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Here's 100 Years of Proof That Girls Are Better Students Than Boys. In all subjects, even math and science.
In 2006, Newsweek magazine declared it, loud, on their cover: America's boys were in crisis. Boys were falling behind their female counterparts in school. They were getting worse grades, lagging on standardized tests, and not attending college in the same numbers as girls. "By almost every benchmark," Peg Tyre, the author of the cover story, wrote, "boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind." And so it began-the end of men, but also an ongoing conversation on how to better boys' performance in the classroom. From the article:
This "boy crisis," however, was based on an assumption: that males had previously been on top. Granted, there was evidence to support that idea. For one, educational institutions for most of modern history have been openly sexist, favoring boys. And traditionally, males had outperformed girls in standardized tests and in math and science. But "by the mid-1990s, girls had reduced the gap in math, and more girls than boys were taking high-school-level biology and chemistry," Tyre wrote.
The assumption that boys had been the better students didn't seem right to (married) researchers Daniel and Susan Voyer of the University of New Brunswick in Canada. "I've been collecting grade data for a long time," Daniel Voyer says in a phone interview. "Typically if you find gender differences, they are in favor of girls - it doesn't matter what it is. So it started to kind of puzzle me." And so the pair set out to test, collecting every study they could find on grades and gender since 1914 and crunching the numbers in a mega-meta analysis, the first of its kind.
While the girls' advantage is largest in reading and language studies, it exists for all subjects, even math and science. And though they tested data from across the world, the Voyers found the gender gap was largest in the United States.
What's most striking is that the gender gap held across the decades. If the boy crisis existed, they would have seen boys' performance peak and fall over time. That wasn't the case. "Boys have been lagging for a long time and ... this is a fairly stable phenomenon," the paper concluded.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by metamonkey on Friday May 02 2014, @01:47PM
The problem I see is all of these programs that are targeted at girls while ignoring boys, when it turns out the boys have bigger problems than the girls. "Get young girls coding!" "How do we get more girls interested in science?" "After school math clubs for girls!" I just don't see the same kind of programs for boys.
I think if you tried to create a program specifically targeting improving the performance or interest level of boys you'd be screamed at for sexism, and promoting the patriarchy or whatever. And that's sad because according to this study (and other studies I've seen reported) the average girl is doing better than the average boy. As you say, the outliers are more likely to be boys, but the dullards are more likely to be boys, too.
If we're going for equality of outcome, we need to focus attention on average boys to try to get their scores up to the level of average girls. The brilliant boys can teach themselves. Just give them an open avenue to explore, create and learn and they'll take off all by themselves. As for the dullards, well, somebody's got to dig ditches. But it's the average boy who's falling behind, and all the programs are targeted at girls.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.