What happens when you apply a little statistics to boys' and girls' math and reading scores? About what you'd expect, if you trust the numbers over political correctness:
Claims are often made by gender activists like UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde that “There just aren’t gender differences anymore in math performance. So parents and teachers need to revise their thoughts about this. Stereotypes are very, very resistant to change, but as a scientist I have to challenge them with data.”The complete post is here, including easy-to-understand graphs.
Well, I’d like to challenge Professor Hyde by looking at some recent data that suggest exactly the opposite – boys consistently outperform girls on standardized math tests. Oh, and by the way, girls outperform boys on standardized reading tests.
9 comments:
What interest does Dr. Hyde have in proving that there are no differences? I mean why would you want to prove that? The statistics pertain to the behavior of a group, not any given individual. What policies are being based on this information, and how does Hyde profit from it?
It's not so much that she wants to prove there are no differences but that all differences are accounted for by environment, i.e. society.
So little girls don't want to be princesses and ballerinas because of any innate drives but because society's channeled them in that direction and away from repairing motorcycles and chewing tobacco. Similarly, little boys aren't naturally flesh-and-blood incarnations of the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil. Society channels little boys in that direction and it only requires a proper upbringing to cause little boys to put away their toy guns and such and I suppose start worrying about global warming.
Society can be altered by the application of a sufficient amount of wisdom and insight the good professor has to believe and she, and her like, are possessors of that wisdom and insight. But it's all meaningless if there are innate differences. Differences that aren't amenable to the application of wisdom and insight by the wise and insightful.
So the possibility is first dismissed and then those who refuse to discard the possibility of innate differences are attacked. The next best thing to being right is shutting up dissent.
Darren ... I don't know what computer problem I'm having with your blogspot ... but my second post was meant to be here. It's sort of relevant where it is, but more so here. Feel free to delete the first. I knew SOMETHING went wrong ...
This maybe a partial repost ... I had a computer issue.
Anyway ... my first problem is that this study is based on standardized tests where the students have no incentive (at least based on what I read) to perform well, and were based on a sampling of school, rather than all of them. To a statistician, that should be problematic, as you've skewed the data twice ... in undefinable ways. Do girls take more pride in their work than boys, or vice versa? Were these schools a representative sample or all high end or low end.
My experience ... having taught English in 7th and 8th grade, is indeed that the girls performed better, on average. But that's debatable, because only a few of my students ever read the books, and their writing was generally horrible ... despite my being the first, apparently, to introduce them to grammar. Teaching math? 9-12? My best students were USUALLY girls, and if I had to rank the top ten, it would normally be a 6-4 split favoring them. Which ... is really close. It certainly challenges the girls can't do math thing. I think the one thing that might play in to that? I think girls in math classes are sometimes intimidated to ask questions, particularly if the teacher is male ... because the stereotype is that they aren't supposed to be good at math...asking a question might confirm it. But ... for whatever reason, most of the questions I get are from the girls ...my thought is that I've created a comfortable environment where I make it clear that I will answer any question until they're done, I won't ridicule for not knowing something they should arguably know, and I won't call on people who don't have their hands up (something I've been criticized by more than one administrator for.) Asking a question ...indicates you sort of got it, but need some clarification ...which actually indicates your better at the subject.
Yet guys consistently do better on the SAT. Year after year. Statistically significantly so. This jibes with the NAEP data.
When the facts contradict your expectations, believe the facts.
That's a different arena. If you're motivated, that's when reality take hold ... but ... did you mean just on Math, or overall. I'll acknowledge it's a better data set, though you didn't cite the numbers ... and did you mean overall, or just on math, or both? And still ... no standardized test, even if incentivized, truly measures understanding.
Your entire comment, especially your last sentence, is absurd.
No, it isn't. It was a question about what data was measured, followed by an opinion about standardized testing. I offered an opinion which I know differs from yours, but I have never found a standardized test which could not be cleverly guessed at. In fact, when I applied for a part time job as an SAT prep tutor, I was told that understanding how to do math was not only important, but led to lower scores. I didn't get the job, because I couldn't separate the teaching from the learning how to guess. You can believe what you want ... but that's how those courses work. Personal experience ... generally leads me to absurd conclusions. And, you didn't answer my question, either. Since the original study separated math and English, and you cited the SAT without differentiation, it was a fair question to ask.
And I did ruin that last comment by leaving out the second 'not' ... it should be ... not important. We were explicitly trained not to teach any math at all ...regardless of how quick you could be...
Want science? Try this, Professor Hyde:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0767920104
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