An ambitious study of the differences in how well girls and boys perform on tests has found much less of a gender gap than is commonly assumed.
Though girls do better in some tests of verbal skills and boys do better in some mechanical and mathematical ones, there are more similarities than differences, according to the study by the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT and other tests.The findings also show that the gap remaining between boys and girls is narrowing, particularly in the sciences.
The study, billed as the most extensive look ever at gender and testing, involved a four-year review of more than 400 tests and more than 15 million students. And the findings are broken down in ways that provide new insights into how boys and girls achieve.
Though the gender gap in testing is narrowing, the results added fuel to the continuing questions about the fairness of high-stakes college-entrance tests like the SAT, where math scores of boys are much higher than those of girls. Critics of the testing service have called for de-emphasizing tests like the SAT, saying they are culturally biased and do not do a good job of predicting college performance.
Releasing the report here Tuesday, the testing service's president, Nancy Cole, defended the SAT and said that gender differences in the results largely reflect the self-selected nature of students taking the test. She said boys are disproportionately represented in both the top 10 percent and bottom 10 percent of students in general. Boys at the low end are unlikely to take the SAT and boys at the high end extremely likely to take it, so it is not surprising that boys score higher, she said.
She said the results overall show a largely promising picture. "The similarities are much stronger than what you would expect from the studies that have focused on differences," she said. "This is really a story about similarities."
But critics, who contend that the SAT and other standardized tests are culturally biased toward white males, said the report obscured this issue by focusing on the broad universe of tests.
Janice Weinman, executive director of the American Association of University Women, which in 1992 released an influential study on continuing gender differences in education called "How Schools Shortchange Girls," said the study drew on an unusually broad range of tests and therefore provides some useful information.
"Unfortunately," she added, "there is a big difference in demographics and rewards between the SAT, a key gatekeeper to college admissions, and the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. This is really a missed opportunity."
The report found that there is little gender difference up to the fourth grade and that even at 12th grade, gender differences in general are modest.
"The familiar math and science advantage for males was found to be quite small, significantly smaller than 30 years ago," it said.
In fact, the report said the most persistent gap was not for girls in math, but for boys in English, suggesting that schools should pay more attention to boys' language skills.
The report also identified gender differences for 12th graders in far more detail than is usually presented. Thus, though boys do better in math in general, girls do better in mathematical computation. Though girls do much better than boys in writing, boys and girls have almost identical results in verbal tests of vocabulary and reasoning.
The results come at a time when increasing competition for slots at selective colleges and issues like affirmative action are creating controversies over the appropriate use of tests like the SAT in admissions and scholarships. And critics continue to say the tests are poor predictors of college success.
"It's very hard for a large corporation, albeit a nonprofit one, to admit its flagship product is fundamentally flawed," said Robert Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, whose suit against Educational Testing Service alleging gender bias helped lead to the addition of a writing portion of the PSAT test, a preliminary test for high school sophomores.
But at a briefing about the findings, Cole; Robert Chase, President of the National Education Association; and Debra W. Stewart, vice provost and dean of the Graduate School of North Carolina State University, all stressed the importance of considering both standardized tests and school performance in making decisions on admissions and scholarships.
"It's important to recognize the limitations of standardized testing, because life is not a multiple-choice test," Chase said.