Teachers might not see growing math gender gap

[caption id="attachment_66615" align="alignleft" width="215" caption="Educators hope to eliminate a persistent gender gap in early math education."][/caption]A gap in reading and math scores still exists in lower grades, with boys continuing to outpace girls in math, and girls ahead of boys in reading, two University of Illinois education professors say.Using national longitudinal data to perform their analysis, Joseph P. Robinson and Sarah Lubienski investigated male and female achievement in math and reading, looking for when gender gaps first appeared and where in the distribution the gaps were most prevalent.Except for kindergarteners in the 99th percentile, boys and girls generally start out on equal footing in math competency. In elementary school, girls throughout the distribution lose ground to boys in math achievement before eventually regaining some ground in middle school, according to research published by the professors in the American Educational Research Journal."If you just look at the average gap, there is no gap in math between boys and girls when they start kindergarten," Robinson said. "But when you start to break it down throughout the distribution, taking a look at the low- and high-achieving girls and boys, that's where we see that there's a gap favoring boys at the upper-most extreme of the distribution. The 99th percentile of boys is outscoring the 99th percentile of girls."Over time, as students progress through elementary school, the gap "begins to widen, favoring boys in the lower part of the distribution," Robinson said. "By third grade, you can see it throughout the whole range of kids."

Robinson and Lubienski also compared teachers' assessments of boys and girls. They discovered that teachers seem to overestimate girls' mathematics achievement relative to boys, rating girls higher than boys in both subjects, even when cognitive assessments suggest that boys have a math advantage."Our results suggest that there is still a gender gap, not only with achievement, but with teachers' perceptions," Lubienski said.Based in part on other research, the professors suspect that teachers might be mistaking girls' compliance in the classroom for comprehension, a topic that the researchers are exploring in a forthcoming study."We thought that teachers might rate boys higher in math, but we found that even when boys are outscoring girls, the teachers think the girls are outscoring the boys," Lubienski said. "This might be because girls tend to be perceived as 'good girls' in the classroom, and then teachers assume that they understand the material because they complete their work and don't cause trouble."The researchers say that there's also a gap in reading that favors girls. Although the gap favoring girls generally narrows over time, it also eventually widens among low-achieving girls and boys, who struggle to keep up with their classmates."Clearly, the boys start out behind the girls in reading achievement," Lubienski said. "In general, the mid-achieving boys eventually catch up, but the lowest-achieving boys don't. In other words, if you're a boy and you're really struggling to read, you most likely won't catch up with your peers. It's those boys at the bottom that teachers should be most concerned about when it comes to reading."