Why Girls Tend to Get Better Grades Than Boys Do
ENRICO GNAULATI
The Atlantic
SEP 18 2014, 10:58 AM

This trend helps girls on average relative to boys, although there are conscientious boys and less-conscientious girls. It may also result in gifted students not getting grades that indicate their potential. In addition to overall letter grades it may be a good idea to show grades based on tests in each subject. Maybe overall grades should be a nonlinear function of homework and test grades. If you can solve every algebra problem your teacher throws at you on a test, arguably you should get an A for the class, even if you did not do many homework assignments.

My sentiments exactly.

Is the point of school to teach material, or to force kids into a mold their teachers and administrators prefer?

I still struggle with what the purpose of school is. I would have agreed that just showing you know the material should be sufficient - if the only focus of school for K-12 was to learn subject matter and show you know it, regardless of how you get there and if you continue to learn new subject matter.

But... it just seems like schools' role has greatly expanded beyond just subject mastery. As my children start their journey, I really do struggle with what I really want from school. It just seemed so much simpler and black/white when I was a child, and it just seems to have gotten so out of control with what I sometimes think is trivial nonsense that school admin get so hung up over.

So - is school just to teach academics, or is the schools' role to prepare a child for the outside world and life skills they need for college and beyond? Skills like managing time, organizing themselves, responsibility, leadership, team work and so on... seem to be increasingly more and more emphasized in classrooms and grades than pure mastery (until college, when the bucket of cold water tends to hit students that depended on the micromanagement style of so many "top notch" schools through high school)

so... I don't know - I still struggle with trying to figure out what I would consider "best educational setting" for my kids would be and balancing their strengths with weaknesses that needs to be dealt with early on and my expectations over whether school is to be focused on subject mastery and making sure the child is working towards their potential and whether those non-academic "skills" should be so critical to the environment or not.

and when I look at parents in my DD's daycare, I find so few parents really asking about what role they want educational institution to play in their and their child's life... and yet I know I would have never even second guessed our public school system (we live in a highly rated district) - until we had our 3.5 DC reporting boredom, and his testing result that stunned (and scared) us. And so now, I find myself really trying to answer this question.

as for boys vs girls, it always seemed like it favored girls... even when I was a kid, I recall boys always being sent to the principal's office because they could not sit still. It does seem to trend towards average girls' strengths - even at daycare/preschool level, it already seems like the environment is slanted toward the average girl (and "calm or mellow" boy).

To extend this why not just take a test when one is ready (at 14, 16, or whatever) and get a HS Diploma? Competency based credentials make more sense to me than ones earned by serving a certain period of time (especially for the academically precocious).

This is the argument you're going to get, and to some degree I have to agree with it. (I find myself a little surprised to be saying this.) I do think the pendulum has gone too far in this direction, though. But we do get back to a question of--well, what is school for?

You have to do *something* with kids.

Otherwise they run around and gum up the machinery that makes the diet coke.

I think the Ellis Middle School example is a solid approach. Study skills, note taking, self-regulation, and such may be valid skills to learn but they need to be wholly separate and accounted for outside of subject mastery.

If they did that, then maybe those sorts of things could be taught directly and remedially as needed without completely undermining other subject areas. With that model, then you can pull out other meta-skills for focus, too.

I would say that it's not a schools job to conflate organization and time management skills with traditional academic subjects like math and history. If the schools want to grade students on such skills, create a separate category for it.

As it is schools are injecting too much English into math class with the common core curriculum.

To a certain degree, I do agree that school does teach time management, responsibility, etc.

DS5 goes to after school care until 5pm. He used to pay at after school care and did homework after dinner (and whined the whole time).

School does teach him that homework is his responsibility, so he has to do it even if he whines. So now he does it during after school care, and when he gets home, he gets to play!

Mostly, the role of the school is to provide workers to the economy, and high ability is not enough in the marketplace. Volume of work produced is usually even more important. Hence, a school system that places heavy time demands on students is well-calibrated to produce the workers employers demand. This is true in both private and public sectors. A tweak that allows high grades with low output is likely to lead to a subset of workers with high ability and a lousy work ethic, who would largely be unemployable.

Furthermore, the growth of two-earner families has frequently left children shortchanged for parental attention, who would traditionally be the source for learning essential life skills like time management and priority organization. Society has taken notice, and when it comes to interventions, the biggest bang for our buck is to transfer more responsibility to the schools.

ITA.

Important skills, to be sure-- but often an area of great (and hidden!) asynchrony for gifted students, too, this creep of multiple skills into curricular domains where they don't naturally occur.

Where and to what extent they naturally occur, fine. Good, even. Make high school students write lab reports. By all means. But don't make them write an essay about their geometry proof. Oh. Wait-- that's right. Proofs are things that students observe now, rather than construct for themselves... since it takes too long to produce something, evidently.

States typically prohibit people below age 18 from taking the GED because they fear that this would encourage kids to drop out and pass a test to get a high school diploma. I don't like this policy, but research has found that the job market outcomes of GED recipients are worse than those of "regular" high school graduates.

Horace Mann looked to Prussia for his ideas on public education and its superior trained armed forces at the time. He wanted to instill political stability and social harmony with public schools. He argued that universal public education was the best method to create disciplined, orderly, republican citizens.

His sister-in-law Elizabeth Peabody (who was also sister-in-law to Nathaniel Hawthorne) had different ideas on education. She believed that the premise of children's play had intrinsic merit and educational value. She helped to establish the kindergarten system in the US based on German educator Friedrich Froebel's original ideas and principles. Froebel had rejected fear-based discipline in favor of fostering a child's curiosity and senses, which Peabody supported.

If anyone has read Walter Isaacson's brilliant biography on Steve Jobs (highly gifted, Reed College dropout), you'll notice that Jobs operated with intuition, curiosity, and like Peabody advocated, though he definitely wanted a disciplined workforce. Then again, Jobs seemed to be one of those rare creatures who was at the crossroads of the arts/humanities and technology/science -- which too often public schools entirely forget about it.

Problem is, imo, except for a handful of schools like Montesorri and others, we're stuck with linear, rigid objective thinking with public schools. Even if you un/homeschool, college applicants are still often required to produce 'evidence' of following or adhering to a degree what the public schools do and this includes standardized testing.

I do miss the good old days as I don't believe that I would have done as well under the current regime. However, our district's approach is more difficult than just an issue of completing/delivering homework. Sure, if you completely blew off homework, you would end up with a B or below since homework is worth between 10% to 20% in most classes. The numbers vary from teacher to teacher but as a general rule tests/quizzes plus homework together constitute only 40% to 50% of the total grade. The other 50% to 60% are based on work completed during class immediately after a lesson is taught. This means that if you didn't immediately understand a concept or algorithm or you happen to have more than a few off-days, you would not be able to get an A in that course. These classwork assignments are not called quizzes but they effectively are and they are more challenging than standard unit tests, which tend to take more of a survey approach, and on which almost all kids in our GT classes can manage to score 80% to 100%. This current approach makes it challenging in the sense that you pretty much need to be "on" almost all the time. On the other hands, it makes my kiddos more accountable on a daily basis. Organization, executive functioning, and discipline are required and on average, girls tend to be a bit better than boys at least at the younger ages.

You cannot run a company with entrepenurial types. You need good middle class worker bees who do what they are told. Organized, disciplined.

It should be noted too that girls have more white matter (over 9.5 times more than boys), the neurological wiring, that connects various parts of the brain. Plus, sex hormones play a key role in brain development. Girls do have such exposure to testosterone levels as boys.

Even with 2- and three-year-old girls and boys at a playground, you might notice the girls, generally speaking, seem to be more purposeful with their play. Boys (generally speaking), on the other hand, can be totally aimless and run around without any goal or plan in mind. They're wired differently.

At uni, I often had subjects where the entire grade came from the final exam.

I'm stunned that so much of the grade in schools now can come from non-academic criteria like compliance.

There is actually a school of educational thought that advocates what is called standards-based grading, which is supposed to base grades only on mastery of learning standards. Teachers can select the means of documenting mastery, including test repair (repeat testing until a minimum standard is reached). Where I work, our official homework policy is that homework cannot subtract from your grade, but it can add to it. (Granted, this does not entirely prevent certain faculty from sneaking higher weightings for disguised homework into the syllabus, or from using low responsibility grades as an excuse to downgrade placement recommendations for the subsequent class.)

THIS.


And yeah-- it's a problem for a lot of kids, not just the boys. My DD really struggled with this, too-- because she's a "cheetah" and not a border collie.

We finally had to coach her to understand that for her-- a few mistakes were inevitable, and that therefore, while A's were within reach (and yeah, expected)-- A+ grades (98% plus)were sometimes just... not.

When there is NO (low-stakes) formative assessment in place in a course, that isn't good either.

Re-do policies, depending upon how they are implemented in practice, may provide a sense of legitimacy to essentially falsifying student level of performance.

Regarding do-over policy or practice, parents may wish to know:
1) How is grading assigned?
- For example, does the redo grade replace the original grade?
- Is the assigned grade an average of the original work and the rework?
2) Who has access to the redo opportunity?
- Everyone who wishes to repeat the exercise?
- Only select individuals?
--- Is selection determined by a consistent set of criteria, such as a cut score? If so, what is the cut score?
--- Do any other selection criteria apply?
3) Is the policy clearly documented? Is it selectively implemented on the fly?

Does the student who was originally failing (or below a specific threshold) ultimately receive a grade of 100% based on a redo, while a student who originally scored 96% is denied a redo and retains the grade of 96% entered into the gradebook?

I've heard of policies like this used to considerably raise the GPA of marginal performers. By the end of high school selective access to redo opportunities which offer grade replacement may push selected students to the upper reaches of class rank while the GPA of consistent high performers may be comparatively lower. Colleges and universities may get an inaccurate picture of students' level of performance.

^ YES, indeed.

This is precisely what my DD often experienced as a secondary student. If she'd been scoring 50% all the time, an A was still within reach because of re-do policies.



However, the fact that most of the time, she was scoring 95%-100%, with a few oddball off days at 75%-80%, she often had to WORRY about her grades, and seldom got second chances at anything.

So fundamentally, an A+ was NOT within reach of most A students-- unless they happen to be of the "always on" variety.

All of HER assessments were summative.


For her struggling classmates, many of them were formative.

NOT cool to mix those two systems IMHO.

I didn't see any mention in the article of the fact that generally speaking girls are people pleasers. Overall girls do what is expected of them. Boys don't. Some have said it's due to historical differences in the way the sexes were treated/expected to do. Others say it's because of wiring.

I thought to mention it as it plays a big role in identifying gifted kids - boys in particular.

See Madoosa I would argue that it makes boys more likely to be IDed - because they stick out like sore thumbs while girls apply their intellect to blending in (speaking in gross generalizations). Might also make them more likely to get labelled ADHD...

If I recall correctly - the rate of misdiagnosis of gifted boys is about 70% - largely as ADD/ADHD.

The misdiagnosis, imo, is due to outward (often regarded as negative) behavior displayed by boys. Girls, as a rule, tend to internalize things, including being socially/emotionally aware of others.

Generally speaking, girls don't tend to draw attention on them to stand out like a sore thumb. IF girls get unwarranted attention, they risk being isolated and/or being labelled - social, emotional, and/or physical consequences are too much and not worth the risk for many girls. Some girls if they've got ADD/ADHD or are on the spectrum may lack this social awareness or connections to risk taking behavior, but they're the exception, imo.

Some boys (who then become Steve Jobs types) are not so internally motivated (or perhaps neurologically wired) to curtail their behavior, which others may deem as outrageous and socially unacceptable. Though that doesn't mean they're not sensitive or care what others think. And, no, Jobs was never diagnosed with ADD/ADHD but he was definitely off the wall and an out of the box type.

We have this problem. Convincing my son to as I often put it "dot all his i's and cross all his t's". I also found out this summer that my son has low processing speed issues. This makes completing work during class a bit of a challenge, particularly when it's work he considers boring.

My son is just not intrinsically motivated and I don't really have very many good ways too motivate him. Even though I try not to I am always comparing him with a friends two girls, the first whom is very similar to him but super compliant.

What is frustrating is in my school how much homework/classwork means depends on the level of class. Homework/seatwork is less important in the honors/AP classes, and mean more in the "regular" classes. So dropping my son into all non honors classes isn't necessary going to help his grade at all, since he tests very well but he doesn't turn in (even if he has done it) 100% of the homework/classwork.