This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 05 Jun 2008, by Rosetta Lee.
-
05 Jun 08
Rosetta Leecultural attitudes, gender equity, and statistics give clues as to why boys fare better in math in standardized tests, etc.
-
Girls performed best in countries such as Norway and Iceland, which have progressive gender policies, and worst in countries such as Turkey, which scored relatively low on standard measures of gender equality. The U.S. fell somewhere in the middle, the researchers say.
-
Girls scored higher in reading everywhere - and their reading advantage widened in countries with more gender equality, according to the report in today's edition of the journal Science. But only in Iceland, a country known for its homogeneous population, did girls score better than boys in both reading and math.
-
The researchers used 2003 results from the Program for International Student Assessment, which tested 276,000 children representing a cross section of each participating country's overall population. Math skills tested included basic geometry, algebra, arithmetic and probabilities.
Gender equality profiles were determined by measures such as the World Economic Forum's gender gap index, which ranks countries based on economic and political opportunities for women, and on other barometers such as longevity rates. The U.S. ranked 23rd of 128 countries in the WEF's 2006 analysis. -
With fewer boys than girls taking the SATs and going to college, much of the concern about a gender gap in education today days focuses on how badly boys are faring.
-
About 57 percent of today's U.S. college students are female, experts say. Among the 40 percent of the nation's undergraduates who are 25 or younger, women outnumber men by almost 2-1, according to a 2006 report by the American Council on Education.
-
Boys also score uniformly lower in reading tests, in the United States and elsewhere, a result confirmed in the Science study.
-
Although gender may matter, household income plays a much greater role in most standardized test score results, some experts say.
"What you see consistently is - for both boys and girls - those with higher incomes consistently score higher than lower-income boys or girls," said Christianne Corbett, a research associate with the American Association of University Women.
-
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.