> On Sun, 20 Apr 1997 21:48:37 -0400 Joel VanLaven wrote:
> > Perhaps that adage should be more like: reading is NOT for boys
> and math
> > is NOT for girls, so feminist sci-fi is for NO traditional people.
> >
> > -- Joel VanLaven
>
>
> I don't know what the figures look like in the US, but in the UK there is
> currently mass panic in some quarters because girls are now beating
> boys in the maths and science exams taken at 18 years old. And
> guess what, the rhetoric is *not* about how wonderful it is that girls
> are doing so well! Only a few more years to wait and it should all be
> filtering through to the colleges.
>
> Farah
>
Wish I had the stats, but apparently here in the US girls DO do better in
high school math in terms of grades--girls have better GPAs generally--but
still trail in the SATs. (For non-USers, the SATs are used as one of our
main predictors for college success.) Amidst the constant debate over the
validity of the SATs, the verbal section (as well as the math) keeps being
reviewed for biases--ethnic, gender, class, whatever. In addition to
other changes, the verbal section was revised to include more scientific
readings in the reading comprehension in an attempt to equalize the
genders (girls were and still do score higher, but the scores are now
closer). I'm not sure what went/goes on with the math-section
discussion--might it be gender-biased? I don't know.
The above info comes from Matlin's psyc of women text. It might be
loaded, I don't know. No better way to lie than with statistics.
Hedges & Nowell (1995) assessed test scores b/n 1971 and 1992 and found
that in large-scale surveys, high school boys score on average higher on
the math sections, and/but show more variability in scores--that is, there
are more males than females at both the high end of the spectrum and the
low end.
One limitation of Hedges & Nowell's approach is that the scores from the
earlier years would be recording students who were not required to take a
certain number of math classes. In 1970, Sells found that high schools
were serving as a "critical filter," keeping many women from careers in
math and science by not requiring math courses, rendering more women than
men (who opted to continue the math) ineligible for college math and
science (50% of Berkeley men had 4yrs of HS math, 8% of women). Thus, the
girls in the earlier studies might have been less prepared for the
tests--and the tests then reflected experience not ability. So, I don't
know if the gender gap in math scores is narrowing or not, I'd presume it
is. It definately is in terms of math and science courses in college.
Anyway, sorry to be long-winded...thought some might be unfamiliar and
interested. The point is simply that assumptions of biological
differences are being questioned. Though that seems a redundant point to
make to a feminist listserver.
Andrea Klein
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