Why Girls Do Better At School 690
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.'"
Differing learning styles (Score:4, Interesting)
As a math / science teacher (Score:5, Interesting)
I teach highschool math and physics, and by far, a disproportinate amount of my "better students" are female. I will not go as far to say that they are more or less smart (choose whichever difinition of smart that you like) than the male students, but the results among myself and teacher friends from across the region do not lie. The majority of female students I have can solve the assigned problems more accurately, and quickly than the their male counterparts. Is it attention span? Hormones? I can't say. It's merely an observation.
Survey says.... (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a survey a while back that I heard some NPR commentators bantering about a while back (few years ago, tried to find a link but nothing is popping up)
We all know the standard stereotype is that men are threatend by smart/hard working women, look down at them, don't consider them good mates etc....
What they were finding was that these attridues were becoming less common in younger boys, and younger boys have been,more and more, indicating that they find intelligence and hard work attractive in women and don't really see just a "housewife" as a woman's place.
Leading me to remember an old quote about scientific theories and thinking it may apply to social ones:
Grading/Tests are flawed (Score:5, Interesting)
It's like an old co-worker of mine that a week after passing his Network+ certification, he truthfully asked me what a router was. He had no clue. He was just good at memorizing questions, and he spent a few weeks memorizing a ton of practice tests. He gamed the system. I pity any one who hires him thinking that he has any of the skills he's certified for.
Re:Going to get modded down as sexist for this, bu (Score:2, Interesting)
The original poster is considerably more accurate in his analysis.
Coed education (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was young all-boy and all-girl schools were going away. The feminists argued that it was discriminatory against girls.
Then later the feminists started arguing that girls had to be separated from boys in class because they were intimidated by the boys.
Frankly I think single sex classrooms would be better. Taking away some of the sexual distractions. At the same time there is something to be said for mixed ed sex. Maybe what I would do is build all-boy and all-girl schools next to each other.
Re:Feminization of US schools (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:...and yet (Score:5, Interesting)
The economist in me says: "If the market could truly bear women being paid 20% less than men, then employers would only hire women." All businesses are looking for any means to cut costs.
No, I'm not saying women should be paid less or do an inferior job; I'm saying that old statistic is grossly over-used and over-applied.
Re:Going to get modded down as sexist for this, bu (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree with quite a bit with what the GP said, but I do agree with teachers cutting them more slack. It's like speeding tickets. It's been my observation that females are a lot more likely to get a warning instead of a ticket from a cop than a guy. Girls are more likely to get emotional over the grades.
Maybe that creates an additional incentive for them to study (to avoid their emotional stress), or maybe it gives them additional incentive to use emotional manipulation. It's hard to tell.
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Interesting)
if girls do worse on standardized tests, how do we conclude they do better at school?
The answer is in the summary. Teachers give girls better grades. Standardized tests give boys better grades.
Re:Going to get modded down as sexist for this, bu (Score:5, Interesting)
I once read a summary of a study that indicated this is somewhat wrong. Boys and girls both have roughly the same averages, but boys have a higher standard deviation. This means there are more "smart" boys and more "dumb" boys; but boys aren't smarter overall. It did mean that if you asked, "How many of [gender] have [intelligence at some high sigma]?" it would indicate there were more boys, unless you were looking for people around the median. No idea if this was ever corroborated but I thought it was interesting.
Time for a Calvin Coolidge classic:
I don't see the additional bachelor's degrees or the additional brains as a guarantee of anything. The genius who flunks out of college because he discovers for the first time he actually has to study and actually has no idea how to do it is almost proverbial.
Re:School targets girls (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree, although I've never done a formal study. Girls may exhibit all the symptoms in TFA, but to me that shows true interest. Boys weren't interested because it was mostly a social playground, and most of the boys I know couldn't have cared less about all that. But most of the girls seemed drawn to school like flies and spent their free time thinking about it.
Certainly all the group work and social circle jerk that went on when I was in school was a huge turn off and a major cause for most of my class cutting. My sister went just for that, and I really think that's why she got disinterested in math and science where the mostly male teachers (laid off from defense companies back in the day) didn't have much use for that.
Certainly that's how my own kids are trending too. It concerns me because in spite of TFA, girls don't do as well in math and science later on (when it actually matters) and I don't really want my daughter falling in to the trap that most girls in HS seem to get in to and ending up with a BA in English Lit because "i'm dumb at math".
Re:Going to get modded down as sexist for this, bu (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe that creates an additional incentive for them to study (to avoid their emotional stress)
Anecdotal evidence, but:
Social competition. For females, it's much, much more brutal and vicious, and happens earlier, than for males. In the schools I attended, girls were clique-ish and segregating themselves by the second grade. That shit didn't start happening for boys until around seventh grade, as I recall.
Girls who did badly? We ostracized them, led in fact by members of their own gender.
Boys? Nobody cared who did what, and everybody - everybody - loved the scholastically inept but hilarious class clown.
I'd need a doctorate to even begin to describe the convoluted social pecking order they fairer sex had set up for themselves, but for whatever reason, doing terrible at school seemed to be the quickest way to be thrown to the bottom of the heap. I actually suspect it may have something to do with primarily having female teachers at young ages - it perhaps sets a certain expectation. I'd be curious to see if there's any difference in the lower grades where male teachers are the primary instructors.
But school was a goddamned nightmare, and I'm not going through that again. :p
Re:Differing learning styles (Score:5, Interesting)
Being a lady-engineer, I have personal experience of being rejected by men for being "too smart". Fortunately, it made it easier to avoid sexist, control freaks.
As for selecting a partner with lower education and income level, for me that was less of a concern than selecting a *partner* -- someone with similar interests who advanced the common prosperity of the partnership.
And as my gentleman-engineer partner tells his co-workers who complain about their own under-achieving wives, "You could have found have married a smart girl, too, if you had been willing to risk your ego."
Re:Going to get modded down as sexist for this, bu (Score:5, Interesting)
I've noted pretty much the same thing going through school. My older sister and I were in the same Chem class at one point and were lab partners. I did the work, she got the A I got the B. It was very clear comparing our tests and labs, where we had extremely similar answers, that the teacher preferred her work to mine even though her work was mine with nicer hand writing. The end result is I finished university, got married and have a great job and she's a college drop out and depends on her boyfriend to support her, despite her perfect GPA being double mine all through school.
I'm not saying men in general are smarter than women, it just strikes me that in the general sense maybe we have different strengths. Grading in the school system favors the strengths of women and practical application favors the strengths of men.
I've also observed is several cases teachers, epically male ones, are more likely to provide help to female students as opposed to male students. This could have some affected on why girls seem to do better in a controlled environment where regurgitation of knowledge and complying with a superiors is more valued over practical application and challenging authority.
Of course it doesn't really matter, there could be thousands
Re:Going to get modded down as sexist for this, bu (Score:5, Interesting)
There is one very large fundamental difference. "black" and "white" are socially perceived categories very loosely based on some genetic traits that relate to appearance.
Gender is a legitimate biological difference that has a massive impact biologically, chemically, and socially. It isn't a made up category based on some arbitrary perception of appearance but a real tangible distinction. I am of course not accounting for the oddball chromosomal flukes that sometimes pop up that can't be easily fit in either category.
But even on the race factor. Take out the political winds of today and the social taboo of suggesting a difference. In the US at least african slaves were literally breed for physical performance while the "white" counterparts succeeded in breeding on different standards particularly economic success which loosely correlates to management and leadership ability. The result is that those with african american heritage have a predisposition to a great count of high twitch muscle fibers that give them athletic advantages (it could be argued that since most african american's today actually are mixed to some degree that they may well enjoy the benefits of both breeding systems). This could well be argued to give them an advantage when performing manual labor.
It really is just a matter of time before we recognize that society isn't going to return to the barbaric practices of the past and the subject becomes less taboo and we admit that while races (or more properly genetic lines since our racial perceptions are bogus) and genders may or may not be "equal" by some particular metric they definitely are different and we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge those differences.
Manual labor may not be highly valued in our society at present so skills there might be somehow be perceived as negative but "rule following" and social skills are actually extremely prized and rewarded in some areas. It could be argued that it highly desirable to have this in every level of management short of the CEO. While the highly intelligent/skilled lone wolf males are more suited to being the CEO he is only one executive. In most other cases you'd want them to be the talent that actually wows your clients and works solutions or the lower tiers of management that are effectively working in the same capacity using their minions as tools.
Re:Going to get modded down as sexist for this, bu (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually this article doesn't indicate that girls are better students. It clearly states that males are doing better on the tests and therefore were better students by the only definition that counts, their ability to absorb, comprehend, and apply the knowledge they were studying. The article indicates that girls are being inappropriately given grades they can't back up while boys are being inappropriately given lower grades than they deserve.
In other words, the article says more about the deficiency in teachers grading methods and criteria than it does about either girls or boys.
Re:Going to get modded down as sexist for this, bu (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally wouldn't blame anyone like that. Busy work in public school is seemingly almost always completely worthless and a waste of time. This isn't always true of real work.
Re:Feminization of US schools (Score:4, Interesting)
Absolutely! As an immigrant from a Commonwealth country with a "traditional" education system, with two sons in the US system, I see this clearly.
My boys are now in high school, and my observations so far:
Elementary school: 100% female teachers, male janitor
Middle school: 90% female teachers, male custodian and gym teacher
High school: 80% female teachers, male custodian, coach and principal!
The female teachers certainly expect the boys to conform to the girls' type of behavior - plenty emails from teacher to confirm this.
Why do girls have a better attitude? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we need to ask why girls have a better attitude towards learning. Speaking as a teacher, I think that I can suggest a couple of factors and examples of why this is an important question.
TLDR: schools and schooling is overwhelmingly female oriented, and does not adapt to the needs of boys (nor anyone, really).
Schools, particularly primary (elementary for my American friends) schools are female dominated and, unfortunately, this leads to problems for boys. I taught in a school recently where I was the only male teacher at the school where there were some issues for boys. Whether there was a causative relationship or not is open to question, but the boys at the school were wild, and their achievement was substantially lower than the girls on several measures. I (simply because I was a male) was seen as the solution to an ongoing behavioural crisis among the boys in the older grades because I was seen as a role model as a boy who was interested in learning, but I think that by middle school, where I teach, it's too late for that to have much effect.
In fact, against the more influential male public role models who seem to be more interested in sport, driving, etc., than anything school-related, my effect would have been minimal (and I argued this point prior to my appointment, and my position was confirmed time after time through my appointment - in fact that failing was attributed to me which was fun). I have seen at other schools attempt to conflate an interest in sport with an interest in school by involving local sports people in reading programs at the school. The sports people come in to the school and inadvertently confirm students' beliefs, that sport and reading do not mix much. But it's a fun novelty, I suppose.
The other problem with female dominated schools is that the curriculum becomes more female dominated. At least in my experience, boys do have shorter attention spans, and do seem to have more kinaesthetic or visual approaches to learning (against girls, who more often seem to have auditory learning styles more suited to the "stand-and-deliver" lecture approach to teaching). Teaching in a single sex boys' class requires shorter lessons with more emphasis on doing stuff than discussing stuff, and this doesn't suit the approaches that a lot of teachers want to use.
Finally, there's a belief that boys are bad, whether this is explicitly stated or not, and, equally, that we should be easier on "boys being boys". In my work, I visited a school and sat through a presentation given by Year 1 students on school rules. Which was hilarious for a whole bunch of reasons, but most notably in the way that the activity seems to have been presented to the students. They were providing examples of good and bad behaviour. The teacher had chosen to tell the students to make a girl doing something good, and a boy doing something bad. The students then got up and use male pronouns for describing one scenario (where a student does something wrong) and female pronouns for describing the other (when a student does something right). The teacher corrected a student (a girl actually) twice when she said that she had drawn a girl doing something wrong, which had me on the verge of heckling the stupid woman.
As to being soft on "boys being boys", I believe strongly that we need to instil a sense of honour among boys. I had a Year 6 student a couple of years ago who incessantly physically and verbally bullied younger students and girls in the playground. I constantly brought him up on it, but was always held back from applying the school's discipline policy because "he doesn't have any great male role models", "you know his parents are really strict", or "he's just a bit energetic". The worst excuse that I heard from a colleague was that a girl he had bullied had to "share part of the blame" because she "instigated" the situation by talking to him (it's like a "she asked it by dressing that way" defence in rape cases). Over and over excuses were made for him by other staff su
Re:As a math / science teacher (Score:4, Interesting)
I studied physics. The best mathemeticians in our classes were the girls. Why? No idea. They seemed to enjoy the pure abstract math and did their homework regularly. Most of the guys (myself included) had difficulty when the math got too abstract. Our bad homework skills showed too. On the other hand, our best mathemetician had a hell of a time figuring out how to apply the math to the physics. Fortunate for her, she was a mathemetician who was only taking physics courses as electives.
Everyone was mature and professional. We recognized our differences and figured the gender line was just a coincidence. Physics enrollment wasn't very high so the sample size was too small to be meaningful.
socialization. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
It has not been culturally "cool" to be smart, for many decades.
There was an improvement in this situation during the 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's - but our culture, particularly in the USA, has shifted back towards macho posturing, and money-earning, as the primary values. Much of "being smart" has to do with whether an individual nurtures an inherent intellectual capability, or whether they focus their time and energy on "other priorities" (social, religious, family, financial, athletic, etc.).
I think that a huge amount of intellectual talent in this country is wasted, because of this shift in priorities.
Ultimately - people should have the right to choose an interest that they want. I don't think that it's possible or constructive to try to "Engineer" our culture. I think that most of our past idolization of intellectualism came out of our cold-war fear of being technically inferior to the Soviet Union and the Cold War.
(and also - as demonstrated by Germany, the Nazis).
We spent a HUGE amount of effort trying to specifically ENGINEER this cultural change. (and we were successful, in the short-term, but in the long-term, there has been a backlash. Hasn't there?) - We created NASA, DARPA, we had guys like Von Braun and Disney collaborating on publicly-funded propaganda films on educating our population about our future in space exploration and colonization. This inspired two generations of Americans to become scientists and engineers. We leapt so far forward, so quickly. But obviously, we were unable to sustain that. (there is no technical reason for that.)
Engineers and scientists have proposed solutions to these issues; sustainable energy, population control - but the "cool" people objected. Now, we abdicate control back to Nature. Maybe the females, who seem to no longer be constrained by the "macho" socialization, will figure this shit out.
Re:Going to get modded down as sexist for this, bu (Score:5, Interesting)
In my last year of jr. high, my father challenged me to write the scholarship exams to a prestigious boys' school. I won one. And so I left a co-ed school for a male one. The atmosphere was completely different; moments of rowdiness would be tolerated by the master (there were no female teachers), but he would then instruct us to settle down, and the class would continue. Unlike the 45 minute periods at jr. high, our periods were only 35 minutes. The school realized that teenage boys have to get up and move frequently, which is why we still had recess each morning - unheard of at the public high schools. We also had an hour for lunch, giving us time to play ball hockey or basketball or touch football, and burn off some energy so that we could sit through the afternoon.
Wolfing down your lunch in ten minutes, playing 50 minutes of basketball with all the intensity teenage boys can muster, and then racing to class, tieing your tie with one hand whilst carrying your books in the other - it was thrilling. We would, literally, stampede through the halls in a way that wouldn't have been tolerated at public school. We were FREE to be BOYS, and I would not give up the memory of those days for anything.
With no girls to show off for, we competed at everything - academics, sports, arts, clubs - without fear of being labelled, for example, a 'browner' or a 'jock'. Many of us were a bit of both. The school encouraged you to be an "all-rounder", and while classes ended at 3:15, you were expected to participate in some extra-curricular activity until 4:30 or so. My friends at public high school envied that; most of their teachers were out the parking lot 10 minutes after the last bell.
Teenage boys, adjusting to the suddenly changed levels of testerone in their bodies, don't fit well into the female-dominated "sit still and be quiet" mode prevalent in the co-ed school. They need space and more importantly, time to move and burn off some of that raging energy. Women don't understand that at all, which is why so many bright young boys are being mis-diagnosed with ADHD/ADD/whatever, and being put on drugs because they don't fit into women's world view.
I had two beautiful and bright daughters, who chose public school. Had I had a son, though, I would have pushed him for all I was worth to go the school. I know he would have been treated like a young man there, with the understanding of a young man's particular needs, and not have been pushed into a feminist/schoolmarm charicature of what a boy should be.