Why Girls Do Better At School 690
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Soulskill
from the sugar-and-spice-are-actually-performance-enhancing-drugs dept.
from the sugar-and-spice-are-actually-performance-enhancing-drugs dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A new study explains why girls do better at school, even when their scores on standardized tests remain low. Researchers from University of Georgia and Columbia University say the variation in school grades between boys and girls may be because girls have a better attitude toward learning than boys. One of the study's lead authors, Christopher Cornwell, said, 'The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as "approaches toward learning." You can think of "approaches to learning" as a rough measure of what a child's attitude toward school is: It includes six items that rate the child's attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization. I think that anybody who's a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that.' Cornwell went on about what effect this has had now that education has become more pervasive: 'We seem to have gotten to a point in the popular consciousness where people are recognizing the story in these data: Men are falling behind relative to women. Economists have looked at this from a number of different angles, but it's in educational assessments that you make your mark for the labor market. Men's rate of college going has slowed in recent years whereas women's has not, but if you roll the story back far enough, to the 60s and 70s, women were going to college in much fewer numbers. It's at a point now where you've got women earning upward of 60 percent of the bachelors' degrees awarded every year.'"
I saw a documentary (Score:2, Funny)
I saw a documentary on this awesome (yet rarely mentioned) site called 'Naughty America' that covered how girls get good grades in detail. Must watch.
Re:Going to get modded down as sexist for this, bu (Score:3, Funny)
What about men like me, who swear they were born a lesbian trapped in a man's body?
Seems like I get the best of both worlds, I'm smarter than all the women, but have all the natural rule-following traits of actual women.
Plus the added benefit of being heterosexual gives me tremendously more opportunities to pass my traits on to future generations :)
Re:Going to get modded down as sexist for this, bu (Score:3, Funny)
Charts? I wanna see pictures.
Re:Going to get modded down as sexist for this, bu (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I can relate... (Score:2, Funny)
(same girl who after a whole semester of C++ took several hours to implement the most basic version of "cat" in C).
Just because she couldn't think of a good way to do it without using a struct she is automatically a bad programmer?