Study Claims Girls Equal Boys in Math Ability

August 6, 2008

By sifting through mountains of data, including SAT results and math scores from 7 million students who were tested in accordance with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), a team of women scientists have reported that today's girls keep up with boys when it comes to mathematics. Whether it's average performance or scores of the most-gifted, the girls measured up to the guys.

"There just aren't gender differences anymore in math performance," said University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde, the study's leader. "So," she maintained, "parents and teachers need to revise their thoughts about this." Cultural beliefs like this are "incredibly influential," said Hyde. "Because if your mom or your teacher thinks you can't do math, that can have a big impact on your math self concept."

Hyde and her colleagues acquired math scores from state exams mandated annually under No Child Left Behind, along with detailed statistics on test takers, including gender, grade level, and ethnicity, in 10 states. They calculated the effect size, a statistic that measures the degree of difference between girls' and boys' average math scores in standardized units. Effect size ranged from 0.01 to 0.06 indicating that average scores of girls and boys were just about equal. "Boys did a teeny bit better in some states, and girls did a teeny bit better in others," said Hyde. "But when you average them all, you essentially get no difference."

To find out if gender discrepancies exist at the highest levels of mathematical ability, the team compared the variability in boys' and girls' mathematics scores--the idea being that if more boys fell into the top-scoring percentiles than girls, then the variance in their scores would be greater. However, the effort uncovered little difference, as did a comparison of how well boys and girls did on questions requiring complex problem solving.

What the researchers did find, though, was an absence of questions that tested this ability on state assessments for NCLB, which forced them to turn to other data for that part of the study. According to Hyde, the findings suggests that if teachers gear instruction toward these assessments, the performances of boys and girls in complex problem solving may be at issue, leaving both sexes ill-prepared for careers in mathematics, science, and engineering. "This skill can be taught in the classroom," said Hyde, "but we need to motivate teachers to do so by including those items on the tests."

Perhaps the study's most important investigation was a review of the math portion of the SAT in which boys score better than girls do, a result that has influenced the public's notion that girls are weaker in mathematics. Hyde and her co-authors suggest there's another explanation: an unintended effect of the sampling method. Because it's administered to college-bound seniors, the SAT may not be a random sampling of all students' ability. Since more girls than boys now take the test, “You're dipping farther down into the distribution of female talent, which brings down the average score," said Hyde.

The study, which appeared in Science (July 25), was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Source: EurekAlert, July 24