Article Summary
Article Summary
The premise of this article and the associated research study is that there is a gender gap in areas of reading and math that can, in part, be attributed to gender stereotypes. It understood that there is a significant gap between male and female performance on math assessments. What is not as significantly studied is the performance gap that exists in the area of reading. This is reported as being a surprising fact as the performance gap present in reading is far greater than the gap present in math.
According to information from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, boys outperform girls in math assessments by an average of 11 points. Girls on the other hand outperform boys in reading tasks by an average of 38 points. This is partly due to the fact that girls, on average read far more than boys for pleasure and have a better attitude about it. Researchers hypothesized that much of this discrepancy between genders is due to negative gender stereotypes, deemed stereotype threats.
During the study, a sample of 90 students, of which 48 were male were chosen from three public schools. These students were all 9 years old and all were assessed as average level readers as assessed by the Alouette standard reading test and normal intelligence as assessed by Raven's Progressive Matrices. Finally all subjects were given the opportunity to refuse participation and proper consent was given from the appropriate authorities prior to participation.
Children were administered a reading comprehension test meant to gauge comprehension and recognition of words in children age 6 to 20 years of age. The test was administered in a classrooms with either a stereotype threat or a non-threatening o presentation, groups to which the participants were randomly assigned. In the threat situation the participants were instructed that they were being assessed to determine their level of reading comprehension. In the reduced threat groups the participants were instructed that they were participating in a kind of reading game. In this second group, as apposed to believing they were being tested, their task was described as one to assist in the design of a new game. The tasks actually performed by each of these children were the same.
Results
According to the study, the expected result of boys under-performing girls under the threat condition held up to be true. Under the reduced threat scenario, the performance of boys, increased to the level of the girls'. Notably, however, the performance of the girls was not significantly different between threat and reduces threat groups. Results may be interpreted as showing that boys have a lower motivation but this is confounded by the fact that the under-performance was limited to boys with higher motivation toward reading tasks.
Implications
The implications of this study may be simple at first glance but they are quite significant in how we approach the implementations of learning and assessment activities in students. It is common to stereotype men as being better at math and women as being better at language arts as a left brain versus right brain issue but it could be more of a matter of how information is being assess in relation to how the students perception of the task has been influenced by society and gender stereotypes. If boys, are able to remove the gap presented in scores, meeting the score of girls in reading tasks when it is presented as a form of a game with competition, while girls continue to outperform boys in a testing environment, it would seem clear that the difference in overall knowledge and ability is not gender oriented but rather one that is present due to the approach used to frame the kind of assessment being used. Overall the results seem to indicate that boys may be worried about perpetuating gender stereotypes. The most notable of all findings is that gender differences are eliminated in the reduced threat group.
Pansu, P., Régner, I., Max, S., Colé, P., Nezlek, J. B., & Huguet, P. (2016). A burden for the boys: Evidence of stereotype threat in boys' reading performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 65, 26-30. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2016.02.008
