Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Why Girls Tend to Get Better Grades Than Boys Do

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.