Obviously, if this is the case, there are significant implications on the subsequent gender gap (in college major selection and job and career directions) in areas where math or related types of thinking (e.g. logic) are used.
About the teacher perception of girls and boys performance. According to the paper, the boys math performance curve is flatter, with more extremes. You can see that in Figure 1. Now, if you’re a teacher with plenty of experience and have seen many of these “extreme” top end cases, mostly boys, it’s bound to influence your overall judgment. None of this actually answers the underlying chicken-and-egg issue.
I’d like to see the same analysis done with separate figures for male and female teachers. However, I don’t know if there are enough male K-2 teachers to make a meaningful comparison (e.g. all of my D’s teachers in ES were female).
Yes there is considerable discrimination in regards to girls in regards to their math ability. It starts at an early age and continues up through adulthood. How come UC Berkeley math only has about 3 tenured female math professors out of about 100??? Let me guess. They just cant find any qualified ones is what they always say. But they are trying soooo hard is also what they always say.
The most discouraging aspect for me, as an elementary public school administrator, is how teachers may model math anxiety for their students. Girls often identify with important females in their lives, like their teachers. We have all our teaching applicants solve a multiple step math problem- at a fifth grade level- among other hurdles in our very competitive application process. You would be surprised not only how many applicants cannot solve it-- but how many did not even try, and made comments at their interviews like “As a kid, I never liked math.” We didn’t hire them, but someone somewhere probably did…
@TheGreyKing Thank you for your observation. I’ve been saying that for years. If the teacher doesn’t like math she/he will transmit that to her/his students. It really is sad. Personally I never found it discouraging, but I was insulated/protected my my parents’ belief in my abilities. I don’t believe that my kids have ever suffered either, I have heard teachers and guidance councilors say some pretty outrageous things about how hard math is. Glad to hear that school districts are figuring this out.
The link seems to ask if this under-rating means they are being discouraged. Permanently. But there’s a lot of time- and a lot of math opportunities- between first grade and high school. And, as girls come to see math as a tool, not just assignments and quizzes, their views/interest and determination can change.
Anecdotal, but: -My girls were not discouraged at any point through hs. They were encouraged. But that’s their school experience. -The serious female potential math and stem college majors I see are usually highly qualified- and enthusiastic. They’ve not only been offered the challenges, but mentored. -And, I recently asked a friend who teaches high level math at both a college and hs if she experiences some sort of either discouragement of girls or some lacking in skills after years of discouragement. She said, not at all. But none of this is definitive, I realize.
Anecdotal but I have posted previously about the way very few girls were tested to be moved up in math at her ES - but boys were. After many parent complaints they started testing all of the students and what do you know? Lots of girls (including mine) qualified. Unfortunately for D it was not until 5th grade that this happened.
My D who scored in the 99 th percentile in both aptitude and achievement in math was never mentored or encouraged in school. Only at home.
@FallGirl, I was the best math student in my grade growing up. No one ever suggested that I should pursue a math or STEM related field, or gave me any specific encouragement.
At my kids’ HS, they decided to add another level of math after Calc. On the quiet, they offered 7 boys (class of ~50, majority female) the chance to do some work over the summer before 11th grade so they could skip a level and take the class as seniors. My D2 – 99th percentile math scorer – heard about it from the boys in the fall when she got back to school and discovered they had been moved ahead. You can guess how happy we both were. And the teacher who decided which kids to ask was a woman, too. My kid has gone on to be a physics major at a rigorous school, and some of her best grades have been in math. But this still makes my blood boil.
The math gap between boys and girls, IMO, can be partially explained by cultural factors. In my local middle school and high school, there are actually slightly more Asian American girls than AA boys in school math clubs, Math Count and Math League.
This always gets me. We had to really fight for D to be placed in the higher math track. She’s a small quiet person.
Finally after years of trying, I got an 8th grade math teacher to listen. She thought D deserved a chance. D missed the 2nd semester of pre algebra and was tutored for one semester of algebra and joined the advanced track 2nd semester of 8th grade.
Made all A’s in math and 5 in ap calc. She’s now an engineer.
It was annoying to advocate for someone we knew loved math and was good at it at the grade school level. She’s not what the school felt was the model for being good at math.
I can honestly say that D hasn’t experienced this. But, for elementary and middle schools she attended a charter school and had a fair number of both male and female math and science teachers (as well as other subjects) who were quite encouraging and were great mentors. Her school also had specialty teachers starting in second or third grade, so her math teachers were people who specialized in math. Somewhat off topic, but I do think kids should be exposed to male teachers often - I have found they bring different attributes than female teachers. However, like was mentioned by prof2dad, D has experienced much more “math is hard” talk among fellow students.
@intparent - that would make my blood boil as well. Surely that would violate Title IX.
Private independent school, I am not aware of any federal funds they receive. So probably not.
Same here … and I almost went ballistic the time I heard my D18 agreeing to something similar when she was with a group of girl friends several years ago. I said something like, “never play dumb to try to fit in with the group”. She’s the only one left in the accelerated math path. The others dropped out in 9th grade.
In 6th grade my D was in a math group at school (montessori–several groups in each class)—it was the most advanced group, her and two boys. A parent requested and the teacher, a woman, moved the two boys up to pre-algebra. My daughter was furious and the boys taunted her. The teacher realized her mistake after a few days (I can’t remember if I said something or she figured it out on her own) and moved my D up as well. Montessori is self-paced, and D proceeded to work ahead and finished prealgebra and half of algebra before the end of the year, well ahead of the two boys. By 12th grade she was in a class of all boys taking the most advanced math offered at her school. She and my other D, also strong in math (once asked her math teacher for extra work to do for fun, for the bus ride to a field trip) have been encouraged along the way as well, but it gets old being the only girl in a class of boys.
My son, a few years younger, has had a couple of really outstanding young female math teachers that his sisters didn’t have, so maybe there’s hope for the future in this area.
My daughter is planning to major in math. In junior high kids were in enriched in 7th grade based on their elementary school performance. 8th grade they were placed in algebra a/b or regular algebra, supposedly based on 7th grade enriched performance. My daughter had straights A’s in 7th grade enriched, but was placed in regular algebra for 8th grade. What this means moving forward is she was only able to get through AP Calc AB senior year. The AP Calc BC class is predominantly male and the only females are Asian. However those cuts were made in 8th grade weeded the girls and non Asian girls out. When we complained we were told they were “slowing down the math track across the board” and very few students would be geometry ready in 9th grade.
Question. Don’t you think sometimes this is more than grades, something about mindset and approach? Some lust for math and its applications?
I had somewhat the opposite experience to what others have posted here. My kids went to a very high quality private school for elementary and middle school.
My daughter was an excellent student who was always far more focused on language, literature, history than on math or science. She detested the memorization aspects of early arithmetic and the competitive games that were played in class to reward memorization. But she was (and is) a highly analytical person, and she “got” math concepts effortlessly. She received a lot of encouragement, and her teachers always rated her math ability very highly (while also noting their wish that she would just suck it up and memorize some math facts). In 8th grade, she was placed in an accelerated math track, with a female teacher. It was a disaster. She hated the teacher (who was very much jock, something my daughter was not prepared to respect at 13), hated the course, and she developed full-on math anxiety. She hung on through 9th grade, and at the outset of 10th grade essentially went on strike for a while and refused to do any work for math. We found a sensationally good tutor for her, and she eventually caught up and did A work for the second half of the course. But when she switched schools the next year, she stepped off the fast track and didn’t push herself on math at all.
She did the minimum at college (two quarters of introductory calculus, the first of which she tried assiduously to fail until her excellent TA convinced her that it would be far less painful to make a push to pass that class than to take it again). Essentially, she used her considerable natural math talent to pull a C in a course where she had a 0 half way through.
As an adult, post-college, she has come to appreciate math far more. She works in a very quant-y environment now. she has taken graduate statistics courses, and gotten much more facile in using math and statistics in her work.
My daughter could have been very good a math. She was encouraged plenty, and accelerated, and challenged. Nevertheless, no one ever convinced her that she should want to be good at math.
Her younger brother, by the way, was always getting As in math, and thought of himself as a math person. He read about math, loved doing problems, tutored kids who were struggling with it, etc. And his teachers did not place him in the accelerated track in 8th grade. They thought he was great at plug-and-chug, but not at grasping concepts quickly. And that turned out to be true, although it didn’t really affect him until 2/3 of the way through his AP Calculus BC course in 12th grade, and again in Calculus II and III in college. He still works with math – sophisticated statistics – all the time. But he knows real math people, and he knows he’s not one of them.
I have just my own observations in our school district but if anything, here it was the other way around.
In elementary school the teachers mostly equated math success with timed solving of large amounts of exceedingly simple problems. A few errors or missed problems - and it means you haven’t “mastered” the material. The same went for other tests and quizzes. Boys got so bored, they didn’t even try hard enough. Girls, being naturally more detailed, were ahead and praised. Definitely more girls than boys were “ahead” in math.
In middle school and even more so by high school time situation was changing. Hormones started to play (I think) and it was suddenly “not cool” for girls to be interested in math (minus typical asian kids pressured by their parents) and boys started to discover that math is indeed worth their attention.
In the end it was a regular mixture of asian kids, interested boys (who were persistent enough to push through) and a few even more persistent (or differently-minded) girls.
At no point after elementary school there was any preference between the genders and yes, I agree that unqualified teachers (especially in elementary school) play a big “role”.
Incorrect and a stereotype. And part of the larger problem. We are not “naturally” anything. We are individuals, and should be measured as such.
Thought the same, MoD. Nor was it hormones. The interest in pursuing math to higher levels is individual. In 8th, D1 “owned” math. In 9th, as her humanities opps broadened and deepened, she found her direction. That’s not a failure, hers or the school’s.