• Question: is there and if there is why is there a difference between the ways boys and girls learn at a certain age.

    Asked by al and jacob to Joe on 5 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Joe Bathelt

      Joe Bathelt answered on 5 Nov 2016:


      In general, boys and girls are very similar in their thinking skills. There are some differences that emerge in the teenage years, but these are very small, too. There are two things that have been consistently found to be different between genders, which is the ability to rotate objects in mind and rapid access to words. Boys or men are on average a little bit better at imaging how something will look when it is rotated (mental rotation). On the other hand, girls or women can usually come up with more words that belong to a category in a given time (verbal fluency), e.g. name as many animals as you can in one minute.
      However, there is considerable variation. That means that if you picked any two boys or girls, then the difference between them is probably larger than the average difference between boys and girls.
      We can also not be sure that this is a true difference between boys and girls. Boys and girls are encouraged to do different things from an early age. For instance, boys may be given Lego to play with, while girls get a tea party set. Because of this cultural difference in how the genders are treated, we cannot be sure if gender or the environment causes the slightly different performance on mental rotation and verbal fluency tasks.

      There is one study that I think illustrates the different treatment very nicely. In this study, boys and girls and their parents were asked how good they are at Maths. On average, boys and their parents thought that they are better at Maths, while girls and their parents tended to think that they are less good compared to the boys. However, the researcher also compared how well boys and girls did on an exam – the researchers scored it without knowing if a boy or a girl had filled it in. It turned out that there was no difference in how well boys and girls did on the exam. So, despite similar performance, boys and their parents were more confident, and girls and their parents were less confident in their Maths skills. One can easily imagine that this might influence which courses boys and girls take later on.

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