Study Examines Why Girls Do Better Than Boys In School

Article here. Excerpt:

'American women seem poised to make the 21st century their century as they begin to equal or even surpass their male counterparts in many aspects of society.

Researchers from the University of Georgia and Columbia University decided to look into one possible aspect of the emergence of women: why young girls earn better grades in elementary school than their male counterparts despite performing worse on standardized tests.

According to the research team’s report in the current issue of the Journal of Human Resources, the girls’ classroom behavior appears to translate into a higher overall academic performance.

“The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as ‘approaches toward learning,’” study co-author Christopher Cornwell, an economics professor at UGA, said in a statement. “You can think of ‘approaches to learning’ as a rough measure of what a child’s attitude toward school is: It includes six items that rate the child’s attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization.”
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The study’s findings showed that gender differences in teachers’ grading and evaluation begins in early years and tends to favor girls. In every subject area, the boys tended to perform below where their test scores might indicate.'