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Archive for July 30, 2008

At math, girls are as good as boys!?

July 30, 2008 by Walter Schneider.

Girls = Boys at Math

By David Malakoff

ScienceNOW Daily News
24 July 2008

Zip. Zilch. Nada. There’s no real difference between the scores of U.S. boys and girls on common math tests, according to a massive new study. Educators hope the finding will finally dispel lingering perceptions that girls don’t measure up to boys when it comes to crunching numbers….

…The results “essentially confirm” earlier studies–and they should finally put to rest the idea that girls aren’t going into technical fields because they can’t do the math, says Ann Gallagher, a psychologist who studies testing at the Law School Admission Council in Newtown, Pennsylvania. But she still thinks there may be cultural or psychological reasons for why girls still tend to lag behind boys on high-stakes tests such as the SAT. Among students she’s observed, she says “the boys tend to be a little more idiosyncratic in solving problems, the girls more conservative in following what they’ve been taught.”
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Comments by Fathers for Life: Girls are as good as boys at math!? Bunk!!

Neither David Malakoff, of ScienceNOW Daily News, nor apparently the five women authors of the study he wrote about didn’t stress the fact that obviously the student test results that were examined were conflated to produce the results that the authors intended to find.

Neither David Malakoff nor apparently the five sympathizing women authors were able to explain away the reality of the math-achievement differences between girls and boys. At the prodigy level, in math, boys excel over girls by a factor of close to seven. Certainly, some girls may become as good at math as many boys are, but there simply aren’t as many girls, by far, as there are boys who are top performers. (Nor are there even any women who are world-class chess champions.)

As usual in feminist “research”, it appears that the five discoverers of the surprising truth of girls doing as well as boys do in math presented statistics in such a way that they provided the answers they were after. That is not objective science and the truth. It is advocacy research.

Here is an objective study report on the subject:

The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception — an article by Judith Kleinfeld, Professor of Psychology, University of Alaska (unfortunately, some of the tables and graphs in thatPDF file are for unknown reasons no longer being displayed)

Here is the reference to the report on the study done by five women who found the surprising news announced in the ScienceNOW Daily News:

Diversity: Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance
Janet S. Hyde,1* Sara M. Lindberg,1 Marcia C. Linn,2 Amy B. Ellis,3 Caroline C. Williams,3

Standardized tests in the U.S. indicate that girls now score just as well as boys in math.

1Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA

2Education in Mathematics, Science, and Technology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

3Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA

*Author for correspondence. E-mail: jshyde{at}wisc.edu

Read the Full Text

It is somewhat useless to follow that link, as access to the full text of the study report is denied unless an AAAS membership subscription is purchased first, and that ranges from US$75 to US$310, depending on academic standing or qualification. Nevertheless, a free summary of the study report is alleged to be available. However, the free “summary” consists of nothing more than the title of the study report and a list of its five women authors (exactly as shown above). Mind you, for ten dollars it is possible to gain 24-hour access to the article. That may not be worth the effort and expense.

According to Wikipedia, AAAS may refer to:

* American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an organization dedicated to scholarship and the advancement of learning
* American Association for the Advancement of Science, an organization that promotes cooperation between scientists

According to information available at http://www.sciencemag.org/index.dtl, AAAS stands for “American Association for the Advancement of Science”.

Christopher Jones wrote the following thoughts on the announcement of the study report by Hyde at al. (in a letter hat went, amongst others, to a number of members of the AAAS):

Ladies & Gentleman,

Undoubtedly this will seem very non-PC, but I am I the only one who suspects some agenda in this headline?

I am not a subscriber so I do NOT have access to the full report (I read the Supporting Online Material) but what struck me immediately in this article was the apologetic tone of David Malakoff - admittedly defensive for suggesting the unlikely promotion of a “feminist” agenda that appears to have taken hold of higher education.

20 years ago the caveat for this report was “little difference at age 12-14 (or middle school)” as girls are perhaps 2 years or more ahead of boys in physical development at that cohort. Nothing has really changed in that time - they are still neck and neck and no one seriously disputes there is a difference ON AVERAGE. But clearly the “tail” distribution is thicker for boys - hence they out-number girls 2:1 in tougher questions! How is it that this USEFUL interpretation was avoided? Of course once boys have caught up to girls in physical development (by 18) they tend to do better as evidenced by SAT scores - which was acknowledged.

The SURPRISE was this statement:

Hyde suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests.

Why? Is this meant as a backhand way to banish any thought that “The Bell Curve”, Philippe Rushton and Helmuth Nyborg were right and there are significant differences in racial intelligence?

In the very next sentence Hyde stretches (to confound any criticism) by calling well documented evidence from the College Board “illusory”. Really? A professional organization that has been dedicated to rigorously testing and evaluating standardized testing for 40 odd years was sloppy and we never noticed? How can such idiocy go unchallenged or unpunished?

Then comes the political “fear-mongering” gambit which trots out that familiar chestnut - much loved by teachers and professional “educators” (and who support the Democrats) - that politicization of education under No Child Left Behind has lead to “teaching to the test” strategies by dropping level 4 questions.

Perhaps the best news in this article - girls now have no excuse why they don’t pick STEM fields (unless they perhaps do not conform to the stereotypes assigned by feminists?). That is GREAT NEWS because we can now drop all those targeted programs that enhanced girls esteem and discriminated against boys merely because they did better.

Yet strangely, boys are still unfairly advantaged according to Ann Gallagher, a psychologist who studies testing at the Law School Admission Council in Newtown, because she still thinks there may be cultural or psychological reasons for why girls still tend to lag behind boys on high-stakes tests such as the SAT. It’s not fair that “the boys tend to be a little more idiosyncratic in solving problems” while “the girls more conservative in following what they’ve been taught.” Boy use more successful strategies. How unfair! Hobble them.

I wonder if Hyde thought to add 2.5 men to the group in order to broaden her conservative sisters with more idiosyncratic thought?

That so many broad based statements with nothing more that feminist ideology behind it could be made and blindly parroted, is remarkable for a popular entertainment magazine - which it must be to abandon all pretense of rigorous inquiry, for surely this is NOT science.

Here is the offending article
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/724/1

And here is what I consider to be a helpful non-science discussion that touches on most of the troubling issues: