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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: 2) by Angry Jesus on Friday May 02 2014, @05:37PM
> You can't have it both ways;
Black and white thinking is rarely true. In the article I previously linked to they found that as long as the differences aren't too extreme, the advanced children do not suffer a significant detriment by having the less developed children in the same classroom.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday May 02 2014, @06:57PM
No one said you have to have 30 classes for 30 different kids, since every kid is unique and doesn't learn exactly the same way or at exactly the same pace. However, taking 30 random kids and sticking them together is exactly what mainstreaming is, and doesn't work because the difference between the smartest and dumbest kids is too extreme.
It also doesn't help that some kids value education, while others don't, and sticking them together just yields bullying, and kids learning that it's not "cool" to get good grades.
(Score: 2) by Angry Jesus on Friday May 02 2014, @07:16PM
> No one said you have to have 30 classes for 30 different kids
So where are you drawing the line?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday May 02 2014, @07:25PM
Well in Germany, at around our high school level, they divide kids into 3 different schools: one for the dumbest kids, one for the reasonably-intelligent ones who will end up in trades or technician-type jobs, and one for university-bound kids. Seems like a good system to me, and seems to work quite well for them.
(Score: 2) by Angry Jesus on Friday May 02 2014, @08:01PM
And you think that is a significant factor in their economy's productivity? They aren't the only country with segregated educational tracks, most of europe has some variation on that theme.
As for bullying, it doesn't seem to make all that much difference with 29% of german students saying that bullying is a problem at school, [theguardian.com] putting them in middle of the pack for europe.