Why Do Girls Do Better In School?
Why Do Girls Do Better In School? by Annie Murphy Paul was originally posted on The Brilliant Blog.
Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys—even when they perform worse on standardized tests? ScienceDaily reports:
“New research from the University of Georgia and Columbia University published in the current issue of Journal of Human Resources suggests that it’s because of their classroom behavior, which may lead teachers to assign girls higher grades than their male counterparts.
‘The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as “approaches toward learning,”‘ said Christopher Cornwell, head of economics in the UGA Terry College of Business and one of the study’s authors. ‘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.’
The data show, for the first time, that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls. In every subject area, boys are represented in grade distributions below where their test scores would predict.
The authors attribute this misalignment to what they called non-cognitive skills, or ‘how well each child was engaged in the classroom, how often the child externalized or internalized problems, how often the child lost control and how well the child developed interpersonal skills.’
Research about gender differences in the classroom and beyond has grabbed headlines recently. Titles like Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men and the Rise of Women and Kay Hymowitz’s Manning Up have spent months on best-seller lists and inspired countless discussions in the media.
‘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,’ Cornwell said. ‘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.’
But despite changing college demographics, the new data may not be reflecting anything fundamentally new.
‘My argument is that this has always been true about boys and girls. Girls didn’t all of a sudden become more engaged and boys didn’t suddenly become more rambunctious,’ Cornwell said. ‘Their attitudes toward learning were always this way. But it didn’t show up in educational attainment like it does today because of all the factors that previously discouraged women’s participation in the labor force.’”
Readers, what do you think? Has something changed for boys, or are girls simply being rewarded now for the behavior they’ve always exhibited? Also: Is this a problem, and if so what should we be doing about it? Tell us in the comment section.
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Fine piece, Annie! I
In my classes, I thought it had something to do with emerging testosterone, too.
In a nutshell, the girls were more focused on learning and cared about doing well. A lot of boys were not and did not.
In time, some of the boys learned that the girls were right.
Well said, Tom. And I think it might be when the testosterone kicks in that the boys FORGET the girls were right