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Joined: Aug 2010
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Saying differences are found "every year" is deceptive, since these differences have shrunk enormously. There has been a VAST change in girls' average and high-end scores in the last 50 years. How do you explain this? How do you explain the large variability between countries WRT girls' performance? As I think I have said elsewhere, there MAY be some slight innate biological differences in male and female performance, but we are certainly not in a place yet to know what they are--it's clear that culture is still acting upon these results.
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Saying differences are found "every year" is deceptive, since these differences have shrunk enormously. There has been a VAST change in girls' average and high-end scores in the last 50 years. How do you explain this? How do you explain the large variability between countries WRT girls' performance?
As I think I have said elsewhere, there MAY be some slight innate biological differences in male and female performance, but we are certainly not in a place yet to know what they are--it's clear that culture is still acting upon these results. My inexpert opinion is that both positions here are right, based on my limited understanding of the malleability of the human brain. I would expect that differences of brain composition (grey vs white matter) would exist historically, because historically we didn't expect/allow women to think. And I would expect those differences to disappear in modern times, because our attitudes about women and thinking have radically changed... so if the brain is as malleable as research suggests, that composition should also change. And because that attitude shift is not yet fully complete, I would expect that stark differences in brain matter can still be noted in certain groups. I don't see a conflict in the data from either side.
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I know two of the boys on the list from TX and know their families. Those boys get far more prep and pushing from their parents than their sisters do. This easily explains the 1 point difference. Another way to see this is if you look at the grade level where girl participation almost equals the boys, the difference shrinks to its lowest number - almost 1/2 of a question.
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JonLaw, with all due respect, I really don't think there is any evidence whatsoever that women's brains have physically shrunk or gotten stupider or anything due to sexism and are now "catching up."
Again, I'm going to point to the fact that 50 years, or even 100 years, is a MICROBLEEP in evolutionary time. If we have seen big changes in girls' test scores over that time, we are NOT talking about evolution. We are talking about cultural change.
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The science seems to be coalescing more strongly on the other side of the argument. If all this is biological, then why has there been a HUGE change in female math and science achievement in the last 50 years--a mere microbleep in evolutionary time? The brain is a very plastic organ and will change in response to the environment. Lock a very bright kid in a closet with dogs and they will come out "damaged" a few years later. Just google "feral child" to see just how plastic the human psyche is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxana_MalayaIMHO, we have a very long way to go to educate our kids to the best of their abilities.
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Oh yes, of course, individual brain development is very plastic. But that is not the same thing as saying that within 20 years, the female brain has been able to evolve so drastically such that while very high-scoring boys once outnumbered girls 20 to 1 on math tests, they now outnumber them only 3 to 1.
(Or maybe you were agreeing with me--sorry!)
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This book backs up part of Bostonian's post, which is that it appears women generally use both hemispheres in their thinking processes whereas men's brains are more lateralised. Again, it goes back to environment. The most productive intellectual of the last 100 years was John Von Neumann. I read his biography and he had a very interesting way of seeing and thinking about the world - he saw things in his mind with a combination of color, sounds, and pressure - in other words - his entire brain was in the act. Feynman also saw the world in this way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
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Oh yes, of course, individual brain development is very plastic. But that is not the same thing as saying that within 20 years, the female brain has been able to evolve so drastically such that while very high-scoring boys once outnumbered girls 20 to 1 on math tests, they now outnumber them only 3 to 1.
(Or maybe you were agreeing with me--sorry!) Hmm. On the AMC test, for grade 8, the girls are almost the same in number as the boys and the average point difference is just 0.7. At the upper ends of the test, there are more boys than girls, so I imagine that a distribution of the results would show that the majority of the girls actually score better than a majority of the boys if the upper end of both sexes was removed from the sample.
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