Posted on 07/25/2008 2:48:55 PM PDT by Oyarsa
If you believe that girls fare significantly worse on math than boys in high-school tests, you would have been right — twenty years ago. Thanks to a concerted effort by parents and schools to get more girls in advanced math classes, the test-score disparity has completely disappeared, according to the National Science Foundation:
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
Well good.
Now that they have dumbed down math enough...both genders are bad at it.
I see some of the comments express the same reaction I had. How much of this results from favoritism toward girls, from making the boys feel inferior, and (I would add) from feeding many of the boys Ritalin if they behave too much like boys?
LOL I was going to say, the teachers now prove they can teach no one.
Not sure what to make of this study and its implications. However any study by UC Berkeley and U of Wisconsin is suspect. These are two super PC institutions and keep in mind politics are intruding into scholarship on a fairly routine basis. I’m not saying that study is flawed but I would want to see this type of study confirmed by about a half-dozen other studies. Always be suspicious about academic studies in this day and age.
Am I supposed to trust her calculations?
On the difference between mathematical ability between boys and girls
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/2008/07/25/on-the-difference-between-mathematical-ability-between-boys-and-girls/
Can we thank Danica McKellar?
Google up your own images, woo-hoo!
But usually, they want studies that prove a disaprity, so they can call for actions and money?
“LOL I was going to say, the teachers now prove they can teach no one.”
Good one!
or they have sufficiently destroyed the education of boys to make both equally bad.
There has long been a long lived trend where more women than men are going to college. This is a fact. Men are finding jobs that pay well in blue collar area’s and are opting for that instead of school. Nothing wrong with it. I think that has something to do with what we see here.
so true
And the authors have a feminist agenda.
I’m not saying that study is flawed
The study is flawed.
I would want to see this type of study confirmed by about a half-dozen other studies
I would not want to see anyone pull what they did here. They used NCLB tests. These tests can be filled with ridiculously simple questions and manipulated to make sure the girls do as well as the boys or even better. It makes more sense to use the NAEP data.
It's also wrong to focus solely on the average scores. Science is not done by people with average math ability. It's done by people with high ability. There are a lot of females with high math ability but there are even more males.
agree, now that fewer boys are going to college than girls, there is no outrage (it’s who cares?), yet, her in az they are still gearing special programs to “girls”
maybe this was appropriate in the 70’s, certainly not today
lol you beat me to it. Math, based on my sister’s experience recently in high school, is nothing like ‘math’ I learned 20 years earlier.
Allowing calculators in school from early ages is simply moronic, among other things....
The smells more like “feel-good” news than fact. If it’s the case, however, that our young females are ascending to greater mathematical capabilities, it’s good news for everyone especially the Country that requires ongoing excellence. On the other hand, if the flattened statistical data is the result of educational regression, the people of this Country should take the necessary legal steps to recalibrate the educational systems.
>> Allowing calculators in school from early ages is simply moronic, among other things....
No it’s not. A calculator is a legitimate tool that can be used at any point throughout the teaching of math. It’s important to differentiate the application of the sciences from the mechanics used to process information.
The student should still be required to evaluate complex expressions without the use of a calculator and the results should be reflected in the student’s academic profile.
In Minnesota, for example, 1.85% of white boys in the 11th grade hit the 99th percentile, compared with 0.9% of girls -- meaning there were more than twice as many boys among the top scorers than girls.
Makes me think that the AP and other news outlet reports were also spinning the data.
A solar-powered 4-function calculator is fine once a child has basic math down and is heading into pre-algebra. But my Ti-89 can handle symbolic triple integrals. No information processing needed. Math problem in, answer out--including proper formatting and equation simplification.
Instead of a calculator, it would be nice to have a guided practice device to be a virtual tutor for students. I think that we are almost to a point where the technology in a cell phone could read and check a student's handwritten math work and follow the logic the student used at each step.
Bush’s fault.
Precisely.
“A calculator is a legitimate tool that can be used at any point throughout the teaching of math”
Of course it can, but that is not the application in the real world in many cases. Much of my intuitive grasp of numeric relationships, concepts and what-not would be much less developed if a calculator had been a normal classroom item from early on.
“The student should still be required to evaluate complex expressions without the use of a calculator and the results should be reflected in the student’s academic profile.”
This is the catch. How many schools do this in a meaningful way (rather than a cover-their-butts-way)?
If the point is to learn to punch buttons, then this is fine, but don’t expect them to know their multiplication tables by memory or be able to take an x=my + b and draw the graph by hand, or even understand why.
“But my Ti-89 can handle symbolic triple integrals. No information processing needed. Math problem in, answer out—including proper formatting and equation simplification.”
This is a part of the issue. It’s kind of like Google for math, just type in the problem, and out comes the answer, no research needed.
What’s interesting about that 2-to-1 ratio at the very top is that until the last decade the ratio was much greater: more like 10-to-1, then 7-to-1, then 4-to-1. The drop really has been precipitous and may be tied to more girls now taking higher-level math classes. The traditional difference there may really be disappearing as education and focus level out.
Of course they were spinning the data. But so were the authors. When you read the fine print you find out that they went through the questions on these NCLB tests and graded them as Level 1 through 4. Only Level 3 and 4 are mathematical reasoning (which is where the gender difference is).
Now how many level 3 and 4 questions do you think they found? If you are thinking NONE, you are right.
Bottom line: GIGO.
The male/female ratio gets more extreme as the group tested gets more elite. SAT test takers are more elite than kids in grades 2-11.
Yes, but the biggest difference between SAT test takers and these scores is that the lowest-scoring majority of black males, themselves a low-scoring group, have dropped out of high school and aren’t taking the SAT, for example.
The SAT differential is now 3-to-1 at the top percent, and as I was saying before, that ratio has come down dramatically in the last 10 to 15 years.
The biggest factor in the “drop” re: the SAT is the “re-norming” or “re-centering” of the test done in the mid-90s. The scores were re-centered so that it takes fewer correct answers to get the mean score, perfect score, etc.
This was done so that more women would score at the high end of the curve. The ratio of male/female perfect scorers dropped dramatically overnight.
It’s obvious that it was a cook the books or get sued situation.
The renorming had a far greater effect on the verbal than the math scores.
Whether verbal was affected more than math is irrelevant to what we were talking about: the drop in the m/f ratio at the top on the math section. The fact is that the big drop in the ratio was from the re-centering.
I am questioning you premise that the recentering was done primarily to get more girls a perfect score on the math test, as there were much bigger effects to greater outcome elsewhere.
We’re still talking about 3 times as many boys scoring 750 or higher on the recentered math test (3% vs. 1%), but 750 is high enough for most viable uses in identifying high-potential math students.
The ETS is never going to admit why it did the re-centering. But it just so happens that at time that it was being threatened with lawsuits over the “disparate impact” of the test on girls.
There was no good reason to change things. If there had been, all the other tests, like the achievement tests, would have been re-centered too. Now what you have is a situation where the SAT cuts off at less than 2.5 SD above the mean while the achievement tests dont. It’s not scientifically justifiable but it is politically correct. And you know how important that is.
As I stated way back, I’m not for any kind of direct or indirect quota-norming for anyone. If men outnumber women at the very high end of IQ and/or in seats at the top physics programs, so be it. I don’t want those who are there to be tainted by such boosts at all. Statistically evidence seems to suggest that black women, for example, significantly outnumber black men at 140+ IQ levels, and there seems to be evidence toward the opposite disparity, particularly at higher levels still, for whites.
As an aside, it is high testosterone women and low testosterone men (counter to popular assumption!) who reach the highest levels of that sort of abstract thinking. Enough to make you think we’ll soon be tweaking with pills in the same way that athletes dope themselves now in the sports world.
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