According to a research team at the University of Paris Cite in France on the 12th, the difference in achievement was consistently observed throughout France after analyzing language and mathematics evaluation data of 2,653,082 children in the first and second grades of elementary school.
There was little difference in average math grades between male and female students at the beginning of admission, but within four months of admission, the difference in male and female grades was clearly starting to appear. It was unrelated to socioeconomic status, test type, and public or private status.
In particular, male students showed about four times higher achievements than female students at the beginning of the second year. The effect size of the gender difference at the beginning of the second year was analyzed to be about 0.20, which means that the difference in math achievement between men and women began to appear after four months, and the gap widened to a statistically significant level after eight months.
The research team pointed out that the time and place when the gender gap begins to appear prominently in mathematics is the ‘first year of admission’ to school. In infancy and infancy, boys and girls generally showed similar levels of knowledge of numbers and space, noting that the gap began to widen shortly after entering school.
In response, the research team analyzed that the gender gap in mathematics is more likely to have originated from environmental factors such as socio-cultural stereotypes, attitudes of teachers and parents, and math anxiety, which are more common among girls, rather than biological differences. The research team explained that previous studies conducted in the U.S. and France also observed a gap in math achievement between men and women in the early stages of elementary education, and attempts were made to find the cause of the gap in attitudes of parents and teachers such as gender stereotypes or math anxiety, which is more common in female students.
However, the research team said it is still unclear where, when, and how widely these stereotypes have been established. In addition, it is difficult to obtain detailed information on the gap change over time as the data measurement time is only three times, four months after admission and a year after admission, and there is a limit to deriving a mechanism that can specifically explain the cause of the gender gap.
Nevertheless, the research team said the findings suggest that policymakers need to consider intervening as early as possible, such as kindergarten, to bridge the math achievement gap between men and women.
The results of the study were published in the scientific journal Nature on Wednesday. “This paper shows that gender differences in children’s math achievements are neither innate nor inevitable,” said Jillian Lauer, a psychologist at Cambridge University. “There may be biological factors, but this paper suggests that environmental factors can have a relatively large impact.”
JULIE KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
