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Will Elementary School Teachers Take the Rap For Tech's Diversity Problem?
theodp (442580) writes "Citing a new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (free to Federal employees), the NY Times reports on how elementary school teachers' pro-boy biases can discourage girls from math and science. "The pipeline for women to enter math and science occupations narrows at many points between kindergarten and a career choice," writes Claire Cain Miller, "but elementary school seems to be a critical juncture. Reversing bias among teachers could increase the number of women who enter fields like computer science and engineering, which are some of the fastest growing and highest paying. 'It goes a long way to showing it's not the students or the home, but the classroom teacher's behavior that explains part of the differences over time between boys and girls,' said Victor Lavy, an economist at University of Warwick in England and a co-author of the paper." Although the study took place in Israel, Lavy said that similar research had been conducted in several European countries and that he expected the results were applicable in the United States."
By making it an essay test or something subjective, I'd guess.
Not that it really matters - even if there is a pro-boy bias to grading, boys are getting their asses kicked when it comes to pre-college education in the US. And the only reason it lessens at the college level is because colleges can just not accept lower-scoring boys.
But don't take my word for it, go check out any of the myriad of articles asking what can be done about it: https://www.google.com/search?q=boy+girl+education+gap&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Where teachers are not union, or where the unions are weak, teachers tend to get paid less than their union counterparts.
Funding for public schools needs to increase at all levels. Bad teachers need to go, but average teachers need to get paid more than they are.
Now, because you're clearly the slow kid who needs to have everything spoon fed to them, let me repeat: the students took the same test twice
Um... no, they were not the same test. Instead of reading the article. I read the actual study in PDF. To save space, I will point out one section that shows that the students didn't take the same test:
To construct a measure of teachers' biased behavior we combine the scores from the GEMS 5th
grade external exam with those of internal exams held in the middle of 6th grade. The GEMS test
scores is a âoeblindâ assessment since the GEMS exams are graded by an independent agency where at
no stage are the identity and gender of the student revealed. In contrast, the internal exam is graded by
the studentâ(TM)s teacher and therefore it is a âoenon-blindâ assessment.
In case you're wondering, GEMS is apparently some government-kept record. I don't know exactly how it works (they have a site, but I can't read Hebrew), I wager that the 5th grade test would be a different one from the 6th grade test.
Not even the NYT article you quoted outright say the two tests were the same. They only said the students were "given two exams"
These are farking math tests - there's a right answer and an infinite number of wrong answers.
To be pedantic, math test != math != arithmetic
There's only one answer to arithmetic
But there's not just one answer to solving a math problem
And there's an infinite number of ways to grade math tests where students solve math problems (what most math tests do)
Consider the legend of how Gauss discovered the formula for the sum of an arithmetic series. What's the sum of all integers from 1 to 100?
There's only one arithmetic answer (5050), but there are at least two ways to solve it, and subsequently infinite ways to mark an answer. If you arrived at the right arithmetic answer, but didn't use the expected method, how many marks should you be given? Or vice versa?