It is unlikely to be a surpise to anyone that girls do better than boys in school. Many studies confirm this. Girls outscore boys in nearly every subject in school and generally have higher grades. Why is this?
The Economist reports from the OECD 5 reasons:
- Girls read more
- Girls spend more time on homework than boys, over 5 hours worth
- Boys spend more time playing online games
- Peer pressure for boys makes them value schooling less
- Boys are being unfairly graded than girls – teachers are being very biased
The first two reasons are quite strong, the more a student studies the more likely they are to get high grades. The last two reasons should be very troubling. What is making boys pressure each other to value school less? How strong of a factor is it and can it be reversed? Could the peer pressure be a self-fulfilling prophesy – a boy gets low grades for a period and then reduces his effort to do better in the belief that expending greater effort is futile? Teachers need to be aware of this negative grading phenomena and work against it. But how? Certainly, inflating grades to make student feel better about themselves is a bad idea and shielding from failure is also detrimental to students.
Teachers engaging in biased grading is particularly damning against the profession and is worrying. This is something that clearly needs to be highly guarded against in the profession. A classroom is supposed to be a place of fairness and justice. Performing biased grading shoots the teaching profession in the heart. Are teaching colleges researching and discussing about how to properly assess work and avoid biased grading? I do not believe so, I never had this discussion in college about this issue and was largely unaware of it before. Having become a teacher I have had a few temptations to mark down students’ work (usually boys) for sloppy, messy writing. How many teachers do not resist that temptation?
In any case, I have found that girls far outscoring boys in my economics class just . Fortunately, I can say the grading is objective as the scores come from standardized tests being examined by outsiders. The proportions for grades are shown below for the years 2012-2014. I have found it perplexing why there is such a disparity. Are there ways I can help the boys raise their scores to the level of girls? Interestingly, the difference between the sexes in my classes are not as great as the same tests taken in England (the originator of the exams) where girls outscored boys by only 5% points in economics. Additionally, in England more boys choose economics than girls by nearly 2:1, but where I have worked it was the opposite. Not only were more girls choosing to study economics than boys but they also outscore them by wide margins.
Figure 1. Male/Female participation in Cambridge International Exams AS Economics, 2012-2014 at WHBC
Two girls for every one boy, the opposite of domestic England participation.
Figure 2. Grade distribution for Above Average/Below Average, 2012-2014 at WHBC; just under half score an A or B overall.
Figures 3. Distribution of males and females in Above or Below Average grades from 2012-2014 at WHBC. Close to half of all girls earn an A or B while less than four out of ten boys do so.
Figures 4. Distribution of males and females between earning A or B grades within the group who earn above average grades from 2012-2014 at WHBC. For girls who earned above average grades over 60% earned an A, while for boys it is under 55%.
From my own experience girls not only outscored the average scores of boys but also in distribution within their own sex. How to get the boys to do better in school?
John Warner 