys are less likely to ask for help when they need assistance at school. What the gender education gap tells us is that if anything, we should be speaking and reading to boys much more often. We should also be encouraging boys to seek help when they are in trouble (although both genders should be raised to have some degree of independence and resilience). Perhaps if we raised them this way, the boys would be better suited to our school systems and a curriculum that is highly language based. If boys sort assistance, rather than gave up and switched off, they would also be less likely to fall behind in class. Perhaps the most damaging aspect of social influence impacting boy’s performance in education is our Western culture. I remember when I was growing up being constantly bombarded with messages on TV implying that boys and men were stupid. One example that comes to mind is the portrayal of men in the Simpsons. Bart and Homer are portrayed as idiots and Lisa and Marge are portrayed as smart. When we do see a male character in the show come across as smart, like Martin Prince or Frank Grimes, they are portrayed as geeks or losers. We see this treatment again in shows like TheBig Bang Theory. On the rare occasion now when a male is smart on our TV shows, he must be some weird, unpopular nerd. Again we see in our culture the promotion of many male role models in sport, but basically no attempt to showcase smart, academic or innovative men (Steve Jobs fortunately was one, but he does not have much company). In the movies the guy everyone likes and who gets the ladies, is often not that smart, but instead relies on his physical strength and aggression. Frequently he is a criminal, violent or has questionable character and personal history. There is a lack of a strong cultural masculine identity in modern Western culture that is associated with intellectual pursuit and other characteristics that are the key to being successful in the modern world (as opposed to the old warrior archetype). Consequently, many boys lack an up-to-date cultural reference of masculinity to direct their life pursuits in ways that lead to success in modern society. They want to be the next wrestler or basketballer, rather than the next nobel prize winner or CEO. This is partially why boys tune out in class, as they are not shown the link between academic performance and future success in the modern world by cultural references to masculinity. So what takes the place of a modern healthy male identity in our Western culture? Well in newspapers, in advertisements and the TV news, there is no end to the amount of misandric garbage telling young boys that men are lazy and stupid. We have people like Hanna Rosin, Maureen Dowd and so forth, peddling the same old tired story that men are redundant, obsolete and no good. Do not get me started on the ads. Prof. Paul Nathanson and Prof. Katherine Young have analysed the negative portrayal of men in the media, TV shows, ads, radio, books and popular culture and have written a book about it. Their findings highlight a truly pervasive social phenomenon, particularly in Western society, that promotes and encourages misandry. Examples of misandry are not exceptional, they are now a normal part of our culture and are found throughout our media, newsprint, TV, radio, online content and pop culture. The messages that get sent to boys from all these different cultural channels of our society, is that we expect that they be stupid and that it is not only okay, but funny and encouraged. If you are a smart boy, then you are a geek and undesirable to other men and to women. Remember that boys are still forming their identities when they are exposed to these harmful messages. They are quite impressionable and lack the critical thinking of adults to counteract these messages. To make matters worse, the lack of fathers and male role models at school, further increases the influence such messages have on the socialisation and psychological development of boys. Is it any surprise then, that young boys glorify sports, violence, reckless behaviour, aggression and stupidity over intelligence and academia? Absolutely not. Of those traits only one or two are positive, sports and aggression in the right contexts. However, something like study or being smart is discouraged in boys and men. The impact of misandry in our culture on young boys thinking, becomes amplified many fold when they begin to play and interact with their peers. These twisted social norms they learn from the media, TV and our culture etc, are reinforced and policed in boys social groups. The peer group pressure on boys to conform to social norms of disobedience, reckless behaviour, violence and being good at sport but bad academically (or not being a "nerd") is intense. The jock gets the girls and is popular and the nerd is a loner. Honestly after having gone through primary school and later on to an all boys high school, I confirm this is indeed the mentality. I was very independent compared to most of the other boys and really did not care what they thought of me. I worked and studied hard and achieved really good grades. I can tell you though that the pressure on me to stop being such a “nerd” was intense. Getting an A+ or being awarded Dux put a target on your head. If you did well at sport though, suddenly everyone liked you. What was interesting to note is that this type of treatment did not happen anywhere near as often with the girl groups at primary school or at our sister all girls high school (when I frequently spoke with them or saw them on the train home or outside school socially). They would praise each other if they did well at school and encouraged each other in their study. Instead of talking about sports, they would be talking about their school subjects or which university or career they were going to pursue (not all the time but definitely more frequently than the boys). Very rarely did they call each other nerds and if they did it was often in reference to a smart yet unattractive or unpopular girl. She was called a nerd for reasons other than being smart. Another thing I noticed at school, was the stark difference in academic performance when comparing my Caucasian male peers, to my Indian, Jewish and Asian counterparts. Boys from these ethnic backgrounds performed far better academically than the white Anglo-Saxon males. Why? Because in those cultures education was still highly valued in men. It was the Indian, Jewish and Asian boys getting all the academic awards and scholarships amongst the boys. They were performing as well as or better than the bulk of the female students. At home the ethos of valuing education is instilled in these boys from a young age. The male parent is often around and fatherlessness is almost unheard of. Again I don’t make these remarks to be racist but instead to compliment these cultures. Frankly we could learn a thing or two from our Eastern counterparts when it comes to the education of boys. We need to more strictly regulate the portrayal of men on TV and in film. We also need more positive and intelligent (of particular importance) male role models in these mediums. To achieve these goals, there needs to be more activism to keep the corporate media and entertainment industry in line, because they have enormous influence on our culture. This especially applies in present times, where many boys are watching several hours of TV a day and being exposed to vast amounts of online content. We need to be spending less time promoting male athletes and more time promoting our brilliant male thinkers (like Steve Jobs, not that I own anything Apple, but I respected the man). We need to eliminate the misandric articles and reports in the news that are either baseless or built upon poor quality research or a misunderstanding of it. Until that happens and we change how we define masculinity in our culture, I expect we will keep reinforcing all the behaviours that have led to and perpetuated the gender education gap. If these negative cultural messages and bad stereotypes of masculinity keep telling boys we expect them to perform badly academically, the pygmalion effect tells us it will become a self fulfilling prophecy and this will be reinforced in their peer groups (where they will learn and internalise a twisted form of what masculinity is in their pscyhe). In short, the declining academic performance of boys is a product of our modern man-bashing culture and the imprint it leaves on their identity from a young age. Again I urge people to look at the study on the classroom environment, which was a classic example of the pygmalion effect and demonstrated it's negative impact on boys academic performance. I discussed it at length in my article on the classroom environment and the gender education gap. Boys are failing at school because the classroom environment and curriculum is hostile, irrelevant and unaccommodating to their masculinity. They are failing because they have no male role models as frames of reference and guidance at school or at home. They are failing because they are not being raised with the life skills necessary to make the most of their education. They are failing because of the negative influence of feminism in our education systems and the bias that induces in the educational environment and cirriculum. They are failing because our culture and society, create, spread and promote messages that attack and downplay male intellect and academic achievement. They are failing because our culture and society spread and endorse misandric messages that tell them that they are no good because they have a penis. They are failing because their peers exert pressure on them to conform to these twisted social norms and negative associations with masculinity. They are failing because our culture fails to provide boys with proper cultural references of masculintiy and what it takes to be successful as a man in the modern age. Consequently for all these reasons and
more, boys are not motivated to learn or do well at school
and they predictably put in no effort, switch off and play
up in class. Boys will be boys right? A false misandric
justification that leads to a self fulfilling prophecy. The
scientific evidence says boys have it in them to perform
just as well as girls, if they are taught, socialised and
encouraged to apply themselves just as girls are. How sexist
indeed is a comment like boys will be boys! Did we make that
excuse 40 years ago when we tried to help women in
education? No!
Gender Differences in the Classroom:
Physical, Cognitive & Behavioral Gender Differences in the Classroom Researchers have identified several areas of difference between boys and girls. While some of these differences may be perpetuated by stereotypes, all are real and observable. Boys tend to be more physically active than girls and often have trouble with sedentary activities. Physical Activity and Motor Skills Within the realm of physical activity and motor skills, researchers have found that boys are generally more active than girls. Boys tend to have trouble sitting still for lengthy periods, and therefore do not enjoy activities that are sedentary in nature. Reading, coloring, and activities that require sitting still are more difficult for boys. Pre-puberty boys and girls have similar potential for physical and motor growth, although girls have a slight edge in fine motor skills. After puberty, boys have a biological advantage in physical activity due to their height and muscular development. Boys tend to develop their physical and motor skills more through participation in organized sports. It's important to understand the educational implications of gender differences between boys and girls. Curriculum, especially involving physical education classes and group sports, should provide equal opportunities for boys and girls to maximize their physical well-being and athletic skills. Cognitive Abilities and Achievement Motivation When taking standardized assessments, boys and girls typically perform the same. This is due in part to testing standards in validity and reliability. Researchers have identified gender differences in cognitive abilities, however. Girls have been found to perform slightly higher in verbal ability exercises, while boys tend to perform slightly higher in visual-spatial exercises. It is important to keep in mind that these differences are relatively small. Boys do tend to show greater variability in cognitive abilities. Boys, more so than girls, appear at the extreme upper and lower ends of the assessment spectrum. Girls tend to consistently earn higher grades in school and are, on average, more concerned about doing well in school. They are typically more engaged in classroom activities, persist, and are more likely to graduate. Girls tend to gravitate toward activities and courses that they know they will do well in. By the time students are in high school, the courses they select reveal distinct gender differences. Boys typically enroll in math and physical science classes, while girls typically choose language and literature-based courses. In terms of educational importance, curriculum should involve opportunities for boys and girls to explore areas that they may not feel high self-efficacy towards (such as reading and writing for boys and science and math for girls). These opportunities should promote achievement and appreciation for the unfamiliar or uncomfortable subject matter. Interpersonal Behavior and Relationships Researchers have identified gender differences in the way boys and girls interact with their peers. Boys are typically more physically aggressive than girls, especially in elementary and middle school years. Boys are more likely to engage in aggressive and bullying behaviors without being provoked. Girls can be equally aggressive, but they demonstrate their aggressiveness in nonphysical ways. Spreading rumors, giving mean stares and alienating girls from other friends are examples of these behaviors. Boys tend to hang out in large groups of other boys. Their activities usually involve physical play, group games and risk-taking. They enjoy competition as well. Girls engage in more cooperative play and are more aware of other girls' mental and emotional states. The educational importance of being aware of interpersonal behavior and relationship differences is that classrooms should provide numerous opportunities for cooperative group work and frequent interaction with classmates in order to take advantage of boys' natural tendency to play in big groups and girls' natural tendencies to engage in cooperative activities. Sense of Self and Self-Esteem When talking about sense of self and self-esteem, boys typically hold a higher overall sense of self-worth than girls beginning in upper elementary or middle school. This could be due in part to boys' tendencies to overestimate their abilities and girls' tendencies to underestimate. Boys have higher self-confidence and view themselves as being better athletes and problem solvers. Beginning at puberty, girls tend to hold a lower sense of self-worth and rate their physical appearance less favorably than boys. Both boys and girls rate themselves higher in academic areas that are stereotypical for their gender, such as math for boys and literature for girls. Classroom Behavior When talking about classroom behavior and gender differences, researchers have identified differences in the classroom, with boys tending to be more active participants by talking more and asking questions. Boys also tend to dominate group discussions and ignore girls' ideas and requests. Girls tend to be less likely to publicly volunteer or ask questions, possibly for fear of looking incompetent in front of their peers. In terms of educational importance, educators may sometimes want to group girls with other girls and boys with other boys to ensure girls actively participate in classroom activitie To unlock this lesson you must be a
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large factor in academic performance A recent article in The Seattle Times outlined the national trend. “Female college graduates – fewer than half of all graduates a decade ago – now outnumber their male counterparts in most industrialized countries,” the article stated. The current number of female graduates is amazing compared to ten years ago. A recent CBS newscast stated that campuses are now around 60 percent female, with women earning 170,000 more bachelor degrees each year then men. “Women are streaming into business schools and medical schools, and will be the majority at the nation’s law schools.” This trend is not only due to the fact that more women than men are applying to college, but also that the women are more qualified. Karen Cottrell, associate provost for enrollment at the College of William & Mary said girls are making the grade. “Girls typically have better high school transcripts,” she said. Research and interviews conducted by USA Today show that “even the most academically talented boys never catch up to girls in high school grade point averages.” Sociologist Andrew Hacker, author of “Mismatch: The Growing Gulf between Women and Men,” is not surprised by the increased number of women on college campuses. According to Hacker, three of four high school senior girls report spending an hour or more on homework every day, compared to about two out of four boys. Statistics showed boys report, “watching more television than girls do and spending more time on video games.” Hacker continues, “It’s almost as if being a man and being masculine, macho and powerful is not conducive to being a good student.” Michael Thompson, a school psychologist who wrote “Raising Cain” on the academic problems of boys, agreed with Hacker’s theory. “Boys hear that the way to shine is athletically. And boys get a lot of mixed messages about what it means to be masculine and what it means to be a student. Does being a good student make you a real man? I don’t think so… It is not cool.” Despite speculation that boys simply do not try as hard as girls, the bottom line is males are slowly becoming a minority group on many campuses across the nation. The more diverse a campus, the more ideas and ways of thinking are represented in the student. Such a large female student body can potentially promote a homogenous population. This poses an interesting question, which most schools are dealing with quietly. Should males be treated as a minority, accepting less qualified males over females? Most college admissions officers are
reluctant to discuss special preferences boys’
applications receive. However, Robert Massa, the director of
admissions at Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College, admits
to “tilting the admissions scale toward boys.” The
male-female ratio at Dickinson is 45-55. Massa said that
without preferences for male applicants, the percentage of
men would drop as low as 38 percent. This is similar to
admissions policies at Wake Forest, in which the school
policy is to maintain 50/50 ratio. Sex
differences in academic achievement are not related to
political, economic or social equality Even in countries where women’s liberties are severely restricted, girls are shown to be outperforming boys in mathematics, reading and science literacy subjects by age 15. The research, conducted by psychologists at the universities of Glasgow and Missouri, looked at the educational achievement levels of 1.5 million 15 year olds from around the world using Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data taken between 2000 and 2010. The findings, which are published in the journal ‘Intelligence’, show that countries with high levels of social, political and economic equality still experience gender differences in academic achievement. Paradoxically, some of the countries known for relatively low gender equality ratings, such as Qatar, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates are those where the educational achievement gap is relatively large, in favour of girls. When considering combined achievements in mathematics, reading and science, boys fall behind in 70% of countries, whereas there are only three countries/regions (4% of those included in the survey) where boys outperform girls (namely Colombia, Costa Rica, and the Indian state Himachal Pradesh). The United Kingdom and United States belonged to the countries where no (statistically significant) sex difference in combined achievement was found. The achievement disparity between boys and girls is most in evidence at the lowest levels of achievement. The gap however closes, and is sometimes reversed, among the very highest achievers in more economically developed countries. Researchers claim that these findings show that policy makers need to look beyond setting targets for gender equality as a way of reducing gender gaps in school achievement. Dr Gijsbert Stoet, Reader in Psychology at the University of Glasgow, who led the study, said: “The results of this study show that a commitment towards gender equality on its own is not enough to close the achievement gaps in global education. “At the moment we see that, with the exception of high-achievers, boys have poorer educational outcomes than girls around the world, independent of social equality indicators. What’s more is that this gap in not reducing. If policy makers are seriously concerned about gender equality in education, this ought to be their top priority. That it is not is probably fuelled by a lack of public understanding of the distribution of skills which we have highlighted in this and previous studies. For example, listening to many news stories in the media, one can easily get the idea that girls around the world are falling behind boys, in particular in countries with known gender inequality. The reality is quite different in the many countries participating in PISA, which many may find surprising. “Of course we understand that there are many reasons beyond education attainment to strive for gender equality within societies that are not measured in this study. Although it is vital that we promote gender equality in schools we also need to make sure that we’re doing more to understand why these gaps, especially the poor achievement of boys, in educational attainment persist and what other policies we can develop to close them.” Researchers believe that PISA scores may also help define why fewer girls, despite being educationally stronger than boys at 15 years, go on to study STEM subject at university. David Geary, Professor of Psychology at the University of Missouri, said: “As well as being stronger in STEM subjects, the PISA data show that a greater percentage of girls have proportionally better reading achievement compared with mathematics achievement, with boys showing the opposite pattern. The tilt in skills influences later choice of college major and occupation so those who are better at language related skills than maths tend towards language-based professions, such as law instead of computer science, even women with very high maths skills. The sex differences we see in STEM industries today is related in part to this tilt.” The full paper is available online:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289614001688
Sources: Gender equality indexes
referenced in the study include the World Economic
Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report and the United
Nation’s Human Development Report. www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_388432_en.html Gender gaps among
students revealed by Ucas Some 285,100 women were accepted on to higher education courses last autumn compared with just 2,300 men, says the admissions body Ucas in analysis of university admissions in 2014-15. The overall difference between women and men has increased steadily each year from 47,200 in 2008, Ucas says. Women also achieve higher marks while at university, according to data published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency last week. Seventy-two per cent of women received at least an upper-second-class degree in 2013-14 compared with just 67 per cent of men. The latest Ucas information, which shows a record 512,000 people were accepted into higher education last year, also details which subjects are mostly likely to be dominated by men or women. Male students strongly outnumber female ones on engineering and computer science courses, with 20,300 more men doing engineering and 17,300 more on computer courses. However, there are more women than men in about two-thirds of subjects, in which they outnumber men by a total of 107,500. These include subjects allied to medicine and education, where four in five students are women. There were between 12,000 and 13,000 more women than men in creative arts and design, education and social subjects. The Ucas analysis of 2014-15 admissions also shows the number of students admitted with vocational BTEC qualifications, rather than just A levels, has almost doubled since 2008. Some 85,000 of 369,000 students admitted to higher education through Ucas’ main application scheme held a BTEC, it says. It means 23.4 per cent of students entered university in 2014-15 with a BTEC compared with just 13.5 per cent in 2008. A large majority of universities took a significant number of students who held BTECs, it adds. Only 26 large providers took fewer
than 5 per cent of their intake from BTEC holders in 2014-15
compared with almost double that number (47) in 2008, Ucas
says. Student
suspension from school: Impact on academic achievement by
race Federal data shows that student scores on the SAT college-entrance exam have improved as well. The combined math and reading scores of white students grew from an average score of 1038 in 1986-87 to a score of 1061 in 2012-13. Over the same time period, black students raised their combined score from an 839, on average, to a 956. Puerto Rican students went from a score of 868 to a 909 and Mexican American students’ scores rose one point to a 913. As the nation scrutinizes the academic performance of minority children, scholars and researchers have been looking into the factors that could be hindering children of color. One area of focus is instruction time — whether minority children have less time in the classroom because of illness, absenteeism, tardiness or disciplinary actions such as suspensions or expulsions. A September 2015 report released by Attendance Works and the Healthy Schools Campaign looks at how chronic absenteeism disproportionately affects children from minority and low-income families and those with disabilities. Several studies in recent years have taken on the issue of student suspension, revealing alarming trends. For example, a 92-page report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education found that 55 percent of black-student suspensions nationwide in 2011-12 occurred in 13 Southern states. In 84 Southern school districts, black students were the only students who were suspended that school year. A 2016 study published in Social Problems contributes new insights to the ongoing discussion about racial disparities in school discipline and academic achievement. The authors of the study, titled “The Punishment Gap: School Suspension and Racial Disparities in Achievement,” indicate that it is the first-ever comprehensive analysis of suspension as an explanation for racial gaps in student performance in math and reading. The authors – Edward W. Morris of the University of Kentucky and Brea L. Perry of Indiana University — used data from the Kentucky School Discipline Study and school records to examine how suspension affected a sample of 16,248 students in grades 6 through 10 over a three-year period. Most of the students involved – 59 percent – were white while 25 percent were black and 10 percent were Latino. Four percent of students were Asian and 3 percent identified as being another race. The study’s key findings include:
The authors state that while their findings suggest a strong link between suspension and lower academic achievement, they cannot prove that suspension causes poorer test scores. The authors suggest that future research should aim to assess whether other acts of discipline are associated with reduced achievement. They also recommend trying to determine whether the suspension or the missed class time is what underlies the connection between suspension and achievement. Related research: A 2014
research roundup explores the strategies that schools use to
eliminate or prevent violence on campus. A 2014 study
published in the American Educational Research Journal,
“Parsing Disciplinary Disproportionality: Contributions
of Infraction, Student and School Characteristics to
Out-of-School Suspension and Expulsion,” looks at how
rates of suspension and expulsion can be predicted by the
type of infraction committed as well as demographic factors
and principals’ attitudes. A 2014 study from scholars
at Johns Hopkins University, “Sent Home and Put
Off-Track: The Antecedents, Disproportionalities, and
Consequences of Being Suspended in the Ninth Grade,”
looks at how suspending students during their first year of
high school can influence their academic performance and the
likelihood they will attend college. Parents aiming
too high can harm child's academic performance Summary: When parents have high hopes for their children's academic achievement, the children tend to do better in school, unless those hopes are unrealistic, in which case the children may not perform well in school. When parents have high hopes for their children's academic achievement, the children tend to do better in school, unless those hopes are unrealistic, in which case the children may not perform well in school, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. "Our research revealed both positive and negative aspects of parents' aspiration for their children's academic performance. Although parental aspiration can help improve children's academic performance, excessive parental aspiration can be poisonous," said lead author Kou Murayama, PhD, of the University of Reading. The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Murayama and his colleagues analyzed data from a longitudinal study from 2002 to 2007 of 3,530 secondary school students (49.7 percent female) and their parents in Bavaria, Germany. The study assessed student math achievement as well as parental aspiration (how much they want their child to earn a particular grade) and expectation (how much they believe their child can achieve a certain grade) on an annual basis. They found that high parental aspiration led to increased academic achievement, but only when it did not overly exceed realistic expectation. When aspiration exceeded expectation, the children's achievement decreased proportionately. To reinforce the results, the researchers attempted to replicate the main findings of the study using data from a two-year study of over 12,000 U.S. students and their parents. The results were similar to the German study and provided further evidence that parents' overly high aspirations are associated with worse academic performance by their kids. Previous psychological research has found the association between aspiration and academic achievement, but this study highlights a caveat, said Murayama. "Much of the previous literature conveyed a simple, straightforward message to parents -- aim high for your children and they will achieve more," said Murayama. In fact, getting parents to have higher hopes for their children has often been a goal of programs designed to improve academic performance in schools. This study suggests that the focus of such educational programs should not be on blindly increasing parental aspiration but on giving parents the information they need to develop realistic expectations. "Unrealistically high aspiration may
hinder academic performance. Simply raising aspiration
cannot be an effective solution to improve success in
education," he said. Four-Day
School Week Can Improve Academic Performance, Policy Study
Finds The study, published in the journal Education, Finance and Policy in July, analyzed the impact of a four-day school week on student achievement by comparing fourth-grade reading and fifth-grade math test scores from the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) for students who participated in a four-day school week, versus those who attended a traditional five-day school week. The researchers found a four-day school week had a statistically significant impact on math scores for fifth-grade students, while reading scores were not affected. The study suggests there is little evidence that moving to a four-day week compromises student academic achievement, an important finding for U.S. school districts seeking ways to cut costs without hampering student achievement. “What interested me about our results is they were completely opposite to what we anticipated,” said Mary Beth Walker, dean of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State. “We thought that especially for the younger, elementary school kids, longer days on a shorter school week would hurt their academic performance because their attention spans are shorter. Also, a longer weekend would give them more opportunity to forget what they had learned.” Although the shortened school week did not have a measurable impact on reading outcomes, “the idea that the change in the calendar did not have negative effects we thought was an important result,” Walker said. A number of school districts in the United States have moved from the traditional Monday through Friday schedule to a four-day week schedule as a cost-saving measure to reduce overhead and transportation costs. Four-day weeks have been in place for years in rural school districts in western states, particularly in Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming. Over one-third of the school districts in Colorado have adopted a four-day schedule. The alternative schedule has also been considered in school districts in Oregon, Missouri, Florida and Georgia. The four-day school week requires school districts to lengthen the school day to meet minimum instructional hour requirements. Previously, there was a lack of information on whether the four-day school week affects student performance, Walker said. The researchers have speculated on why the shortened school week positively affected students but there are not enough data to draw definite conclusions. “We thought the longer days might give teachers an opportunity to use different kinds of instructional processes,” Walker said. “We also speculated that a four-day school week lowered absenteeism, so students who had dentist’s appointments or events might be able to put those off until Friday and not miss school. We thought there might be less teacher absenteeism. “My own personal hypothesis is teachers liked it so much—they were so enthusiastic about the four-day week—they did a better job. There’s some evidence in other labor studies that four-day work weeks enhance productivity.” Walker notes the results are only applicable to smaller and more rural school districts. Further studies should be performed to understand the effects on urban school districts, she said. Read the
study Gender
differences in school achievement: The role of
self-regulation This study examined whether different aspects of self-regulation (i.e., emotion and behavior regulation) account for gender differences in German and mathematics achievement. Specifically, we investigated whether higher school achievement by girls in comparison to boys can be explained by self-regulation. German and mathematics achievement were assessed in a sample of 53 German fifth graders (19 boys, 34 girls) using formal academic performance tests (i.e., reading, writing, mathematics) and teachers' ratings (i.e., grades in German and mathematics). Moreover, teachers rated children's behavior regulation using the Self-Control Scale (SCS-K-D). Children's self-reported strategies of emotion regulation were assessed with the Questionnaire for the Measurement of Stress and Coping in Children and Adolescents (SSKJ 3-8). Age and intelligence (CFT 20-R) were included as control variables. Analyses of mean differences showed that girls outperformed boys in German achievement and behavior regulation. Regression analyses, using a bootstrapping method, revealed that relations between gender and German achievement were mediated by behavior regulation. Furthermore, we found a suppression effect of behavior regulation on the relation between gender and mathematics achievement: boys' mathematics achievement was underestimated when the analyses did not control for behavior regulation. We discuss these results from a developmental perspective and within the theoretical framework of self-regulation and achievement. Currently, both scientific literature and German mass media are discussing the discrepancy in school achievement between boys and girls, going so far as to call boys the new losers of the educational system (Spiewak, 2010, August 5). Several studies have found significant gender differences in school achievement favoring girls over boys (Cole, 1997; Duckworth and Seligman, 2006). According to the German census, there are more girls than boys in higher secondary schools, whereas more boys than girls attend lower secondary schools. As a consequence, more girls achieve the general qualification for university entrance, whereas more boys complete the certificate of lower secondary school (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2011). The reasons for these gender differences in school achievement have not been clarified yet. Past research has shown that besides cognitive abilities (e.g., intelligence; Deary et al., 2007; Spinath et al., 2010) the motivation and ability to self-regulate is positively associated with school achievement (Duckworth and Seligman, 2005; Suchodoletz et al., 2009). In line with these findings, previous studies have indicated that specific components of self-regulation—behavioral regulation or self-regulated learning—could contribute to gender differences in school achievement (Duckworth and Seligman, 2006; Kuhl and Hannover, 2012). However, by only investigating behavior regulation, these previous studies neglected the wider conceptualization of self-regulation. The concept of self-regulation includes both behavior regulation and emotion regulation, and both aspects of self-regulation may be related to children's school achievement (Blair, 2002; Calkins, 2007; McClelland et al., 2007). Therefore, it is important to understand the contribution of behavior and emotion regulation to gender differences in school achievement. In the present study, we investigated in a sample of German fifth graders who had just transitioned from primary school to secondary school whether self-regulation mediates effects of gender on school achievement. In particular, we studied the relations between different aspects of self-regulation (i.e., behavior regulation, emotion regulation) and school achievement in different domains (i.e., German and mathematics achievement). Past research suggested that girls are in general more successful in school than boys. Hartley and Sutton (2013) have recently reported that especially boys develop gender stereotypes according to which girls are perceived as academically superior with regard to motivation, ability, performance, and self-regulation. However, previous studies revealed rather inconsistent results concerning gender differences in different domains of school achievement. In the present study, we focused on achievement in German and mathematics because performance in these subjects is seen as an important aspect of school achievement (Schrader and Helmke, 2008). Previous large-scale studies revealed higher German achievement by girls in comparison to boys (Stanat and Kunter, 2003; Stanat et al., 2012). However, the picture of gender differences in mathematics achievement is less clear (Hannover and Kessels, 2011; Stanat et al., 2012). While in some studies boys exceeded girls in mathematics achievement, in other studies no gender differences in mathematics achievement were found (Hannover and Kessels, 2011). For instance, Machin and Pekkarinen (2008) argued that mixed evidence for gender differences in school achievement could be explained in part by a higher variance of boys' in comparison to girls' school achievement. As Hyde (1990) pointed out, meta-analyses have consistently shown that there are no significant gender differences in general cognitive abilities. Thus, although cognitive abilities are significantly and positively related to school achievement, they cannot explain gender differences in school achievement (Spinath et al., 2010). Therefore, further “non-cognitive” variables have been examined in an attempt to explain gender differences in school achievement. For instance, Spinath et al. (2010) highlighted the importance of personality and motivation for gender differences in school achievement. They found that a higher level of extraversion was associated with higher grades for girls but lower grades for boys. Pomerantz et al. (2002) noted that girls want to please adults to a higher degree than do boys, which leads to girls' higher school grades. Furthermore, stereotypes are an important influence on school achievement in that negative stereotypes disrupt girls' mathematics performance (e.g., Keller and Dauenheimer, 2003). However, a rarely considered explanation for gender differences in school achievement from a developmental point of view is self-regulation (Duckworth and Seligman, 2006). Self-regulation and school achievement Various terms and definitions have been used to conceptualize self-regulation and its components (McClelland et al., 2010). Here, self-regulation is understood as the motivation and ability to maintain goal-directed actions over time and across several situational contexts in order to achieve desired goals (Karoly, 1993). Although relatively stable differences exist between individuals with regard to the motivation and ability to self-regulate (Raffaelli et al., 2005), there is situation specific variance in self-regulation within individuals depending on domain-specific temptation (Tsukayama et al., 2012). Self-regulation is conceived as a broad construct which includes the more specific components behavior regulation and emotion regulation. Behavior regulation includes the motivation and ability to pay attention, to follow rules, to resist temptation, and to inhibit inappropriate actions (e.g., McClelland et al., 2007; Heikamp et al., 2013). In contrast, emotion regulation is a process that serves to initiate, to inhibit, to maintain, or to modulate the experiences of emotions in order to achieve social adaptation or individual goals (Eisenberg and Spinrad, 2004). In the present study, we focused on strategies of emotion regulation that aim to change the experience of negative emotions (Cole et al., 2004). According to the transactional model of stress and coping, problem-oriented and emotion-oriented strategies can be distinguished (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). Problem-oriented strategies are directed to the context and aim to change a situation that elicited negative emotions. In contrast, emotion-oriented strategies aim to regulate emotional experiences by changing the appraisal of a situation. Whereas problem-oriented strategies include instrumental actions that aim to change the cause of the negative emotional experience, emotion-oriented strategies involve the behavioral and cognitive avoidance of the problem (Lohaus et al., 2006; Skinner and Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007). Behavior regulation and emotion regulation can be seen as two distinct components of self-regulation. Even though behavior and emotion regulation are distinguishable concepts, they are interrelated during the course of development (Raffaelli et al., 2005). Considering the broad conceptualization of self-regulation and taking into account that self-regulation is a multidimensional construct (e.g., Duckworth and Kern, 2011), it is important to take a more nuanced perspective on self-regulation by viewing behavior regulation and emotion regulation as interrelated but separate aspects of self-regulation. The transition from elementary to secondary school is associated with increasing demands such as self-organization, homework, and exam preparation in various subjects. Hence, children need to adopt self-regulated learning strategies (through goal-setting, strategy use, and self-monitoring) to be successful in school (Blair, 2002). Students have to develop self-regulation strategies, which include goal oriented processes that aim to regulate emotions and behavior in order to adapt successfully to school (Zimmerman, 1990; Schunk and Zimmerman, 1997; Suchodoletz et al., 2009). Self-regulation, with its components behavior regulation and emotion regulation, is positively associated with school achievement (Calkins, 2007; McClelland et al., 2007). According to Zimmerman and Schunk (2011) self-regulated students are effective in school because they set learning goals, apply effective learning strategies, monitor their own goal progress, establish a productive learning environment, and develop self-efficacy beliefs for learning. Behavior regulation enables one to remember and follow instructions and to concentrate on tasks without getting distracted. Therefore, behavior regulation is positively related to the development of positive classroom behavior and academic achievement (McClelland et al., 2007). Most notably, behavior regulation accounts for additional variance in school achievement above and beyond the variance that is explained by intelligence (e.g., Duckworth and Seligman, 2005; Suchodoletz et al., 2009). Blair (2002) argued that adequate emotion regulation in the classroom facilitates cognitive processes (e.g., memory, attention, planning, problem solving), which are necessary for scholastic learning. In the school context, emotions have to be regulated to allow for the child's appropriate achievement behavior (Trommsdorff, in press). In general, both problem-oriented and emotion-oriented strategies can be adaptive strategies to regulate emotions. It depends on the situation which strategy brings higher benefits (Lohaus et al., 2006). Adaptive emotion regulation means to adopt strategies flexible depending on the situation (Lohaus et al., 2006; Skinner and Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007). Regarding strategies which are used to regulate negative emotions in the school context, studies have shown that problem-oriented strategies have positive effects whereas emotion-oriented strategies (e.g., avoidance, distraction) have negative effects on school achievement (e.g., Brdar et al., 2006; Cohen et al., 2008). This effect can be seen in individual differences in preparing for examinations and in different relations with achievement in the school context. For instance, students who are more likely to use problem-oriented strategies prepare for examinations and plan their work, whereas students who use emotion-oriented strategies do not actively cope with the future examination and thus do not take enough time to study (Zeidner, 1995). Whereas problem-oriented strategies might be more effective for school achievement, emotion-oriented strategies might be adaptive in order to regulate emotions in the short term (e.g., to feel good) but may have negative consequences regarding school achievement in the long run. Gender, self-regulation, and school achievement Bjorklund and Kipp (1996) argue that a greater evolutionary necessity of women to control their emotional and behavioral reactions in social situations has led to women's higher self-regulation abilities. Davis (1995) suggested that girls are more expected than boys to act according to social rules, which induces girls having more practice and therefore a better ability to regulate their behaviors and emotions. In line with this view, meta-analytic studies have shown that girls have a higher motivation and ability to engage in behavior regulation than boys (e.g., Silverman, 2003; Else-Quest et al., 2006; Cross et al., 2011). Gender differences have also been reported with regard to the habitual use of emotion regulation strategies. For instance, girls tend to use strategies that aim to solve a problem in order to feel better (i.e., problem-oriented strategies) more often than do boys. In contrast, boys tend to emotionally disengage from stressful situations (i.e., emotion-oriented strategies) more often than do girls (Eschenbeck et al., 2007). Because (a) there is evidence for greater school achievement and self-regulation by girls and (b) self-regulation is positively related to school achievement, one may ask whether self-regulation accounts for gender differences in school achievement. In a sample of US-American eighth graders, Duckworth and Seligman (2006) found that girls' higher school achievement can be explained in part by behavior regulation. Kuhl and Hannover (2012) showed that in a sample of German fourth graders, teachers' ratings of children's self-regulated learning could partly explain gender differences in school achievement. Here, we examined both behavior regulation and emotion regulation as aspects of self-regulation. We investigated whether the relation between gender and school achievement (German and mathematics) is mediated by self-regulation (behavior regulation and emotion regulation). Further, we extended the mediation models by controlling for age and intelligence. Study aims The present research aimed to test if gender differences in school achievement can be explained by gender differences in self-regulation. Therefore, two mediation models were tested to investigate whether behavior regulation and emotion regulation mediate the association between gender and school achievement in German and mathematics. In line with previous findings (e.g., Cole, 1997; Duckworth and Seligman, 2006), we hypothesized that girls have greater school achievement than do boys. Building on past research on gender-differences in behavior regulation (e.g., Silverman, 2003; Else-Quest et al., 2006; Cross et al., 2011), we expected that girls show a higher motivation and ability for behavior regulation than boys. Regarding gender differences in emotion regulation, we hypothesized that girls show problem-oriented strategies more often than boys, whereas boys show emotion-oriented strategies more often than girls (Eschenbeck et al., 2007). In order to extend the scope of previous studies, we examined whether different aspects of self-regulation (i.e., emotion and behavior regulation) account for gender differences in school achievement. Based on past findings, we expected that the relations between gender and school achievement are mediated by behavior regulation (Duckworth and Seligman, 2006; Kuhl and Hannover, 2012). In extension of past research, we investigated whether there is an indirect effect of gender on school achievement mediated by children's use of emotion regulation strategies (i.e., problem-oriented strategies, emotion-oriented strategies). Materials and methods Participants Fifty-seven children participated in the study in summer 2010. The children attended 22 different fifth grade classes in seven different schools in a town in Southern Germany. The class teachers of the 22 fifth grade classes were asked to complete questionnaires about those children of their class who took part in the study. Number of students for whom each class teacher provided reports of grades and behavior regulation ranged from 1 to 5. Four children were excluded from data analysis because of incomplete data sets. Hence, the sample consisted of 53 fifth graders (34 girls) and their class teachers. Children's mean age was 11.23 years (SD = .54). Twenty-two (100%) class teachers (16 female, 6 male) completed questionnaires about the school achievement (i.e., grades) and behavior regulation of those students who attended their class. Thirty-nine (74%) mothers completed questionnaires on their highest school graduation. Of the mothers, 2 (4%) had a lower secondary school certificate (= 1), 11 (21%) had a middle secondary school certificate (= 2), 3 (6%) had a qualification for university of applied sciences (= 3), and 23 (43%) had a general qualification for university entrance (= 4). Thus, mother's mean level of education was 3.21 (SD = 1.03). Parents of child participants provided written informed consent prior to participation. Children who participated received a 15 € gift card, teachers received a 2.50 € gift card for every child they evaluated (15 € maximum), and mothers who answered the questionnaire received a 7 € gift card. Procedure In summer of 2010, fifth graders participated at two group-sessions (up to 10 children) in rooms of the university. Each session lasted about 2 h and consisted of two parts (computer lab and seminar room) separated by a 10 min break. Questionnaires and standardized tests were administered in group sessions, limited to 10 children per session. The first session included the nonverbal intelligence test, the mathematics achievement test, and questionnaires. In the second session, reading and writing skills and further questionnaires were administered because the present study was part of a larger project on the relations between self-regulation and school achievement. Teachers and mothers answered paper-and-pencil questionnaires at home. Materials Assessment of school achievement In order to measure school achievement, grades as well as standardized reading, writing, and mathematics tests were assessed. German and mathematics grades were assessed by teachers' reports. Grades were based on children's classroom work and grades of class examinations in the first half of fifth grade (i.e., fifth grade midterm report). School grades were recoded in a way such that a higher score indicated higher school achievement (i.e., 1 = not sufficient/fail to 6 = very good). According to the German curriculum, German grades reflect, besides reading and writing skills, language proficiency (e.g., understanding the meaning of texts and reflection of language use) as well as communication and speech competencies (e.g., presentation of texts, written and oral expression; e.g., Ministerium für Kultus, Jugend und Sport Baden-Württemberg, 2004). Basic reading skills were assessed by measuring reading speed using the Salzburger Reading-Screening for 5th to 8th graders (Auer et al., 2008). Writing skills were measured with the Hamburger Writing Test (May, 2007), which consists of a text with mistakes to be corrected. This test assesses the number of corrected words and punctuation marks and provides an individual profile of orthography strategies. The mathematics subtests numerical comprehension, calculation, and quantities from the Hamburger school achievement test for 4th and 5th graders (Mietzel and Willenberg, 2000) was used in order to assess children's mathematics performance. To avoid influences of confounding variables (e.g., stereotype threat) reading, writing, and mathematics tests were conducted in a standardized manner, following the instructions of the manuals. As aggregated measures combining grades and standardized school achievement tests are more valid measures than separate measures (e.g., teachers' perceptions of children's characteristics can be related with school grades; Mullola et al., 2010), correlations were computed to test whether grades and test scores are significantly related. Pearson correlations showed significantly positive correlations of German grades to reading skills (r = .33, p < .05) and to writing skills (r = .37, p < .01) and between test performance in mathematics and mathematics grades (r = .48, p < .01). Test scores and school grades were standardized by computing z-scores and mean scores were computed for German and mathematics achievement. Accordingly, reading and writing skills and German grades were averaged into a German achievement score. Mathematics test performance and mathematics grades were averaged into a mathematics achievement score. Assessment of self-regulation In order to assess individual differences in behavior regulation, the German version of the widely used, reliable, and valid Self-Control Scale (Tangney et al., 2004) from Bertrams and Dickhäuser (2009) was administered. Class teachers answered the 13 items on a 5-point scale (1 = not at all to 5 = very much), e.g., “The child has a hard time breaking bad habits.”. Reliability analysis revealed a Cronbach's a of .94 in the present study. Strategies of emotion regulation (i.e., problem- and emotion-oriented strategies) were measured using the Questionnaire for the Measurement of Stress and Coping in Children and Adolescents (SSKJ 3-8) (Lohaus et al., 2006). In this questionnaire, children are asked to think of a situation in which they have problems doing their homework. Children answered the items on a 5-point rating scale (from 1 = never to 5 = always) by indicating how often they use problem-oriented strategies (6 items; e.g., “I try to think of different ways to solve it.”) and emotion-oriented strategies (6 items, e.g., “I tell myself it doesn't matter.”) to cope with their emotions. Reliability analyses revealed a Cronbach's a of .80 for problem-oriented strategies and a Cronbach's a of .75 for emotion-oriented strategies. Assessment of intelligence In order to assess nonverbal intelligence, the short version of the CFT 20-R (Weiß, 2006) was administered. Sum scores were transformed into age-standardized IQ scores. Data analysis Pearson correlations were computed to investigate associations of intelligence, age, and mother's level of education with self-regulation (i.e., behavior regulation, emotion regulation) and school achievement (i.e., German and mathematics achievement). Multivariate analyses of covariance (MANCOVAs) were computed in order to test gender differences in school achievement (i.e., German and mathematics achievement) and self-regulation (i.e., emotion and behavior regulation). Mediation models were tested by using the bootstrapping method by Preacher and Hayes (2008). Besides the fact that a bootstrapping approach is especially suitable for small sample sizes, this procedure has two strengths compared to conventional methods of mediation tests. First, multiple mediators are tested in the same model at the same time. Second, using bootstrapping avoids the assumption of a normal distribution of the indirect effects. For estimating point estimates, 5000 bootstrap samples were drawn and, for the indirect effects, 95% confidence intervals were used. A post-hoc power analysis was conducted to analyze, if the sample size was big enough to detect significant mediation effects (Faul et al., 2007)1. Results Descriptive statistics are shown in Table ?Table1.1. In general, boys and girls in the sample had good school achievement, as shown by their grades as well as standardized reading, writing, and mathematics tests. On average, teachers rated children's behavior regulation as high. Overall, boys and girls rated themselves as using problem-oriented strategies more often than emotion-oriented strategies. Children's nonverbal intelligence and mothers' level of education were slightly above average. Table 1 Descriptive statistics. Pearson correlations revealed that age was significantly negatively correlated with intelligence and German achievement. Perhaps older children had lower nonverbal IQ and academic abilities because they already had to repeat school grades. Nonverbal intelligence correlated significantly and positively with German and mathematics achievement. No significant relations were found between mother's level of education and self-regulation (i.e., behavior regulation, problem- and emotion-oriented strategies of emotion regulation) or school-achievement variables (i.e., German and mathematics achievement) (see Table ?Table2).2). Consequently, age and intelligence were entered as control variables in further analyses. Table 2 Pearson correlation matrix. Separate MANCOVAs were conducted to test gender differences in school achievement (i.e., German and mathematics achievement) and in self-regulation (i.e., behavior regulation, problem- and emotion-oriented strategies of emotion regulation). In both MANCOVAs age and intelligence were included as covariates. Using a Bonferroni adjusted alpha level of .025, the MANCOVA revealed significant gender differences in German achievement favoring girls, F(1, 49) = 5.90, p = .019, ?2 = .11, but no significant gender differences in mathematics achievement F(1, 49) = 1.16, p = .287, ?2 = .02. The MANCOVA regarding gender differences in self-regulation (i.e., behavior regulation, problem- and emotion-oriented strategies of emotion regulation) using a Bonferroni adjusted alpha level of .017, revealed a significant gender effect for behavior regulation favoring girls, F(1, 49) = 6.65, p = .013, ?2 = .12. However, there were no significant gender effects with regard to problem-oriented strategies, F(1, 49) = .14, p = .706, ?2 = .00 or emotion-oriented strategies, F(1, 49) = .01, p = .918, ?2 = .00. The means and standard deviations for school achievement and the self-regulation variables are shown in Table ?Table33. Table 3 Summary statistics for school achievement and self-regulation variables. Further, we tested whether gender differences in children's school achievement were mediated by self-regulation (i.e., behavior regulation, problem and emotion-oriented strategies of emotion regulation). Therefore, two multiple mediation models were tested separately. In one model, German achievement was regarded as a dependent variable and, in the other model, mathematics achievement was regarded as a dependent variable. In both models, age and intelligence were included as control variables. Indirect effects are unstandardized coefficients, which are significant when the 95% confident interval does not contain zero. The relations between gender, self-regulation (i.e., behavior regulation, problem- and emotion-oriented strategies of emotion regulation), and school achievement, controlled for age and intelligence, are presented in Figure ?Figure1.1. Behavior regulation was significantly and positively related to German and mathematics achievement. Problem-oriented strategies were neither significantly associated with German achievement nor mathematics achievement. Emotion-oriented strategies were significantly and negatively related to German achievement but not significantly associated with mathematics achievement. Figure 1 Multiple mediation tests of the relations of gender to German and mathematics achievement mediated by behavior regulation and strategies of emotion regulation. Multiple mediation test of the relation between gender and German achievement mediated by behavior ... Figure ?Figure1A1A shows the results of the mediation model with gender as an independent variable; behavior regulation, problem-oriented strategies, and emotion-oriented strategies as mediator variables; German achievement as the dependent variable; and age and intelligence as covariates. The total effect c was significant, while the direct effect c' was non-significant. Behavior regulation significantly mediated the relation between gender and German achievement (indirect effect = .226, SE = .116, 95% CI [.056, .541]). Behavior regulation was a significant mediator because its 95% confidence interval did not contain zero. Neither problem-oriented strategies nor emotion-oriented strategies were significant mediators (for problem-oriented strategies: indirect effect = .009, SE = .036, 95% CI [-.037, .126]; for emotion-oriented strategies: indirect effect = .007, SE = .063, 95% CI [-.119, .144]; see Figure ?Figure1A1A). Figure ?Figure1B1B shows the results of the mediation model with gender as an independent variable; behavior regulation, problem-oriented strategies and emotion-oriented strategies as mediator variables; mathematics achievement as the dependent variable; and age and intelligence as covariates. The total effect c was not significant, whereas the direct effect c' was significantly negative. This means, there was no significant gender difference in mathematics achievement (total effect c) but, when self-regulation variables were entered in the model, there was a significant direct effect (c') of gender on mathematics favoring boys. Thereby, there was a significant indirect effect of gender on mathematics achievement through behavior regulation (indirect effect = .258, SE = .142, 95% CI [.057, .611]). Hence, there was a suppression effect of behavior regulation on the relation between gender and mathematics achievement. Neither the indirect effect of problem-oriented strategies nor the indirect effect of emotion-oriented strategies were significant (for problem-oriented strategies: indirect effect = .008, SE = .010, 95% CI [-.051, .130]; for emotion-oriented strategies: indirect effect = -.001, SE = .026, 95% CI [-.079, .038]; see Figure ?Figure1B1B). Discussion As hypothesized, the present study revealed that German achievement was higher for girls than for boys. There were no gender differences in mathematics achievement. These results are consistent with the results of some studies in the literature, which have also found higher achievement in German or in other language subjects (e.g., English) by girls but no significant gender differences in mathematics achievement (e.g., Spinath et al., 2010; Kuhl and Hannover, 2012). Extending previous research, we investigated gender differences in German and mathematics achievement taking children's motivation and ability for emotion and behavior regulation into account. The results of the present study revealed that gender differences in German achievement were explained by gender differences in behavior regulation. This finding emphasizes the central function of behavior regulation for German achievement in general as well as the function of behavior regulation for gender differences in German achievement. The interpretation of the results regarding mathematics achievement is more complicated. There was no conventional mediation effect of behavior regulation on the relation between gender and mathematics achievement. Surprisingly, an interesting suppression effect occurred. There was a significant indirect effect of behavior regulation by gender on mathematics achievement. This means that the mathematics achievement of boys is underestimated when analyses do not control for behavior regulation. The suppression effect could be a reason for the inconsistent findings regarding gender differences in mathematics achievement. The gender difference in mathematics achievement favoring boys is not found when analyses do not control for behavior regulation because girls' higher behavior regulation and the positive effect of behavior regulation on mathematics achievement cancel each other out. This finding could explain why some studies find gender differences in mathematics achievement whereas others do not, as shown in the overview by Hannover and Kessels (2011). There might be other variables that moderate the indirect effect of gender on mathematics achievement. For instance, if girls are confronted with negative stereotypes about females' mathematics achievement, their mathematics achievement worsens (e.g., Keller and Dauenheimer, 2003). A recent study by Galdi et al. (2013) has shown that even when girls are not aware of the mathematics-gender stereotype, automatic associations consistent with the stereotype may hinder girls' mathematics achievement. Hence, for girls with strong negative stereotypes about their mathematics achievement or with the presence of stereotype-consistent automatic associations, behavior regulation might be less strongly related to girls' mathematics achievement in comparison to girls with less negative gender stereotypes. In this case, gender differences in mathematics achievement, favoring boys can be found. Without the presence of stereotypes or stereotype-consistent automatic associations, no gender differences in mathematics achievement would be found because of the suppression effect of behavior regulation. In contrast to former studies, in addition to behavior regulation, we examined the role of emotion regulation on gender differences in school achievement. The present study revealed that strategies of emotion regulation (i.e., problem- and emotion-oriented strategies of emotion regulation) did not mediate the relation between gender and school achievement. As post-hoc power analyses revealed low power for detecting small and medium effects, future studies with larger samples and higher power may find significant mediation effects of emotion regulation strategies. Nevertheless, the present study revealed a significant and negative relation between the use of emotion-oriented strategies of emotion regulation and German achievement. This result suggests that children who tend to engage in active coping are more likely to show higher German achievement than children who tend to disengage mentally and behaviorally from stressful school-related situations (e.g., a lot of homework). Strengths and limitations Although the sample size was rather small and children came from a rather homogeneous middle-class socio-economic background, analyses revealed significant gender differences in behavior regulation and German achievement. For instance, gender accounted for a substantial amount of variance in behavior regulation (12%) and German achievement (11%). However, future research using larger and more diverse samples is desirable in order to be able to generalize the findings of the present study to larger populations. Furthermore, emotion regulation was assessed by children's self-reports only. Further studies should include a direct measure of emotion regulation as well as a multiple-measure strategy that takes also other strategies of emotion regulation into account (e.g., reappraisal; Gross and Thompson, 2007). In addition, the present study relied on class teachers' reports for the assessment of children's behavior regulation. Ideally, to measure behavior regulation, direct and multiple-measure strategies should be used. It should also be noted that school grades are teacher evaluations, too. In order to take these limitations into account school achievement was assessed by school grades (i.e., mid-term report grades in German and mathematics) and by standardized achievement tests. Moreover, children's self-regulation (i.e., behavior regulation, emotion regulation) was assessed by teacher report and a self-report measure. Theoretical implications In line with previous results, the present study revealed that German achievement and the motivation and ability for behavior regulation was higher for girls than for boys. Moreover, indirect effects of gender on German and mathematics achievement were mediated by children's behavior regulation, but not by strategies of emotion regulation. Furthermore, mediation analyses indicated that mathematics achievement was higher for boys than for girls. However, gender differences in mathematics achievement were canceled out because of girls' higher motivation and ability for behavior regulation that was positively associated with mathematics achievement. Hence, further studies analyzing gender differences in mathematics achievement should consider the possibility that the mathematics achievement of boys may be underestimated when not controlling for behavior regulation. Further studies should investigate whether variables such as stereotype threat moderate relations between gender, behavior regulation, and mathematics achievement. Moreover, as culture influences the development of self-regulation (Trommsdorff, 2009; Heikamp et al., 2013), longitudinal studies are needed to draw causal conclusions concerning the effect of socialization in different contexts (e.g., culture, family, school) on the development of gender differences in self-regulation and school achievement. Conflict of interest statement The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Acknowledgments This research was financed by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG GZ, TR 169/14-3) to the last author. 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Lack of Effort in School Tied to College Gender Gap
The proportion of men receiving college degrees has stagnated, while women have thrived under the new economic and social realities in the United States and elsewhere, according to two sociologists who have written a new book on the subject. “The world has changed around boys, and they have not adapted as well as girls,” said Claudia Buchmann, a professor of sociology at Ohio State University and co-author of The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools (Russell Sage Foundation, 2013). Buchmann and co-author Thomas DiPrete, professor of sociology at Columbia University, spent more than a decade researching the education gender gap. They wanted to find out why women are now getting more college degrees than ever before, while the proportion of young men doing so hasn’t changed much in more than 50 years. In 1960, 65 percent of all bachelor’s degrees were awarded to men. By 2010, the gender positions reversed and women received 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees. Some commentators blame schools and argue that schools have become too “feminized” and don’t support the way that boys learn. Some have asserted that single-sex education is the best way to help improve boys’ academic achievement. But there’s little evidence to support these arguments, Buchmann said. “Schools haven’t changed that much. Boys have long underachieved in school compared to girls, but it mattered less when they could get good blue-collar jobs without a college degree,” Buchmann said. “In the last few decades, as those good blue-collar jobs have declined, that boys’ performance in school has become a bigger issue.” Meanwhile, new job opportunities have opened for women in our society, giving girls the incentive to use their better academic skills to earn college degrees. Boys’ underachievement compared to girls has nothing to do with intelligence. Study after study shows that boys and girls are very similar in terms of cognitive ability. “But what is striking is that at every level of cognitive ability, boys are getting lower grades than girls. It is not about ability – it is about effort and engagement,” Buchmann said. More girls than boys report that they like school and that good grades are important to them. They also study more than boys. “Success in academics, like success in sports, requires time and effort. Because boys put forth less effort and are less engaged, they get lower grades and are less likely to get through college,” Buchmann said. Some of boys’ underperformance is related to outdated views of masculinity that devalue hard work and effort in school, she said. This is particularly true for boys from blue-collar and lower-class families. Working class fathers may reinforce the idea that school is feminizing because, for them, masculinity is more about physical strength and manual labor than about getting good grades. Many boys from middle-class families, whose fathers have managerial and white-collar jobs, often develop an “instrumental” approach to school, Buchmann said. Regardless of how much they like school, they have learned how to do well in school in order to get a well-paying job and achieve material success. “For these boys, notions of what it means to be a man are much more in tune with what is required to be successful in today’s economy,” she said. Buchmann said the best solution to the education gender gap is to focus efforts on the “middle third” of students – many of whom are boys - who have the ability to go to college, but who are not honing the academic skills they will need to successfully graduate. These are generally students who are getting mostly “B” grades in their classes, with a few “C”s. The top third of students are those, mostly from white-collar families, who are already on track to successfully finish college, while the bottom third don’t have the resources and skills to realistically finish a four-year degree. In order to reach these boys in the middle third, the answer isn’t single-sex classrooms, or making schools more “boy-friendly,” Buchmann said. “This taps into those narrow notions of what boys and men are like. That is going to backfire,” she said.
“Instead, we need schools to expect high levels of effort and academic achievement of all students, including boys. Schools need to break down the gendered stereotypes that say that real men don’t work hard in school.” Schools also need to do a better job of teaching students about the pathways through college to a good job. They need to make clear what kinds of grades students will need, and what kind of classes they need to take, to get the job they want to have. This should start in elementary school, but should be especially emphasized in middle and high schools. “Many boys say they expect to go to college, and many will enroll, but their expectations about what it will take to succeed are way off. They underestimate the work and effort they need to put forth,” she said. In one survey, 65 percent of boys in 8th grade expected they would get at least a bachelor’s degree. “Not even half of the boys who think they are going to get a college degree will actually do so,” Buchmann said. “Those years from 7th to 12th grade are crucial for really learning good study skills, learning how to apply yourself to your studies, and how to stay motivated even when the schoolwork is not particularly fun.” The good news is that the same changes that will help more boys achieve college success will help girls as well. “This is not a zero-sum
game,” Buchmann said. “Helping boys to succeed in
school won’t hurt girls. It is all about closing the
gender gap.” Sugar and spice
and… math under-achievement? Why classrooms, not
girls, need fixing Boaler, a Professor of Math Education in Stanford’s School of Education, explained in a recent presentation why traditional ways of teaching math through rote memorization just aren’t cutting it. Her research shows that by simply changing the way math is taught, gender differences in math achievement and math confidence disappear. Are girls really worse at math? Boaler is often asked whether the “girl problem” is just a “gene problem.” Americans tend to understand gender differences in math achievement as unchanging—unchangeable—differences in the way that boys and girls think. Girls just aren’t “hard wired” for math, some say. But decades of research proves this assumption wrong. For one, gender gaps in math achievement have rapidly declined over the last century—far outpacing any possible shifts in human genetics. Additionally, gender differences are country-specific: in some European nations, boys’ and girls’ math performance is equal. In places like Iceland, girls outperform boys. If gender differences vary by culture, then can these differences really be genetic? Perhaps most compelling, researchers examined over 250 separate studies of gender differences in math and found no appreciable differences in ability once the number of math courses boys and girls took was held constant. Many educational decision-makers now understand that girls’ preferences are not a result of genetics but rather the different ways boys and girls are treated by peers, teachers and parents vis-à-vis math. To address this issue, schools abound with math camps, extracurricular activities, and special (often pink) toys meant to develop girls’ confidence and interest in math. But, Boaler asks, if the learning contexts are the problem, why are most policies aimed at addressing gender differences in math still trying to fix girls? Fix the classrooms, not the girls Educational environments in which girls and boys learn math need changing, says Boaler. The majority of math classrooms in the U.S. take a traditional approach to learning, where teachers introduce students to progressively more difficult mathematical procedures. Students are expected to memorize these procedures and then execute them on homework and tests. Math problems are usually the closed-ended type where a single answer can be circled at the end, and math procedures are usually taught by extracting them from real-world situations where a person might actually need to use those procedures. For most of us, save the obtuse word problem here and there, learning math meant scribbling down, memorizing, and recapitulating the long strings of equations our teachers wrote on the board. Just because this is the way most of us were taught math does not mean it’s the only way, the best way, or the most gender equitable way. Boaler asks: what if we identified the learning environments that produced the most equitable and successful results and then used those learning environments as templates for the way math should be taught? Boaler’s research actually identified such a learning environment. She studied approaches to math education at two otherwise nearly-identical high schools in England: “Amber Hill” and “Phoenix Park.” Amber Hill approached math the traditional way—students copied down formulas from the board, completed worksheets, and were split up into one of eight ability groups. At this school, boys did better in math than girls. Things were different at Phoenix Park. Instead of a traditional environment, students learned math through collaboration, working together with their classmates to solve complex, multi-dimensional, open-ended problems. At Phoenix Park, boys and girls performed equally well in math and both boys and girls scored at higher levels than the students who had learned math traditionally. But what about the boys? Skeptics might argue that this erasure of gender differences was achieved because boys’ math performance slipped in the Phoenix Park context. But, that’s simply not the case—Boaler found that, although the improvement was smaller in magnitude, boys at Phoenix Park also scored slightly better than boys at Amber Hill. If a learning environment produces a more equitable learning experience for one group of students without negatively affecting the other group’s math achievement, why wouldn’t we adopt this new approach? Boaler explains that there is a surprisingly high level of resistance among parents, teachers, and principals to this new way of teaching math. Part of this resistance may be due to the belief that math is a rite of passage of sorts, which builds character and perseverance in young people. “I struggled through my math courses,” some say, “and so should today’s students.” But the fact is, Boaler explains, “compared to other academic subjects—English, science, etc—the way we teach math to children is very different from the way math education researchers have identified as the most effective way to teach math.” By realigning math education to be more like the gender-equitable learning environments at Phoenix Park, we can move the dialog—and the blame—from what’s wrong with girls to how we can make math education better for everyone. Of course, not all parents have the ability to place their children in gender-equitable math learning environments. For those parents, Boaler has an important piece of advice: parents should emphasize to their children that being good at math is an achievement, not a gift. Once students—especially girls—understand that being good at math is something that one can earn, they are likely to be more confident in their math abilities, and less willing to give up on math. oys in math in high school. Three
students were accepted from our high school to MIT and they
are all girls. One person was accepted to Stanford and she
is a girl. If you look at the girls in middle school now,
they are passing the boys. Do you have any data on how boys
are being left behind now in middle school and high school?
I never see scholarships specifically for boys; Gender and
Academic Achievement During the past decade, there has been a concerted effort to find out why there is a shortage of women in the science, math, engineering, and technical fields (AAUW, 1992). In 1995, 22% of America’s scientists and engineers were women, compared to half of the social scientists. Women who do pursue careers in science, engineering, and mathematics most often choose fields in the biological sciences, where they represent 40% of the workforce, with smaller percentages found in mathematics or computer science (33%), the physical sciences (22%), and engineering (9%) (National Science Board, 1998). Part of the explanation can be traced to gender differences in the cognitive abilities of middle-school students. In late elementary school, females outperform males on several verbal skills tasks: verbal reasoning, verbal fluency, comprehension, and understanding logical relations (Hedges & Nowell, 1995). Males, on the other hand, outperform females on spatial skills tasks such as mental rotation, spatial perception, and spatial visualization (Voyer, Voyer, & Bryden, 1995). Males also perform better on mathematical achievement tests than females. However, gender differences do not apply to all aspects of mathematical skill. Males and females do equally well in basic math knowledge, and girls actually have better computational skills. Performance in mathematical reasoning and geometry shows the greatest difference (Fennema, Sowder, & Carpenter, 1999). Males also display greater confidence in their math skills, which is a strong predictor of math performance (Casey, Nuttall, & Pezaris, 2001). The poorer mathematical reasoning skills exhibited by many female adolescents have several educational implications. Beginning at age 12, girls begin to like math and science less and to like language arts and social studies more than do boys (Kahle & Lakes, 2003; Sadker & Sadker, 1994). They also do not expect to do as well in these subjects and attribute their failures to lack of ability (Eccles, Barber, Jozefowicz, Malenchuk, & Vida, 1999). By high school, girls self-select out of higher-level, “academic-track” math and science courses, such as calculus and chemistry. One of the long-term consequences of these choices is that girls lack the prerequisite high school math and science courses necessary to pursue certain majors in college (e.g., engineering, computer science). Consequently, the number of women who pursue advanced degrees in these fields is significantly reduced (Halpern, 2004). Some researchers, on the one hand, argue that the gender gap in mathematics is biologically driven. Selected research shows that prenatal hormones circulating in the brain encourage differential development in the hemispheres of male and female fetuses (Berenbaum, Korman, & Leveroni, 1995). Others believe intelligence has its roots in genetics (Plomin, 2000). There is evidence, however, that sociocultural factors may influence girls’ attitudes toward math and science. For example, parents tend to view math as more important for sons and language arts and social studies as more important for daughters (Andre, Whigham, Hendrickson, & Chambers, 1999). Parents are more likely to encourage their sons to take advanced high school courses in chemistry, mathematics, and physics and have higher expectations for their success (Wigfield, Battle, Keller, & Eccles, 2002). Teacher characteristics and the classroom environment also have been identified as contributors to this gender gap. Seventh and eighth graders attending math and science camps identified a math or science teacher as “a person who has made math, science, or engineering interesting” for them (Gilbert, 1996, p. 491). Unfortunately, many females report being passed over in classroom discussions, not encouraged by the teacher, and made to feel stupid (Sadker & Sadker, 1994). Classroom environments can be made to feel more “girl-friendly” by incorporating Fortunately, sex differences in mathematical reasoning have begun to decline, and females’ enrollments are up in math and science courses (Campbell, Hombo, & Mazzeo, 2000; Freeman, 2004). Programs designed to interest girls in math and science and that demonstrate how this knowledge will allow them to help others appear to be working. Excerpt from Middle Childhood
Development: A Contextual Approach, by M.J. Zembar, L.B.
Blume, 2009 edition, p. 212-215. Gender
Segregation: Separate But Effective? Dozens of presentations extolled the superiority of gender-segregated classrooms and entire schools, with lecture titles such as, “Burps, Farts and Snot: Teaching Chemistry To Middle School Boys,” and “Just Don’t Say ‘SEX’ — tips on how to implement single-gender programs in conservative, rural communities.” Attendees ranged from Chicago and Philadelphia inner-city high school teachers to elementary school principals from small towns in Idaho and Indiana. They represented a fraction of recent converts to the Single Sex Public Education (SSPE) movement, which has expanded at a remarkable pace. In 2002, only 11 public schools in the United States had gender-segregated classrooms. As of December 2009, there were more than 550. The movement is based on the hypothesis that hard-wired differences in the ways that male and female brains develop and function in childhood through adolescence require classrooms in which boys and girls are not only separated by gender, but also taught according to radically different methods. For example, SSPE doctrine calls for teachers in male classrooms to be constantly moving and speaking in a loud voice, even to the point of shouting, while teachers in female classes should be still and use a calming tone. This differentiation stems from the central tenet of SSPE ideology that young males thrive on competition and confrontation, while young females require a more nurturing and cooperative learning environment. “When most young boys are exposed to threat and confrontation, their senses sharpen, and they feel a thrill,” explains Dr. Leonard Sax, the founder and executive director of the National Associate for Single Sex Public Education. “When most young girls are exposed to such stimuli, however, they feel dizzy and yucky.” In a landmark essay published in the Spring 2006 edition of Educational Horizons, just as the SSPE movement was gaining strong momentum, Dr. Sax detailed the different ways elementary school teachers should address their students in gender-segregated classes. “[The teacher] may move right in front of a boy and say, ‘What’s your answer, Mr. Jackson? Give it to me!’ Far from being intimidated, boys are energized by this teaching style. With girls [teachers should] speak more softly, use first names, terms of endearment and fewer direct commands: ‘Lisa, sweetie, it’s time to open your book. Emily, darling, would you please sit down for me and join us in this exercise?’” The title of Dr. Sax’s essay was “Six Degrees of Separation,” a reference to the SSPE guideline that while the perfect ambient temperature for a male classroom is 69 degrees Fahrenheit, females learn most effectively at 75 degrees. Heroic Behavior vs. Wedding Cakes Separating boys and girls is a longstanding tradition at private and parochial schools. The concept began to gain traction in American public schools earlier this decade as schools began to experiment with SSPE in oft-desperate attempts to reduce disciplinary problems and improve test scores. The Department of Education accelerated the trend in 2006 by altering the Title IX provision of the No Child Left Behind Act to ease restrictions on gender-segregated education in public schools. Since then, advocates like Dr. Sax, a child psychologist who never set foot in a classroom as a teacher, have stepped up their promotion of SSPE as a panacea for public education. With scant evidence backing them up, they herald SSPE as the most effective way to narrow the achievement gaps between rich and poor students and black and white students that persist eight years after the passage of No Child Left Behind. Although SSPE programs are now in place at schools in 39 states and the District of Columbia, they are particularly popular in urban districts with large minority populations, and most concentrated in the Southeastern U.S. South Carolina has 173 SSPE schools, by far the most of any state. Last year, the largest school system in Alabama, the Mobile County Public School System, with 66,000 students, implemented SSPE programs in eight of its 93 schools with no parental notification. The most extreme program was at Hankins Middle School in Theodore, Alabama, where boys and girls ate lunch at different times and were prohibited from speaking to one another on school grounds. Hankins teachers were directed to create “competitive, high-energy” classrooms for boys and “cooperative, quiet” classrooms for girls. Boys were to be taught “heroic behavior.” Girls were to learn “good character.” Sixth-grade language arts exercises called for boys to brainstorm action words used in sports. Girls were instructed to describe their dream wedding cake. Electives were gender-specific. Boys took computer applications. Girls took drama. No exceptions. Mark Jones, whose son Jacob attends Hankins, said that when he complained to the principal about the changes, she told him they were necessary because “boys’ and girls’ brains were so different they needed different curriculum.” “Segregating boys and girls didn’t make things any better for our children. In fact they made things worse,” Jones said. “Our kids were basically being taught ideas about gender that come from the Dark Ages.” Another parent, Terry Stevens, also objected. “The real world is integrated, and it’s important to both me and my son that he learn in a coed environment,” Stevens said. Other parents and students disagreed. “You learn more like this,” 11-year-old Brenda Orduna told the Mobile Press-Register after making the honor roll at the end of the first quarter for the first time in her academic career. “When boys are around, you’re shy. And you won’t ask questions if you don’t get it.” Muddled Results The Mobile County SSPE experiment was short-lived. The district terminated all eight of its SSPE programs last March after the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to file a lawsuit on behalf of Jones and Stevens. The ACLU took the position that the Hankins program violated even the slackened Title IX provision. (The other seven Mobile County SSPE programs either offered all elective courses to both genders, in single-sex classrooms, or made their SSPE programs optional, with co-ed alternatives. At Hankins, they were mandatory.) “While schools might think that sex-segregated classes will be a quick fix for failing schools, in reality they are inherently unequal and shortchange both boys and girls,” said Emily Martin, Deputy Director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Program. “There is no reliable evidence that segregating students by sex improves learning by either sex.“ It is fair to say the supposed benefits of gender-segregated education in public schools claimed by SSPE supporters are unproven. On the other hand, there is no solid evidence that SSPE is harmful to the learning process of either gender, as critics argue. SSPE is such a relatively new phenomenon that no major credible studies have been conducted of its long-term efficacy. Likewise, research into gender-segregated education in general, let alone the controversial teaching methods promoted by the SSPE movement, has been inconclusive. A 2006 study completed at the College of Education at Arizona State University showed that most of the research into gender-segregated education thus far has been of questionable value. According to the ASU study, the “research … is mostly flawed by failure to control for important variables such as class, financial status, selective admissions, religious values, prior learning or ethnicity.” The ASU study also found that the methodology of less than 2 percent of the more than 2,000 quantitative studies of gender-segregated education was of high enough quality to meet the standards of the National Center for Education Statistics. In 2005 the Department of Education released a comprehensive meta-analysis of gender-segregated education scholarship, titled “Single Sex Versus Coeducational Schooling: A Systematic Review.” The DOE found the results “equivocal.” “There is some support for the premise that single-sex schooling can be helpful especially for certain outcomes related to academic achievement and more positive academic aspirations,” the DOE reported. “For many outcomes, there is no evidence of either benefit or harm. There is limited support for the view that single-sex schooling may be harmful.” The DOE report included the caveat that most research into gender-segregated education has been conducted in private Catholic schools, which hardly makes for an apples-to-apples comparison to public education. “Sex segregation doesn’t make public schools more like private schools,” says Allison Neal, staff attorney with the ACLU of Alabama. “If some private schools provide a better education, it’s because of their resources, not because they’re single sex.” ‘A Self-Confidence Thing’ Dr. Sax counters the mixed results of the Department of Education analysis by pointing out that most of the studies reviewed by the DOE involved merely segregating boys and girls in different classrooms without deploying SSPE teaching methods. “The most obvious explanation for the variation is that merely placing girls and boys in separate classrooms accomplishes little,” he said. “For the single-sex format to lead to improvements in academic performance, teachers must understand the hard-wired differences in how girls and boys learn and incorporate the best practices for all-female classrooms and all-male classrooms.” Dr. Sax has made a cottage industry of training public school teachers in those classroom practices. He maintains that two days of training, 14 hours total, is all that’s needed to prepare the staff of a public school to switch from coeducation to SSPE. Since 2002, Dr. Sax by his own count has led such two-day conversion seminars for more than 300 schools in the United States, Canada and Mexico. One of them was Carman Trails, an elementary school in the Parkway School District, which is in the St. Louis area. Despite a lack of test data to prove the program is working, SSPE at Carman Trails has won over teachers, parents and students. The program is expanding. When it began two years ago, it was limited to first grade. For the 2008-2009 academic year, first- and second-graders were segregated by gender. In February 2009, at the urging of enthusiastic parents, principal Chris Raeker grew the program to include the third grade. Raeker said that since implementing the SSPE program, fewer boys are being sent to the principal’s office, their overall attendance is up and they are participating in school clubs in higher numbers. First-grade teacher Alicia Wall said the program is benefiting girls in different ways. “I definitely see a self-confidence thing,” Wall said. “The girls are ready to learn and ready to work. In coed classes, they’re afraid to say something. They’re afraid to be wrong.” The anecdotal success stories from schools like Carman Trails fail to sway opponents of SSPE, which include members of the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Association of University Women. They argue that SSPE is not a silver bullet for improving performance in public schools. Further, they point out that segregating students by race based on supposed differences in brain function between, for example, Asian students and African American students, would be decried as racist and arouse widespread protests. “School districts across the
country are experimenting with sex-segregated programs,
which rely on questionable brain science theories based on
outdated gender stereotypes,” said the ACLU’s
Martin. “Instead, these districts should focus on
efforts that we know can improve all students’
education, like smaller classes and more teacher training
and parental involvement.” Gender
differences in adolescent academic achievement, interests,
values and life-role expectations
To ensure greatest confidence in our data we were careful to compare our results with those ... girls appear to have a better attitude toward learning for learning's sake as compared to boys ... Next, a comparison across the three subject areas will be presented and gender and grade ... Gender
differences in mathematics performance: a
meta-analysis. The psychology of gender: Advances through meta-analysis. ... A comparison of the relationships between the level of acceptance of sex-role stereotyping and achievement and attitudes ... Differential prediction of academic achievement in elementary and junior high school by sex. ... Age
and gender differences in children's self-and task
perceptions during elementary school
(not at all good, very good) MU.ABIL.2 Compared to most of ... It also allows the researcher to compare the fit of the same model across various groups. ... These comparative tests can be ordered from least to most restrictive, with the least restrictive test comparing whether the factor ... Early
gender differences in self-regulation and academic
achievement. First, how does a direct measure of behavioral self-regulation compare with teacher ratings of ... self-regulation at kindergarten entry were expected to demonstrate greater gains compared with boys ... achievement were not expected to be as large as those for gender differences in ... Gender
differences in gifted and average-ability students comparing
girls' and boys' achievement, self-concept, interest, and
motivation in mathematics
Comparing Girls' and Boys' Achievement, Self-Concept, ... This study investigated gender differences in gifted sixth graders, as compared with gender differ- ences in a ... Table 2 Means, Standard Deviations, and Effect Sizes for the Comparison of Achievement (Grades and Test ... Longitudinal
structural equation models of academic self-concept and
achievement: Gender differences in the development of math
and English constructs
subject, and an internal (ipsative-like) reference, in which students compare their performances ... More recently, Feingold (1994) compared results from three meta-analyses of gender ... standardized achievement tests, there have been surprisingly few studies comparing these two ... The
impact of job applicants' facial maturity, gender, and
academic achievement on hiring
recommendations for male than female applicants, although all were significant for both genders, all ps ... an advantage for both jobs, the effects of facial maturity and gender depended upon ... Compared with applicants who were male or maturefaced, female or babyfaced applicants were rated as ... Cultural
capital, gender, and school success: The role of
habitus upon cultural capital and on the inclination to invest in the academic market" (Bourdieu 1973 ... Moreover, one's habitus is also gendered as a result of the possibilities available to each ... of habitus may be stronger for male students because (according to gender- socialization theory ... The nature, effects, and relief of mathematics anxiety R Hembree - Journal for research in mathematics education, 1990 - JSTOR Each comparison was drawn in terms of an effect size; then related groups were analyzed through ... How do its levels compare between courses and respecting college majors? ... Thirteen studies of college mathe- matics were found, comparing the test scores of students with high ... A
multifaceted academic self-concept: Its hierarchical
structure and its relation to academic
achievement. The model further posits an internal comparison process for which students compare their self ... Because math achievement and verbal achievement are compared with each other, it is the ... and when math achievement is better than verbal achievement (the internal comparison). ... Gender
differences in verbal ability: A
meta-analysis. A comparison of composition scores of third-grade children with reading skills, pre-kindergarten verbal ability, self-concept, and sex. ... In C. Ounsted & DC Taylor (Eds.), Gender differences: Their ontogeny and significance(pp. 123-157). ... New York: Academic Press. ... The
path through math: Course sequences and academic performance
at the intersection of race-ethnicity and
gender Comparing this to model 2 for male students, the main effects for failure and high grades are comparable for female students and male ... While African American and Latino students of both genders generally start high school in lower math courses compared with their white ... The
family-school relation and the child's school
performance Compared to other so- cial characteristics of families, such as family size, income, and ... tended to choose college preparatory courses for their child independent of the child's academic performance. ... interrela- tions among parental involvement, age of the child, and gender of the ... The
academic achievement of adolescents from immigrant families:
The role of family background, attitudes, and
behavior students try to over- look the difficulties of their current experiences by comparing them to ... and ethnicity were dummy coded, with the categories listed in the table compared to the ... To compare the school performance of the two generations of students from immigrant families (?rst ... researchgate.net [PDF] Gender
differences in Internet use patterns and Internet
application preferences: A two-sample
comparison .testing of college students provides a known comparison base against which to compare the general pop ... represented a relatively young and inexperienced sample of Internet users in comparison to the ... see Table 2). Duncan multi- ple-range tests (p 5 .05) comparing age group ... Expectancy–value
theory of achievement motivation
These definitions are compared to those of related constructs, including self-efficacy, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and interest. ... Expectancies, values, and academic behaviors. ... Gender differences in sport involvement: Applying the Eccles' expectancy-value model. ... Growing
minds: The effect of a school gardening program on the
science achievement of elementary
students Gender
differences in personality: a
meta-analysis. 69-119). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. ... Cross-cultural comparison of sex-related differences on intelligence tests: A meta-analysis. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 18(3), 283-314. ... Gender differences in eating attitudes, body concept, and self-esteem among models. ... Gender
differences in self-efficacy and attitudes toward
computers Gardener, Discenza, and Dukes compared CAS with three other computer attitude scales and recommended CAS for research if it contains sub- scales measuring the constructs of interest [45]. ... 39. V. Makrakis. Cross-cultural Comparison of Gender Differences in Attitude ... Relation
of self-efficacy expectations to academic achievement and
persistence. In every comparison, differences
favored high-self-efficacy subjects. ... of the high-level
and each of the high-strength subjects persisted for all
four quarters, compared to 58 ... Finally, to explore gender
differences in self-efficacy, data on the four scales were
subjected to a repeated ... |
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