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Why Girls Do Better At School
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 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.
I should probably read TFA, but this is Slashdot. So, uhh, if girls do worse on standardized tests, how do we conclude they do better at school?
Let me guess. This is all going to come down to some kind of thing where when the girls underperform, we change the school, and when the boys underperform, we change the boys.
To try to keep a rant short, let's see why boys do so poorly. Could it have anything to do with rampant gender discrimination at the primary level and being forcefed feminist nonsense and guilt-tripping at the secondary level?
Jeebus. I remember many times when we did projects in class in elementary that the girls were given more options for what they could do than boys. Why? Well, everyone knows girls are more responsible than boys. One year even it was a school-wide policy that during indoor recess, the girls had the option to go to the gym to play basketball or volleyball, but the boys had to stay in their classroom.
Hell, I even remember one teacher I had who once decided to punish all the boys because of a few in the back who were acting up. Why? Well, we had it coming. I challenged the teacher about how it was fair to punish me when I hadn't done anything wrong, and I'll never forget the response. "You're just as well-behaved as a girl, but it wouldn't be fair to the rest of the boys if I let you off." Holy shit.
How about if we just get rid of gender stereotyping and discrimination? How about if we stop imprinting girls with math phobia? How about if we stop treating boys like they're already rapists and thugs?
Or is that just asking too damned much?
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Considering that through much of history men have married women with lower levels of educational attainment and income, and been able to be happy in those relationships without considering their wives "low-lives", I'm not sure why the reverse would be impossible.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Before even clicking on the link, I knew this was an American study. Schools in the US, especially elementary schools, are massively dominated by women. Boys do generally have more difficulty sitting still for long periods, and need to use up their physical energy. This used to be handled by recess periods and sports. They could run around, play games, be competitive, get a bit tired - and be ready the next period of sitting still.
This is no longer allowed. Competitive sports are out, even pretty tame things like tag or dodgeball. Playgrounds have to be ultra-safe, which means utterly boring. Because virtually all teachers and administrators in elementary schools are women, there is very little understanding of boys' needs. They are expected to behave like perfect little...girls.
Is it any wonder they do poorly in school?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Sure, because everything you do not agree with is trolling. The poster has a strong opinion about something that is different of yours, which he is entitled to have. Argue against it or stay quiet. You are the troll here.
You don't need a degree to avoid being a "low-life." I don't have a degree (yet) and I make much more as a software engineer than most of my degree-holding friends.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
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.
Are you serious? GP's post is almost entirely blatant, over-the-top sexism. Replace female and male with a couple of different races and maybe it will be easier for you to see.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I can't imagine anything less useful for high-performing students than group work in math class. It does nothing more than create a pool of free tutors to help the teacher.
Understand that in average both sexes are not equally fit for every task and equally gifted in everything is not sexism it is lucidity. Sexism is to think that a member of one sex is always better than a member of the other in anything, which is obviously false.
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.
his post is nothing more than "boys are smarter because I say so"
Actually, no.
He posted the application of Occam's Razor to to situation described in TFA. Instead of grasping at straws and coming up with insanely convoluted reasons why girls "look" better but perform worse in school, he bluntly stated the most straightforward explanation.
That doesn't make his explanation correct, but class grades describe performance viewed through the social filter of the professor; test scores have no such filter.
Or... Girls socialize better. Film at 11.
There's no insight here, no data. The parent just spews his own feeling that "girls are rule followers" and "boys are smarter". The scientists with actual data found that the qualities were actually "attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization", but don't let science get in the way of your shit headed misogyny.
And yet this anti-science post makes it instantly to +5, why? Because it strokes the ego of the Slashdot anti-female crowd who think that feminists are coming to take their balls away.
questioning feminism and state sponsored discrimination is not hatred.
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."
So in short, you were a lazy fuck and got left behind, and they worked hard and got ahead? Wow, I'm shocked by that outcome. I'm sure once you join the workforce, you'll find that's totally not the case, and that people will reward you for your innate ability to pull B-level work with no effort.
Totally.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
A very small proportion of the population have always been responsible for most of the creativity. As such, your observation indicates that there is a higher proportion of men amongst the smartest people, but it doesn't say anything about the general population.
Men have a broader distribution than women in just about everything. If this is also the case for smarts, that would give the same observation. It would also mean more men are at the bottom of society, which is the case.
While it is true that he's supporting his argument with anecdotal observations, and he is a bit heavy handed, I'd say it's a pretty common observation.
/. posters that identify the same thing and it'll always be anecdotal, sexist and untrue.
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
You have all the evidence in the world, you just need to stop blindfolding yourself. Women are responsible for very little creation of about anything in this world, no matter which time span, location or field or you decide to analyze. Sure, there are exceptions, as in everything, but as a rule women are consumers, not creators.
If you were trying to say that women are underrepresented in STEM (and many other) fields you would be correct, but this is not due to some inherent inability or inferiority.
Women historically have been culturally handicapped by the need to birth and rear children, which consumes extraordinary amounts of time and energy. They have also been physically dominated by men due to sexual dimorphism. It is only in the last century that women have even been generally enfranchised in society. Since childbirth and rearing is much easier now, we are seeing the gaps between women and men close drastically in many fields. Eventually, as we no longer have a need for physically powerful men to protect their female counterparts from like, bears and shit, sexual dimorphism might even be bred out of the species (though it might take thousands of years).
Also, your comment of "as a rule women are consumers, not creators" is clearly ridiculous. There are many, many women in art, music, and literature who create extraordinary masterpieces. These fields have been historically more open to women than STEM and others, so the gap between male and female participation is narrower. There are also numerous brilliant, creative women in STEM fields...far too many to write them off as "exceptions".
As for learning, do you not understand that regardless of all the similarities between male and female, the biggest difference is that all of our cells, including brain cells, are floating in a chemical soup that is greatly different between the two sexes. If you don't understand the effect of environment on gene expression...
Don't allow the collective stupid belief of sexual equality to stifle any logical thought. Use science, not your pissant societal indoctrination.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
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.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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
The proof for a systemic, culturally reenforced feminist counterpart to your accusation exists in the law and the growing malaise towards men and boys in western culture these days. A quick overview of public school policy and university politics, television programming and advertisments, pop music, and (recently) video games, makes it quite obvious. Sadly, it is, for the most part, men who are at fault for this, men who've been convinced to feel 'male guilt' who then pass the laws and decree pro female bias in their organizations in attempts to 'prove' just how much of a feminist they are. It it sad they've internalized this insecurity and self-hatred as they assume the guilt because of having a penis. Basically it's stockholm syndrome exacerbated by misapplied notions of chivalry.
There is nothing wrong with an individualist agenda. You support it for girls and women, don't you? All that 'my body my right' (yet somehow his responsibility) and 'I don't need a man' egocentricity isn't individualist?
So whites can't be the victims of racism? Males can't be the victims of sexism? You're seriously saying that?
You're the typical feminist. You whine about how there aren't enough woman lawyers, CEOs, and other white-collar, high paying jobs; but you're not out there picketing because they're aren't enough woman miners, crab boat fishers, and oil rig workers because those are physically hard and aren't glamorous.
What you want isn't equality, you want superiority.