Research on gender differences in academic achievement offers educators information on implications and guidance on specific directions to take. In mathematics and science in particular, gender differences are well documented and reveal certain stereotypes perpetuated by society, school, and family (Manning, 1998, p. 68). This paper will look at gender differences in school achievement and how educational reforms could encourage girls in their performance in mathematics and science and thus open up more career opportunities for them.
Reviewers have consistently concluded that males perform better on mathematics tests than females do (Hyde, Fennema & Lamon, 1990). The authors performed a meta-analysis of 100 studies which represented the testing of 3,175,188 subjects (p. 139). An examination of age trends indicated that girls showed a slight superiority in computation in elementary school and middle school. There were no gender differences in problem solving in elementary or middle school, but differences favoring males emerged in high school and in college. Gender differences were smallest and actually favored females in samples of the general population, grew larger with increasingly selective samples, and were largest for highly selected samples and samples of highly precocious persons. They showed that the magnitude of gender differences has declined over the years. The authors concluded that gender differences in mathematics performance are small, but nonetheless, a lower performance of women in problem solving is evident in high school (p. 155).
An experimental study of the effects of a didactic teaching approach and a constructive teaching approach on third and fifth grade boys' and girls' performance on arithmetic computation was conducted by Hopkins, McGillicuddy-De Lisi and De lisi (1997, pp. 333-45). Two groups of children, matched on the basis of initial computation performance as well as grade and gender, ...