What Are the Gender Differences in Achievement for the Content Areas?
Exhibit
3.5 displays average achievement in mathematics content areas
by gender for the Benchmarking entities as well as the comparison
countries. The most striking feature of the exhibit is the very small
number of statistically significant differences. There were no significant
gender differences in average achievement in any Benchmarking jurisdiction,
except that boys had higher average achievement than girls in fractions
and number sense in Pennsylvania – for the Southwest Pennsylvania
Math and Science Collaborative and for the state as a whole. Even
though the United States had higher average achievement for boys than
for girls in measurement, there were no significant differences in
the Benchmarking entities.
An important stage of item selection for the TIMSS 1999 assessment
was the examination of item statistics to detect items that differentiated
between groups, including girls and boys, at the country level. Such
items were scrutinized and retained when there was no apparent source
of gender bias. It is therefore likely that the absence of significant
gender differences in the averages for girls and boys in a country
is due partly to a balance between items on which one or the other
gender tends to perform better. It is also reasonable to assume that
where significant differences do occur, they result from gender differences
in one or more of the factors in student backgrounds and schooling
that have consistently been found to affect achievement in mathematics.
In spite of there being few statistically significant differences
in the average achievement of girls and boys in the content areas,
it is interesting to look at the patterns of the differences. Consistent
with the differences in the international averages, there was a strong
tendency across the Benchmarking entities for boys to have higher
average achievement than girls in fractions and number sense, measurement,
and geometry. The results were more mixed in data representation,
analysis, and probability and in algebra.
