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.
“This shows there’s no issue of intellectual ability–and that’s a message we still need to get out to some of our parents and teachers,” says Henry “Hank” Kepner, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Reston, Virginia.
It won’t be a new message. Nearly 20 years ago, a large-scale study led by psychologist Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, found a “trivial” gap in math test scores between boys and girls in elementary and middle school. But it did suggest that boys were better at solving more complex problems by the time they got to high school.
Now, even that small gap has disappeared, Hyde reports in tomorrow’s issue of Science. Her team sifted through scores from standardized tests taken in 2005, 2006, and 2007 by nearly 7 million students in 10 states. Overall, the researchers found “no gender difference” in scores among children in grades two through 11.
This all makes sense to the Chief, based on his 26 years in the science classroom. This piece goes on to point out that the REAL problem is in the testing.
The study’s most disturbing finding, the authors say, is that neither boys nor girls get many tough math questions on state tests now required to measure a school district’s progress under the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law. Using a four-level rating scale, with level one being easiest, the authors said that they found no challenging level-three or -four questions on most state tests. The authors worry that means that teachers may start dropping harder math from their curriculums, because “more teachers are gearing their instruction to the test.”
This is a real issue, and one of the major flaws in the NCLB approach. The Chief was involved in South Dakota’s efforts to bring the testing in line with the states science standards…which are pretty good, and which also include higher level type three and four items noted above.
In the assessment project, we were instructed NOT to attempt to address these levels of competence in NCLB-related testing, since THERE IS NO WAY TO PROPERLY EVALUATE THE ATTAINMENT OF THESE ON THE TYPE OF “OBJECTIVE” TESTING USED FOR ESTABLISHING NCLB COMPLIANCE.
The same thing applies in math as it did for science. While the Chief has no objection (quite the contrary!) to establishing and maintaining high educational standards, the NCLB approach is fatally flawed. Unfortunately, there is no easy, concise, quick fix that readily lends itself to a bureaucratic type of approach. IMHO not only is this the case, but it is the INEVITABLE outgrowth of the establishment and growth of the massive Federal education bureaucracy of the Dept. of Education, which in turn drives a similar growth in the administrative infrastructure at the state and local levels in order to “document” compliance with the Federal mandates.
Reagan was right – abolish the US Dept. of Education!