OK, that does look more like clothing than like cooking.
I can remember more easily what I’ve read than what somebody’s told me. I’m pretty sure this has been true ever since I learned to read, which was before I started school. I have trouble keeping that much continual attention on the speaker, but I can keep it on the book.
I’ll grant that I might be odd enough not to show up in the statistics. But for at least a few of us, it’s a real effect.
– just saw this later post, which is relevant to that, though apparently relating to a different set of criteria:
Whether I learn something best by doing I think depends on what I’m learning. It’s a bit difficult to imagine how I’d learn by doing that Washington declined to be a king, for instance. But I also have trouble imagining how I could have learned to split wood just by having it explained to me – explanations about how and why to stand with your feet apart worked, but the necessary physical swing I needed to learn by doing.
An easy option is to have the whole class repeat facts back to the teacher. It’s a small thing, but it’s slightly more active than just sitting and listening. A more involved one is the have the kids act out the scene. Probably overkill in most cases, but might be worth it for some bits of history. Or you could ask the kids to come up with rhymes to help them remember a fact.
So let me see if I got this right - girls consistent higher academic performance is less pronounced in the UK’s standardized testing than it is in classroom grade assessments? But is in both.
My initial hypothesis would not be that classroom grading is biased to girls but that the testing is biased to boys. Might be the other way around. Either measure shows that the historic norm remains: girls on average do better in academic settings but historically boys were pushed to control higher education more frequently. Less so now.
I have had both these experiences, and I think online vs in-person is a crucial difference.
In-person mom groups tend to be both more varied in culture and less prone to becoming an echo chamber on certain subjects. I do have one mom friend who is always going off about the patriarchy and how terrible men are (she recently divorced her husband), but by and large unless the group has formed specifically around a subject much more specific than “we’re all moms who live in roughly the same geographic area and maybe our kids go to the same school,” there’s enough diversity of opinion and enough chat about a variety of stuff (even my Patriarchy-Hating Mom friend can only talk about that so much) that it tends to dampen out.
Online mom groups, on the other hand, can go in weird directions, I think because a) people are more likely to get more opinionated online when people who might disagree aren’t in front of their face, and b) you can decide whether you want to join any given thread or forum, and c) there can be more specific forums – for example, there’s a forum I once lurked on on a mom’s site that was all about dysfunctional families of origin. So if there’s a thread where someone is all “The patriarchy sucks, let me tell you how terrible my husband is,” it will tend to attract other people who have terrible husbands, while those of us who have actually quite nice husbands will not post because it would come across as not supportive. I’ve seen this across a few sites/forums now, not just Reddit (although I’ve seen it on reddit too).
The SDMB isn’t really like these mom threads because a) the subforums are pretty general, and people can’t really go off and make their own “SdmbWomenComplaining” (or whatever) subforum, and b) the culture is very different from these mom groups, and in particular has a lot more men, so I think it would be very hard to get a thread where a woman complained about how her husband represented the terribleness of the patriarchy without a lot of pushback.
I’ve been an elementary school librarian for 20 years, and have worked with thousands of children. In recent years I’ve seen just as many girls get out of their gourds as boys. Same goes with following directions generally.
I’m a bit dizzied by the recent assertions that school is become over-disciplined and over-abstract, harming boys. When I was younger, it was the common sexist assertion that boys were better at math and science because they were inherently more disciplined and better at abstract thinking than girls. If today’s schools are too disciplined, what of the classic schoolrooms of the past, where discipline (sitting straight and silently absorbing the lecture) was muchmore prevalent (see any memoir of British or American (all-boy) boarding schools)? Were military schools open only to boys because the loosey-goosey military school model was particularly open to undisciplined acting-out?
Which reminds me of this study showing how the real predictive variable in determining how many men will apply to a certain major is the number of women already enrolled - if that number is too large, men will just stop applying making the field become dominated by women (and then through the magic of motivated reasoning, always an “obviously feminine” field). The study is about veterinary science, but the same process of male flight has been seen in nursing, secretarial work, and other fields (yes, nursing and secretarial work were once male-dominated, as was interior design )
Nice. It’s good to have someone else for moral support, even better if it’s someone knowledgeable.
Of course I’m not saying that! Holding anyone back is the last thing I want to do. I was thinking about stuff like allowing kids enough time to be physically active, giving them more help with organising their work and time management, enforcing discipline so the class doesn’t get too distracted, using competition to motivate them, more hands-on practical work, and increasing the ratio of tests to essays. Only the last of those might be bad for girls, the rest would help them too.
Yes, and it has risen steadily since GCSE’s were introduced. But remember most GCSE’s also include coursework.
My initial hypothesis would not be that classroom grading is biased to girls but that the testing is biased to boys. Might be the other way around.
Is there actually a difference?
Not in my lifetime in the US. Not since before I went to university in the UK. Why assume that boys are just naturally less capable - would you do that for any other group that was behind academically?
Yes, that’s exactly it. If a woman talked about this at an in-person group, she’d get sympathy and advice, but most of the people she was talking to would not have experienced the same thing or have the same views. Whereas in online forums, there are many people around and they only join in a thread if it seems relevant to them.
I’d think it’s the other way around: boys do better with more discipline exactly because they struggle with sitting still and following instructions.
Perhaps because when there are a lot of women in a field, employers can pay them less and average salary drops, which puts men off from entering it. Men preferentially chose jobs women dislike or don’t do much, because then they can demand a higher salary. Even when men go into female dominated fields, they often specialise or get into management in order to earn more.
Using competition to motivate them has to be handled carefully, so the kids who aren’t immediately good at something don’t get put down by their classmates for losing in single competition or not helping their team in group competition.
Whether increasing the ratio of tests to essays is helpful seems to me to depend to some extent on the field. Not everything is suitable to being tested in one-right-answer fashion. And even for things that are – it’s important for the teacher to understand why the student got the wrong answer.
In my professional lifetime both Obstetrics/Gynecology (OBG) and Pediatrics have become predominantly female. In the OBG case there is some element of market demand: women preferring female doctors for that care. No such factor exists on the pediatric side. Pay has not dropped, and while we are paid much less than the specialists, it is about the same as for the internists and family medicine docs, all primary care without the same overwhelming female predominance. We interviewed maybe ten candidates for our two open spots, not a male applicant in the bunch. Our bigger organization had maybe one male pediatrician applicant in the last two years. There is a demand for us, especially as some adolescent boys prefer a male doctor. If practices could legally hire preferentially by gender they’d love to hire a few male Peds… Yet I am a dinosaur.
@DemonTree why do think my field has gone from male dominated to female dominated within a fraction of one professional lifetime?
Yes.
Some would consider one or the other as a more objective gold standard of true achievement of information and skill acquisition, and measure the accuracy of the other relative to it. One explanation could be a bias of teachers to grade female students higher for the same quality work, not necessarily consciously, even by an implicit bias. One could be that the tests are biased towards male students, such as including more reading selections of the type that boys would read more often and by male authors, and little of the reading that female students read more frequently. There is a difference between those explanations.
The fact that females, when given equal opportunity, have consistently done better in schools across cultures and across time, even in the face of cultures that declare them inferior, is not proof that, on average, they are better at the skills that are needed to achieve in school on some intrinsic basis, school age group for age group at least. But it is highly suggestive of it.
Academic skills do not necessarily correlate with work world success. So it only means so much. And again the mean is meaningless compared to the standard deviation. But in some programs we may be approaching a point where DEI considerations, if allowed, would weight male gender as a positive.
I certainly don’t think my family of origin experience with my encouragement being much greater than my sisters, is unique. Maybe a bit more obvious but the societal expectation of the woman to put her advancement in the back seat relative to the man’s is pretty clear to my observation. Just one example. Good friends, the woman was high school valedictorian and met my childhood good friend in a very competitive college where she graduated with a higher class rank than he did. Very smart person. She ended up full time stay at home while he earned two advanced degrees and had a very well compensated career. She did not go for advanced degrees. Her choice, without pressure from him, but clearly influenced by internalized societal expectations of wife and motherhood. To this day she describes, without bitterness, herself as having raised their kids as a single mother while he worked long hours. He doesn’t dispute that characterization. They are still happily married with him having retired early after a buyout. He is a smart man who worked hard. Not diminishing that. Again fair choice for her to have made.
If they met today I suspect she’d have her own outside the house career as well though and odds are would have been just as successful or more so than his. And I know him well: he’d have been a wonderful primary parent, very nurturing.
Also, girls are sometimes socially unwilling to do better than boys. My sister felt that strongly in school, she never wanted to show up the boys. So if you have a lot of competitions, some fraction of girls will intentionally hold back and not try hard.
There isn’t. Pedagogical practices that focus on sitting still and listening to the teacher, reciting from rote memorization, following instructions to perform often repetitive tasks, etc., have been standard elements of educational systems for hundreds if not thousands of years. They were developed by (almost entirely) male teachers, for the purpose of teaching (almost entirely) male students.
Over those centuries, nobody much seems to have noticed, or cared, that traditional school pedagogy was not optimally suited to the behavioral tendencies of a lot of boys. At least, not until girls started getting equal access to education and subsequently outperforming boys in school. At which point, standard pedagogical practices being “unfair to boys” suddenly became perceived as a big problem.
Mind you, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t strive to improve educational practices so that they work better for all children, and suit a wider range of individual personalities and capabilities. I’m just calling bullshit on the notion that the decline of boys’ academic performance relative to girls’ must be due to some huge impact of “changes in schooling” in recent decades. The standard educational structures that people are now complaining about as suboptimal for boys are basically the same ones that male teachers have been applying to boys for centuries.
A couple of factors that you seem to be ignoring are 1) greater acceptance and representation of women in STEM fields, and 2) the “girl cooties” phenomenon, in which boys are socialized to believe that things associated with girls are unsuitable for or unworthy of boys’ attention.
Yes, attitudes towards women and girls in STEM fields have changed a hell of a lot over the past several decades. It’s not some mysterious unidentified “changes in schooling” that have increased girls’ confidence and interest in their abilities to do math and science. It’s mostly been just a self-reinforcing phenomenon of more women becoming visible in STEM achievement, which helps mitigate lack of confidence and impostor syndrome and so on in girls studying STEM, which leads to yet more women being active in STEM fields, which further encourages the next generation of girls, and so on. The cultural stereotypes that proclaim that math and science are “too hard” or “too impersonal” for girls to be good at are by no means eradicated, but they’re definitely shrinking.
At the same time that girls are starting to flourish in STEM fields, boys are starting to feel turned off from them, for precisely that reason. STEM study, especially in some fields like biology, is now becoming considered one of the “things girls do”. And as soon as some activity gets sufficiently female-identified, society starts sending boys and men the message that they should avoid it, so as not to be “girly”.
Lol, maths teachers were always nagging me to show my working. But yes, it definitely depends on the subject. I think it’s nice to have this variety, so those who are good at writing essays get to shine, and kids who struggled with that task like I did can demonstrate understanding of the material without it being dependant on writing skills.
Neither can really be an objective measurement of information and skill acquisition, since both depend significantly on other skills - for exams, time management and performance under stress, and speed of understanding and responding to questions. For coursework/class grades, the ability to focus in class/at home for long periods without being distracted, ability to organise oneself, and willingness to do all the tedious busywork involved in school.
Since learning is an internal process, it seems unlikely there can be an objective measurement of it, and without that, how can we know which assessment method is more accurate? In fact it probably differs for different people, so it’s useful to consider both.
More things I’ll never understand! Did either of you ever feel like this?
Issues like this, the reverse where girls are turned off subjects because they think they are ‘for boys’, the ones I quoted above, and the common desire of teenagers to look good in front of the opposite sex have led some people to recommend single sex education, either completely or for certain classes. That has its own problems, though.
No, that’s why i mentioned my sister. But i think it’s fairly common. And i suspect that to the extent there’s actually been a change, schooling hasn’t become biased against boys. It’s just become a little less biased against girls.
Standardized tests are more objective since they are, well, standardized. Individual teachers bring subjectivity. Standardized testing can however be more biased, systematically. And in the United States at least, standardized testing is less predictive of future success in college than grades and class rank, which is the task they are being used for at college applications time, which is why some colleges have stopped looking at them.
It may be that part of the skill set used for grades over exams is consistency in effort (some of the articles claim that, and argue that fewer exams hurt boys because they, allegedly, need the test to cram for). But consistency of effort is a key skill for success in college and employment. Life is often more a marathon training program than a series of sprints.
Speaking as a literal college math professor with PhD and decades of research experience in a STEM-related field, the answer is FUCK YES, and so has every other female STEM researcher I’ve ever heard from.
Most of us (at least, most of us who make it into an established professional career) are lucky enough not to have been seriously handicapped or held back by the intrusion of such feelings. But we know what those feelings are like, and we know our female colleagues and students are also dealing with them to varying extents. Naively asking a roomful of female STEM researchers if “any of you have ever felt like this” because you’ll “never understand it” would just get you laughed at for cluelessness.
For most of us professionals I don’t think that “deliberately trying to underperform the boys” plays much of a role, except perhaps in socialized expectations to be a bit more deferential in interactions than men are expected to be. After all, if we were really strongly averse to “showing up the boys” by being visibly smarter than them, we’d never have got where we are. But being affected to some degree by feelings of impostor syndrome is an extremely real and widespread phenomenon among high-achieving women in all fields, particularly in STEM.
