Gender Differences In Math Assessment Essay

In the essay “When Brights Girls Decide that Math is a Waste of Time” by Susan Jacoby, Jacoby claims that girls develop deficiencies during their adolescent years by not taking math or science in their high school years. It can be argued that Jacoby’s thoughts on high school girls and math are incorrect due to the sexism that takes place in her essay, the amount of inaccurate and outdated information, and her argument that math and science is highly important.

Whilst there are factors outside school, internal factors also impact gender differences in educational achievements hugely. According to Tony Sewell, boys fall behind in education because schools have become more 'feminised', as indicated in Item A. This means that feminine traits such as methodical working and attentiveness have

2. Describe the pattern of growth in the “Number of people told” column for both Scenario A and Scenario B.

Historically boys were top of the class. Today that is no longer the case. A recent article in The Economist discusses a 2009 study by the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) that examined how 15-year-old boys and girls performed in reading, mathematics and science. They found that girls are performing better than their male classmates. This gender gap is worldwide. Girls score higher than boys on tests measuring reading ability in every country in the world (Loveless).

Women in the Math World Works Cited Not Included Math is commonly known as the man’s major. Many college math professors are men and the same goes for their students. "One study revealed that women accounted for 15% of students in computer science, 16% in electrical engineering,. . . Gender splits in the faculty were similar" (Cukier).

Women have always been viewed as the weaker sex, and society will continue to view them that way unless they do something about it. In the essay “When Bright Girls Decide that Math is a Waste of time”, the author Susan Jacoby discusses the problems women steering clear of math and science subjects because of the traditional view of a woman. She focused on what causes high school girls to focus on arts courses instead of STEM courses and what are the effects of it on themselves. The underlying discrimination amongst boys and girls, stereotypical thinking of parents and teachers that girls are not good at math eventually decreases the self-confidence among girls to solve science and math problems.

The mean for the column “mean” is 3.56. It is very close to the parameter of interest but is not equal to it. You can calculate a confidence interval for the mean of the mean column, but a specific confidence interval would need to be provided. In that case, the confidence interval would be centered on 3.56, not 3.5.

An experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles proved interesting when a machine taught both boys and girls. The boys ended up scoring higher than when a woman taught them. I am wondering if girls scored higher than the boys did when male teachers teach them? I also wonder how the girls scored when taught by a machine; maybe they scored higher, too. At the secondary school level boys do perform better on technical or scientific subjects. Now this goes back to the first assumption that our brains work differently, or is it because more male teachers may teach these subjects? According to Mooney, teacher of the similar sex may have the "instinctive understanding that an adult will enjoy with a child who is going through a process which he or she went through too" (122). In other words, they can relate better with a child of the same sex. I am a female kindergarten teacher and also have a daughter who is six years old. I have no problem relating to the boys in my class. I think I can relate to any child who is five or six years old.

However social class is not the only factor influencing educational achievement; Girls achieve higher grades than boys in Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) and GCSE’s (Mitsos and Browne, 1998), in 2010 to 2011 54.3 per cent of black pupils achieved five or more A* to C grades at GCSE compared to 58 per cent of white pupils and 61.8 per cent of Asian pupils (Attew, 2012). Therefore educational achievement is also affected by gender and ethnicity.

     For this particular study, a survey including 39 closed questions (developed by Alan Schoenfeld in 1989) was used. All items on the survey were in the form of a seven point rating scale, with 1 being “strongly agree” and 7 being “strongly disagree”. The questionnaire was determined to be extremely consistent with an alpha of 0.8468. The survey contained questions associated to student’s perception of what mathematics is and how to do well in it, what mathematics solutions should be, how math problems can be solved, how mathematics is learned, and student motivation. For the first 33 questions, the students were asked to rate them on the seven point scale described above. The last six questions on the survey dealt with grades, gender, and perception of the children’s parent’s attitudes towards mathematics. The researcher also used a two-tail t-test to compare the mathematical perceptions of Chinese and American students. The average of each cateogry in the survey was also compared. As stated above, there were six main categories being compared: what

Researchers and testing has proven over time, that some cognitive abilities between males and females change throughout infancy and adolescents. Girls generally perform and use their verbal skills much earlier than boys. Women do much better on exams such as SAT’s in the verbal areas where men excel in the mathematical arena. This finding in itself may seem to solidify the fact of biological makeup. If that is the case, then why do girls perform equally as proficient in the area of math until they reach their “tween” and teenage years, which is generally between 6th and 7th grade? At this point, there seems to be a decline in the female’s performance in the area of math.

Mathematics, study of relationships among quantities, magnitudes, and properties and of logical operations by which unknown quantities, magnitudes, and properties may be deduced. In the past, mathematics was regarded as the science of quantity, whether of magnitudes, as in geometry, or of numbers, as in arithmetic, or of the generalization of these two fields, as in algebra. Toward the middle of the 19th century, however, mathematics came to be regarded increasingly as the science of relations, or as the science that draws necessary conclusions. This latter view encompasses mathematical or symbolic logic, the science of using symbols to provide an exact theory of logical deduction and inference based on

While watching National Hockey League (NHL) games, I often heard the play-by-play announcer mention at the start of the third and final period how it would be tough for a team to come back from a one goal deficit. This led me to wonder just how difficult it was mathematically, and how much previous periods affected the final one. In this project, I will investigate whether the scores at the end of the first period affect the final score of NHL games.

Gender differences occur in many aspects of a person’s life whether it is culture, politics, occupation, family and relationships, or the economy (just to name a few). One major difference in gender occurs in learning and education in the elementary and secondary levels. Research has found that males and females learn differently in many aspects of education. First of all, female and male brains are constructed differently affecting the way they learn; this leads to basic differences in learning and also gives an introduction into why the way one learns differs according to gender and how males and females learn subjects and tasks differently. Second, males and females are treated differently, sometimes unconsciously, in educational

Gender equity issues in mathematics and science have been the focus of many educators and researchers for years. Women have often been denied an equal education in math and science for many reasons. Parents and teachers must realize this fact and change their habits wherever necessary. Girls must be given the same opportunity as boys from the beginning, particularly in math and science where girls tend to lag behind.