gender

A brief round-up of a few of the latest findings reinforcing the fact that academic achievement is not all about academic ability or skills.Most of these relate to the importance of social factors.

Improving social belonging improves GPA, well-being & health, in African-American students

From Stanford, we have a reminder of the effects of stereotype threat, and an interesting intervention that ameliorated it. The study involved 92 freshmen, of whom 49 were African-American, and the rest white. Half the participants (none of whom were told the true purpose of the exercise) read surveys and essays written by upperclassmen of different ethnicities describing the difficulties they had fitting in during their first year at school. The other subjects read about experiences unrelated to a sense of belonging. The treatment subjects were then asked to write essays about why they thought the older college students' experiences changed, with illustrations from their own lives, and then to rewrite their essays into speeches that would be videotaped and could be shown to future students.

The idea of this intervention was to get the students to realize that everyone, regardless of race, has difficulty adjusting to college, and has times when they feel alienated or rejected.

While this exercise had no apparent effect on the white students, it had a significant impact on the grades and health of the black students. Grade point averages went up by almost a third of a grade between their sophomore and senior years, and 22% of them landed in the top 25% of their graduating class, compared to about 5% of black students who didn't participate in the exercise.

Moreover, the black students in the treatment group reported a greater sense of belonging compared to their peers in the control group; they were happier, less likely to spontaneously think about negative racial stereotypes, and apparently healthier (3 years after the intervention, 28% had visited a doctor recently, vs 60% in the control group).

Source: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/march/improve-minority-grades-031711…

Protecting against gender stereotype threat Stereotype threat is a potential factor for gender as well as ethnicity.

I’ve reported on a number of studies showing that reminding women or girls of gender stereotypes in math results in poorer performance on subsequent math tests. A new study suggests that women could be “inoculated” against such effects if their math / science class is taught by a woman. Although in these experiments, women’s academic performance didn’t suffer, their engagement and commitment to their STEM major was significantly affected.

In the first study, 72 women majoring in STEM subjects were given several tests measuring their implicit and explicit attitudes towards math vs English, plus a short but difficult math test. Half the students were (individually) tested by a female peer expert, supposedly double majoring in math and psychology, and half by a male peer. Those with a male showed negative implicit attitudes towards math, while those tested by a female showed equal liking for math and English on an implicit attitudes test. Similarly, women implicitly identified more with math in the presence of the female expert. On the math test, women who met the female attempted more problems (an average of 7.73 out of 10 compared to 6.39). There was no effect on performance — but because of the difficulty of the test, there was a floor effect.

In the second study, 101 women majoring in engineering were given short biographies of 5 engineers, who were either male or female, or descriptions of engineering innovations (control condition). Again, women presented with female engineers showed equal preference for math and English in the subsequent implicit attitudes test, while those presented with male engineers or innovations showed a significant implicit negative attitude to math. However, implicit identification with math wasn’t any stronger after reading about female engineers. However, those who read about female engineers did report greater intentions to pursue an engineering career, and this was mediated by greater self-efficacy in engineering. Again, there was no effect on explicit attitudes toward math.

In the third study, the performance of 42 female and 49 male students in introductory calculus course sections taught by male (8 sections) and female instructors (7 sections) were compared. Professors were yoked to same-sex teaching assistants.

As with the earlier studies, female students implicitly liked math and English equally when the teacher was a women, but had a decidedly more negative attitude toward math when their instructor was a man. Male students were unaffected by teacher gender. Similarly, female showed greater implicit identification with math when their teacher was a woman; male students were unaffected. Female students also expected better grades when their teacher was a woman; male students didn’t differ as a function of teacher gender (it should be noted that this wasn’t because they thought the women would be more generous markers; marking was pooled across all the instructors, and the students knew this). There was no effect of teacher gender on final grade (but there was a main effect of student gender: women outperformed men).

In other words, the findings of the 3rd study confirmed the effects on implicit attitudes towards STEM subjects, and demonstrated that male students were unaffected by the interventions that affected female students.

Now we come to engagement. At the beginning of the semester, female students were much less likely than male students (9% vs. 23%) to respond to questions put to the class, but later on, female students in sections led by women were much more likely to respond to such questions than were women in courses taught by men (46% vs 7%). Interestingly, more male students also responded to questions posed by female instructors (42% vs 26%). That would seem to suggest that male instructors are much more likely to engage in strategies that discourage many students from engaging in the class. But undeniably, women are more affected by this.

Additionally, at the beginning of the courses, around the same number of female students approached their instructors, regardless of their gender (12-13%). But later, while this percentage of female students approaching female instructors stayed constant, none of them approached male instructors. This could be taken to mean male instructors consistently discouraged such behavior, but male students did not change (an average of 7% both at Time 1 and Time 2).

The number of students who asked questions in class did not vary over time, or by student gender. However it did vary by teacher gender: 22% of both male and female students asked questions in class when they were taught by women, while only 15% did so in courses taught by men.

Some of these effects then seem to indicate that male college instructors are more inclined to discourage student engagement. What the effects of that are, remains to be seen.

Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/03/03/study_suggests_role_of_ro…

Social and emotional learning programs found to boost student improvement

A review of 213 school programs that enhance students' social and emotional development, has found that such programs not only significantly improved social and emotional skills, caring attitudes, and positive social behaviors, but also resulted in significant improvement on achievement tests (although only a small subset of these programs actually looked at this aspect, the numbers of students involved were very large).

The average improvement in grades and standardized-test scores was 11 percentile points —an improvement that falls within the range of effectiveness of academic interventions.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-social-emotional-boost-students-ski…

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/02/04/20sel.h30.html

Boys need close friendships

Related to this perhaps (I looked but couldn’t find any gender numbers for the SEL programs), from the Celebration of Teaching and Learning Conference in New York, developmental psychologist Niobe Way argues that one reason why boys are struggling in school is that they are experiencing a "crisis of connection." Stereotypical notions of masculinity, that emphasize separation and independence, challenge their need for close friendships. She's found that many boys have close friendships that are being discouraged by anxiety about being seen as gay or effeminate.

Way says that having close friendships is linked to better physical and mental health, lower rates of drug use and gang membership, and higher levels of academic achievement and engagement. When asked, she encouraged teachers to allow boys to sit next to their best friends in class.

Source: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2011/03/psychologist_boys…

High rate of college students with unrecognized hearing loss

On a completely different note, a study involving 56 college students has found that fully a quarter of them showed 15 decibels or more of hearing loss at one or more test frequencies — an amount that is not severe enough to require a hearing aid, but could disrupt learning. The highest levels of high frequency hearing loss were in male students who reported using personal music players.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-college-students.html

Widely cited gender differences in cognition

It is clear that there are differences between the genders in terms of cognitive function; it is much less clear that there are differences in terms of cognitive abilities. Let me explain what I mean by that.

It's commonly understood that males have superior spatial ability, while females have superior verbal ability. Males are better at math; females at reading. There is some truth in these generalizations, but it's certainly not as simple as it is portrayed.

First of all, as regards spatial cognition, while males typically outperform females on tasks dealing with mental rotation and spatial navigation, females tend to outperform males on tasks dealing with object location, relational object location memory, and spatial working memory.

While the two sexes score the same on broad measures of mathematical ability, girls tend to do better at arithmetic, while boys do better at spatial tests that involve mental rotation.

Having said that, it does depend where you're looking. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an internationally standardised assessment that is given to 15-year-olds in schools. In 2003, 41 countries participated. Given the constancy of the gender difference in math performance observed in the U.S., it is interesting to note what happens in other countries. There was no significant difference between the sexes in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Latvia, Serbia, and Thailand. There was a clear male superiority for all 4 content areas in Canada, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Korea, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Liechtenstein, Macao and Tunisia. In Austria, Belgium, the United States and Latvia, males outperformed females only on the space and shape scale; in Japan, the Netherlands and Norway only on the uncertainty scale. And in Iceland, females always consistently do better than males!

Noone knows why, but it is surely obvious that these differences must lie in cultural and educational factors.

Interestingly, the IEA Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) shows this developing -- while significant gender differences in mathematics were found only in 3 of the 16 participating OECD countries for fourth-grade students, gender differences were found in 6 countries at the grade-eight level, and in 14 countries at the last year of upper secondary schooling.

This inconsistency is not, however, mirrored in verbal skills -- girls outperform boys in reading in all countries.

Gender differences in language have been consistently found, and hardly need reiteration. However, here's an interesting study: it found gender differences in the emerging connectivity of neural networks associated with skills needed for beginning reading in preschoolers. It seems that boys favor vocabulary sub-skills needed for comprehension while girls favor fluency and phonic sub-skills needed for the mechanics of reading.The study points to the different advantages each gender brings to learning to read.

There's a lesson there.

There are other less well-known differences between the sexes. Women tend to do better at recognizing faces. But a study has found that this superiority applies only to female faces. There was no difference between men and women in the recognition of male faces.

Moreover, pre-pubertal boys and girls have been found to be equally good at recognizing faces and identifying expressions. However, they do seem to do it in different ways. Boys showed significantly greater activity in the right hemisphere, while the girls' brains were more active in the left hemisphere. It is speculated that boys tend to process faces at a global level (right hemisphere), while girls process faces at a more local level (left hemisphere).

It's also long been recognized that women are better at remembering emotional memories. Interestingly, an imaging study has revealed that the sexes tend to encode emotional experiences in different parts of the brain. In women, it seems that evaluation of emotional experience and encoding of the memory is much more tightly integrated.

But of course, noone denies that there are differences between men and women. The big question (one of the big questions) is how much, if any, is innate.

Studies of differences, even at the neural level, don't demonstrate that. It's increasingly clear that environmental factors affect all manner of thing at the neural level. However, one study of 1-day-old infants did find that boys tended to gaze at three-dimensional mobiles longer than girls did, while girls looked at human faces longer than boys did.

Of course, even a 1-day-old infant isn't entirely free of environmental influence. In this case, the most important environmental influence is probably hormones.

Hormones and chemistry

A lot of studies in recent years have demonstrated that estrogen is an important player in women's cognition. Spatial ability in particular seems vulnerable to hormonal effects. Women do vary in their spatial abilities according to where they are in the menstrual cycle, and there is some evidence that spatial abilities (in both males and females) may be affected by how much testosterone is received in the womb.

Another study has found children exposed to higher levels of testosterone in the womb also develop language later and have smaller vocabularies at 2 years of age.

Hormones aren't the only chemical affecting male and female brains differently. Significant differences have been found in the brain activity of men and women when engaged in a broad range of activities and behaviors. These differences are more acute during impulsive or hostile acts. But — here's the truly fascinating thing — nicotine causes these brain activity differences to disappear. A study has found that among both smokers and non-smokers on nicotine, during aggressive moments, there are virtually no differences in brain activity between the sexes. A finding that supports other studies that indicate men's and women's brains respond differently to the same stimuli — for example, alcohol.

What does all this mean? Well, let's look at the question that's behind the whole issue: are men smarter than women? (or alternately, are women smarter than men?)

Is one sex smarter than the other?

Here's a few interesting studies that demonstrate some more differences between male and female brains.

A study of some 600 Dutch men and women aged 85 years found that the women tended to have better cognitive speed and a better memory than the men, despite the fact that significantly more of the women had limited formal education compared to the men. This may be due to better health. On the other hand, there do appear to be differences in the way male and female brains develop, and the way they decline.

For example, women have up to 15% more brain cell density in the frontal lobe, which controls so-called higher mental processes, such as judgement, personality, planning and working memory. However, as they get older, women appear to shed cells more rapidly from this area than men. By old age, the density is similar for both sexes.

A study of male and female students (aged 18-25) has found that men's brain cells can transmit nerve impulses 4% faster than women's, probably due to the faster increase of white matter in the male brain during adolescence.

An imaging study of 48 men and women between 18 and 84 years old found that, compared with women, men had more than six times the amount of intelligence-related gray matter. On the other hand, women had about nine times more white matter involved in intelligence than men did. Women also had a large proportion of their IQ-related brain matter (86% of white and 84% of gray) concentrated in the frontal lobes, while men had 90% of their IQ-related gray matter distributed equally between the frontal lobes and the parietal lobes, and 82% of their IQ-related white matter in the temporal lobes. Despite these differences, men and women performed equally on the IQ tests.

It has, of course, long been suggested that women are intellectually inferior because their brains are smaller. A study involving the intelligence testing of 100 neurologically normal, terminally ill volunteers found that a bigger brain size is indeed correlated with higher intelligence — but only in certain areas, and with odd differences between women and men. Verbal intelligence was clearly correlated with brain size for women and — get this — right-handed men! But not for left-handed men. Spatial intelligence was also correlated with brain size in women, but much less strongly, while it was not related at all to brain size in men.

Also, brain size decreased with age in men over the age span of 25 to 80 years, suggesting that the well-documented decline in visuospatial intelligence with age is related, at least in right-handed men, to the decrease in cerebral volume with age. However age hardly affected brain size in women.

What is all this telling us?

Male and female brains are different: they develop differently; they do things differently; they respond to different stimuli in different ways.

None of this speaks to how well information is processed.

None of these differences mean that individual brains, of either sex, can't be trained to perform well in specific areas.

Here’s an experiment and a case study which bear on this.

It's all about training

The experiment concerns rhesus monkeys. The superiority of males in spatial memory that we're familiar with among humans also occurs in this population. But here's the interesting thing — the gender gap only occurred between young adult males and young untrained females. In other words, there was no difference between older adults (because performance deteriorated with age more sharply for males), and did not occur between male and female younger adults if they were given simple training. Apparently the training had little effect on the males, but the females improved dramatically.

The “case study” concerns Susan Polgar, a chess master. The Polgar sisters are a well-known example of “hot-housing”. I cited them in my article on the question of whether there is in fact such a thing as innate talent. Susan Polgar and her sisters are examples of how you can train “talent”; indeed, whether there is in fact such a thing as “talent” is a debatable question. Certainly you can argue for a predisposition towards certain activities, but after that … Well, even geniuses have to work at it, and while you may not be able to make a genius, you can certainly create experts.

This article was provoked, by the way, by comments by the President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, who recently stirred the pot by giving a speech arguing that boys outperform girls on high school science and math scores because of genetic differences between the genders, and that discrimination is no longer a career barrier for female academics. Apparently, during Dr Summers' presidency, the number of tenured jobs offered to women has fallen from 36% to 13%. Last year, only four of 32 tenured job openings were offered to women.

You can read a little more about what Dr Summers said at http://education.guardian.co.uk/gendergap/story/0,7348,1393079,00.html, and there's a rather good response by Simon Baron-Cohen (professor in the departments of psychology and psychiatry, Cambridge University, and author of The Essential Difference) at: http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,9865,1399109,00.html