This study seems to ignore the most obvious differences between standardized tests and typical classroom grades. Standardized tests tend to capture a single type of work (getting the right answer, regardless of process) in a single moment (test day) with an objective evaluation (multiple choice). Whereas classroom grades take into account various sorts of work, including process work, over time, and inevitably take into account a variety of skills and performance beyond the “right answer on test day”.
Which is “better”? Impossible to say. Neither captures the whole picture. But the headline and apparent conclusion of the study is misleading at best.
One argument for standardized tests is that the classroom allows people with high social capital but low academic ability many ways to bullshit their way to higher grades.
Taking practice tests and familiarization with standardized tests helps, but a person who can't test their way out of a paper bag can do very little to improve their standardized test scores other than hire a ringer to take the test for them.
I think a mixture is probably the best, because, cynically, I bet people with high social capital could engineer a way to improve their standardized grades as well. By requiring them to cover more bases, it drives their costs up. A ringer is an obvious solution, but there is a lot of room to be "creative." The best way for admissions to pick well is to always remain liquid on metrics. Keep the pool wide; diversify your metrics portfolio.
Everyday I think more and more about homeschooling my son and daughter.
In business, you should never outsource your core competency. I wonder if I really should be outsourcing the raising of my kids,that I love most in the world (of course I love my husband too).
You're right. But, one, those parents are unlikely to homeschool. And, two, it would seem from looking around that it isn't a core competency for a lot of schools.
It seems like it's easier (or more efficient) to outsource education than socialization. Summer is a great time for additional education beyond the classroom.
Then again, research suggests that homeschooling doesn't have an adverse socialization impact [1]...
Socialization in school might be positive for some children, but bullying is part of the curriculum in public schools and could subtract from any positive benefits for some children.
To put it in a less pithy way... bullying is part of life, too. You certainly want to prevent what bullying you can in schools and give your children the tools to cope with it. But being home schooled means you (likely) never deal with it in the first place; and it's likely to be all the more damaging when you try to settle into an adult life.
Most of the homeschooling families that I have experienced do not seek to completely shelter their children from all the bad things in the world. Taking the bullying example, the goal is not to protect their kids from ever experiencing bullying. Instead they are trying to provide a structured environment for their children to develop while gradually exposing them to more challenging people/situations as they become prepared to handle them.
When teaching a child to swim, you don't typically throw them into the deep end of the pool, but instead start out in a shallow structured situation until they have learned the basics.
if bullying in school is necessary for kids to learn how to cope with adult life then most children are going to fail, because most of them will not experience any bullying. so how does that help?
i must therefore disagree with that premise. i was bullied (thankfully just mildly) in school, and i learned nothing from it that would have been useful later.
what we need to kids to learn is that bullying is not part of life and should not be tolerated anywhere, but should be stopped whereever possible. if we want to help children then not by letting them learn how to cope with being bullied, but teaching all children how to not be a bully, and how to recognize when others are being bullied, and how to help both the one being bullied, as well as the bully, who may well act out because they are themselves coming from a difficult situation eg at home.
doing that in a school requires active involvement from teachers and parents. absent that, going to school doesn't provide any benefit on that issue.
A lot of the "socialization" you learn in school is very dissimilar to "real life" though.
I don't know many workplaces that are organized into teams of 25 employees all the exact same age with just one single supervisor decades older as the sole person they spend much time with that isn't their exact age.
School's great weakness regarding socialization is it mostly teaches people how to get along with others who are the exact same age. It overemphasizes this and creates a strange cultural bubble where kids (and later young adults) are overly disconnected from the culture of older and younger generations. So much of what kids "learn" in school is from being around each other-- and what do other kids know? Not much, either. This is the blind leading the blind.
There is no good reason for this, it's just an artifact of running schools in a seemingly cost efficient way. But because we've grown up with it for a few generations now, many of us will try to justify segregating people by exact age as natural and valuable in and of itself, when it's not.
If schools mixed ages more, I'd be willing to consider school "good for socialization" but there is very little about the school environment that resembles anywhere most kids will have to spend a lot of time in as adults, especially successful ones.
that's what i like about montessori schools. there, classes are grouped over a three year age span, and older kids often teach younger ones what they already learned. that's more similar to the experience of eg. a junior developer joining a company and getting shown the ropes by a more experienced developer.
btw: montessori teaches a lot of independent learning and is therefore effectively a lot less labor intensive. a single teacher can devote a lot more time to individual students because there is less need to supervise the rest of the class, because each child is busy with they own learning projects
Aren't there essentially School-Material-As-A-Service companies that provide all the stuff to you? I cannot imagine that every homeschooling parent starts building their own study plans and comes up with their own teaching concepts etc.
Regarding the social aspect, do you mean your children not getting enough social interaction with other children of the same age, or how home schooling is viewed socially?
Not 100% confident in this. In a classroom you all face the same challenges (this bad teacher, the test being hard etc.) so it develops comradery, each other helps.
Yeah, there is also bad stuff, but it's an experience that I don't know if sports alone can deliver (the amount of time you spend together in school is way higher).
Anecdotal evidence only goes so far, but I knew 3 or 4 homeschool kids when I was growing up, and I feel like there's an answer in the fact that we never learned their names and always called them "one of those homeschool kids"
That said, on the other hand multiple people I knew from high school have since overdosed. So there's a spectrum no matter what you do.
Inviting new people into your friend group is as much a learned social skill as "putting yourself out there" is. I don't mean this too harshly - you were just kids, after all - but I would posit that the fact that your friend group never bothered to learn their names says a bit more about your friend group's socialization skills than it does about the homeschooling kids'.
For a start, try searching for "homeschooling resources". My sister homeschooled her children for a time until it became too difficult for her as a single parent. Even then, there were many resources for interested parents; now, with the Internet, it's easier to find help and other homeschooling families online.
It's important to distinguish between a core competency and something of extreme importance. Obviously education is extremely important but that doesn't mean a parent will inherently be any good at doing it, other than of course caring a lot, which may or may not help depending on how that energy is channeled.
Teaching is hard. Absolutely! But sitting one-on-one with your child helping them understand something is _way different_ than trying to manage a classroom and explain concepts to 30 people who are all at different levels of knowledge and development. The beauty of homeschooling is that it does not really have to scale. To steal an analogy from the tech world, when homeschooling you can approach your "students" as pets instead of livestock. None of this means that homeschooling is easy, but in my experience (was home-schooled myself for 12 years and now my wife and I are homeschooling our children) a lot of the skills you need to effectively teach your children at home are the same basic ones that are necessary for being an effective parent in the first place. (As I mentioned before, though, this is a very different set of skills than is required to be an effective teacher in a classroom environment...)
This is a very good point! I would just like to add, though, that teaching does not have to be one of your "core competencies" to consider homeschooling. Many folks like in places with terrible public schools, but also cannot afford to send their children to private school. As a friend recently remarked to me: to be successful in homeschooling, you do not have to provide a perfect education. As long as it is better than the alternative, it makes sense to have the option on the table.
(Of course, deployment of energy and resources must also be considered. Homeschooling is a TON of effort and might not be worth it for only marginal gains...)
Counterpoint, you can always supplement your children's education at home even if you're not homeschooling them to make up for deficiencies in a local school while still reaping the benefits. Even a terrible school will be able to teach some things, it's incredibly difficult for kids to get nearly the same social interaction with kids their own age while being homeschooled as they would at a public school, and having the kids out of the house for a few hours a day is extremely beneficial for both the parents and the kids.
For homeschooling to be the best option, the local schools need to be not only worse than you, they need to be net negative. There are some places with such terrible schools, but if you have the disposable income to spend all day at home teaching the kids, use it to move someplace with better schools.
Your kids aren't a business, life isn't a business, we should stop trying to optimise everything as if it was a startup, you're already outsourcing 99.9% of your life anyways
Home schooling properly isn't easy, you'll infuses your biases deep into your kids without even noticing it, unless you country's schools are dogshit I'd let them go there
in what way is it not corrupt? what forces are in place preventing it from being corrupt?
it goes without saying that there would be a lot of money and power invested in infusing the future voting public with certain biases not necessarily in their best interest
Like the sugar industry ? Chemical lobby selling "harmless" pesticides or big pharma ?
Lobbies are like ideologies right ? You only hate the ones you don't agree with ?
I'm open to anything but don't come to me with a pro trump conservative lobby as if it was god's truth lol... talking about biases and coming up with these really isn't advancing your point
So this is another silly point. What has sugar got to do with this? Or pesticides? Or pharmaceuticals?
The truth exists independent of your need to assign things to an ideological bucket.
As the other guy said.. Simply because a lobby group is behind it doesnt change the message.. "your kids are being indoctrinated" - this is what is taking place in schools these days.
These groups were created because a number of parents are getting upset with what is taking place in the classrooms.
when i went to school teachers never spoke about their political views. They have a DUTY not to do this. These days, math teachers are SJW's in a classroom with a captive audience.
it is unfortunate you opted to post and state that calling out indoctrination for what it is "is part of the problem".
is the Toronto sun (a news agency) some "conservative think tank" as well?
Is this why parents send their kids to school, to learn this instead of math
"Whether or not teaching children about microaggressions and colonialism is a good idea, infusing mathematics with such collateral issues inescapably detracts from the learning of real mathematics."
> This is exactly your type of persona I had in mind when I was thinking about failed homeschooling.
you should step back and question your assumptions. I was NOT home schooled, nor were my three kids. You could not have been more wrong if you tried.
The US spends more per student than every other OECD nation save Luxembourg[0], but it's students are not anywhere near the top of the list when it comes to academic achievement[1][2]. Where did the money go if not corruption?
Once you get past the fundamentals, avoiding politics in education is impossible. Deciding what is most important to teach students in primary education given limited time is politics. History is nearly all a stitched together story of various politics. It's impossible to avoid politics in Civics if you intend to delve into the intents of why things do or don't exist.
In the two topic examples given, you can avoid politics by avoiding trying to teach the why of social things, but I'd argue then you're not giving a particularly good education.
Me too. In our extended social circle, we're seeing home schooling become more and more popular. Online schools, self-guided pacing and curricula, unschooling etc... A whole range, but whatever it is, not classroom based education.
Homeschooling is not just for anti-establishment weirdos anymore, "normal" people seem to take the leap a lot more.
Not sure what's holding us back; some combination of inertia, fear, doubt, finances no doubt.
Teacher's core competency is teaching. They study it for years, practice it for years, in a system tuned over time. You have never done it before. You really think you can do better?
In most countries teachers aren't required to study teaching per se... Just have a university degree and some training. Some countries require only that you graduated high school/secondary.
You're overstating most teachers' competency, not to mention, most of grade school is pretty damn basic... Most commentators on this site are more educated than the typical teacher.
Not to mention, the difference between teaching a class of 30 versus only 1-3 children.
Parents actually teach their children a lot before they potentially head out for more formal educating, so even if we assume parents don't have teaching experience from their professions, I don't think it is very accurate to suggest they haven't taught anything.
I do question that having a single teacher for 20+ students teaching all subjects for the entire school year is obviously going to work better than motivated homeschooling parent(s). While teachers do have formal education on the matter, it also includes how to manage many children in a classroom setting and how to interface with schools and their processes. The part of the education pertaining to the subjects teachers teach is actually pretty incomplete. To teach elementary students, you have a major, but still teach them subjects that you might only have an average understanding of (like a history major teaching a music class).
Given all that, it doesn't seem hard to believe that parents could do better for a single child than pre-school and elementary school teachers.
As a child gets older their needs evolve such that no one person has everything required to best support that child. That is an advantage of schools (usually high school), but could also be solved with tutoring and other programs available to homeschoolers.
I chose a middle-of-the-road approach: the schools can teach them socialization skills that I can't, but I can be their full-time tutor when tests come along. That does mean you'll need to spend time re-acquainting yourself with long-forgotten high-school algebra, though.
Some of my cousins were home schooled and half of them are now not on speaking terms with their parents.
Many of the kids in my college program who were home schooled were also kind of weird and sometimes socially crippled.
A lot of home schooled kids are clearly from incredibly conservative religious fundamentalist families, so that's a stereotype you may have to deal with and quite potentially the type of people you place your children around for extra-curricular socialization activities or in hybrid home schooling environments.
I worked with a lot of MIT graduates, and there was a definite trend of private education amongst them.
Of course that's from outside looking in, probably better to interview those who have been home schooled to get their perspectives.
> kind of weird and sometimes socially crippled
> A lot of home schooled kids are clearly from incredibly conservative religious fundamentalist families
I wonder if anti-social tendencies are more of a function of a child's home environment, in general, and not specifically related to homeschooling (though, of course, spending more time in the home would amplify the effect of that environment on a person's upbringing....).
I say that because I have spent time around a good number of home-schooled teenagers who live in stable, middle-class, non-extremist households and I can say that basically all of them are able to socially function at a very high level (well above average). Sure they might be hip with the latest Zoomer lingo (are teenagers still Gen-Z?) but they understood how to have intelligent conversations with adults as well as their peers (e.g. look someone in the eye when speaking to them, express their thoughts and opinions clearly, listen and understand what was being said to them).
That is probably true. I suppose the real question is what the primary goal of home schooling is. If it's primarily to prevent liberal indoctrination, I expect that will have poor outcomes. If it's primarily to avoid the hazard of daycare for teenagers and classes aimed for the lowest common denominator (no child left behind), as well as the hazards of an environment that won't let people fail and can't reasonably handle disruptive behavior (by kicking out bad students), I would expect that might lead to better outcomes.
My wife and I were both homeschooled and are homeschooling our children. Their opportunities are far more diverse than if they were in school most of the day. They don't have digital device addictions and play outside 10x most other kids. They are capable of engaging people across a wide range of ages, not just those within a year or two in age. When playing with similarly aged peers, they are consistently the leaders of play because they have more natural creativity, imagination, and, most importantly, initiative. They can fit into a system when needed, but they can also create systems on the fly because they haven't been trained to be cogs on a wheel.
As an evolutionary developmental biologist, I was trained that the key ingredient to adapting to changing environments is phenotypic diversity (diversity has to precede natural selection). If you think the current system of mass technology, mass corporations, and mass culture are sustainable and desirable, leave your children in a system originally created to meet the needs of the barons of the industrial revolution. They'll fit right in and never notice what they are missing.
Long-term, monocultures are rarely sustainable and generally quite boring. So, if you question the value of our current system (e.g., wealth/power distribution) or think it is unsustainable (e.g., global warming), you might want to raise your children outside of the system. They can always choose to conform later, but it is much harder to reacquire the true creativity that comes from not feeling the internal need to conform.
I was raised outside "the system", but entered the system to get a PhD in evolutionary computational biology and now work for a health related biotech. I got my position because I have a distinctively different approach to problems than most.
My kids are also homeschooled. There's a lot of benefits and fewer downsides than I expected. School was shit for me and I'm glad my kids are having a better experience.
On the other hand I can't stand the evangelism of many homeschoolers such as yourself. We tend to avoid homeschooling groups. They (we? :( ) aren't good for just having normal conversations and a laugh with.
> When playing with similarly aged peers, they are consistently the leaders of play because they...
Yeah I know the type. Otherwise known as the precocious brat children everyone else can't wait to get away from.
> aren't good for just having normal conversations and a laugh with
Absolutely true about me since I have zero interest in being normal and prefer discussing science/philosophy over chitchat. I have a son on the autism spectrum and he didn't fall far the tree. My wife, on the other hand, is much more approachable. To each their own.
> precocious brat children everyone else can't wait to get away from
Perhaps you misunderstood what I was saying about the value of creative play. Other kids beg to come play with our kids because they don't get the chance to experience creative, imaginative play to the same degree in other contexts.
In my limited experience having a laugh requires a good bit of intelligence and knowledge with the addition of some humbleness and a thick skin. "Normal" people spend too much time talking about how much their house cost.
It blends functional genomics with evolutionary developmental biology. Instead of trying to solve health problems just by looking at humans and mice, I integrate data from as many species as possible, including yeast and plants. With the right analysis, data from those species is quite predictive of human biology.
I was homeschooled and it was very bad for me. I missed the chance to learn crucial social skills in the low-stakes school environment. Learning requires making mistakes. I had to make these mistakes in my 20s and 30s at work and in social circles. My parents' decision to homeschool me had the effect of making me play life on hard mode.
I like that this article puts the data on the table. I have no idea about what is the exact mechanism for the issue, but as the article notes, girls and boys have slightly different intellects. Furthermore, the eyes-of-the-beholder (teachers) regard them as slightly different creatures as well. And, it wouldn't surprise me if girls in general are nicer to the teachers; while teenager boys feel the pressure to act like he-goats to impress the girls and earn the respect of their peers and adults; and "because kids," their efforts cause the opposite effect in teachers.
One factor I see with my own kids is that the girls are more likely to study for class exams, whereas boys will just "wing it" and only put the effort in for standardised national exams.
According to the article they don't "have the answer" at all - they have a couple of theories:
> The study's authors say it's possible that, in reading, teachers unconsciously reward students exhibiting traditionally female behaviour, such as quietness and neatness, which make teaching easier for the teachers. Another theory is that inflated grades in mathematics are a way of trying to encourage girls, who are often seen as weaker in this subject.
Also, this study focused on Italian schools, and the authors readily admit that while Europe more generally also sees the same grading bias, the reasons for that in other countries may be different.
> She adds that although other European countries also grade girls more generously than boys, the reasons for this could differ from place to place and won't necessarily mirror those in Italy.
See "conclusions" in the paper linked at the bottom. One of the theories is that teachers are over-compensating for gender bias, another is that it's just noise and marks given mid-year represent teacher's attempts at psychological manipulation more than actual grading outcomes.
But on the other hand conscious bias is the only way to compensate for unconscious bias, isn't it? It's just hard to judge where to stop. Without blind testing it's probably futile.
Again, literally the only way you correct for unconscious bias is conscious bias. Where did you get the mistaken impression that it's supposed to be comforting knowledge?
If your target is X = 0, and you think or you've been told that you act as if X = -2, then you act as if X = 2 and hope for the best.
Care to clarify who is mistreating who exactly and how, and who in your opinion benefits from this in the end?
To go back, someone commented that boys are consciously graded lower, to which I wrote that conscious bias is the only way to correct for previous unconscious bias. Now you talk about teachers not seeing persons in students and mistreatment. I lost track of what point you are making and how it relates to anything. Are you still commenting on TFA and grading bias or venting your beef with quality of teaching and education system as a whole? If the latter then by all means join the club
I think the point that folks are trying to make here is that by treating these boys as actors in a system ("conscious bias to correct unconscious bias") is essentially mistreatment via failure to see and treat them as individuals. Teachers should in theory be focusing on the betterment of all of their students as individuals and it is messed up if they are intentionally treating some students worse (lower grades for work of the same quality in this case) in pursuit of some higher goals.
Wait, are you saying education system in general is broken? Absolutely agreed. It's just not the topic in question.
In a better system there would be no grades, but as long as we have a system centered around grades and discussing an article about gender bias in grading that's the topic. And within it it's bordering on deliberate, malevolent ignorance to say "oh no, boys are being mistreated by receiving slightly worse grades" without acknowledging that before that girls were discriminated against incomparably more strongly and while it's not ideal it would seem as if there are attempts to improve the system here.
The original argument was that there was an unconscious bias against girls before, and I posit that conscious bias is the only way to correct for unconscious bias, and sometimes conscious bias overcompensates without any ill intent (because humans are complicated and your unconscious bias against a person is not something you can measure with a stick, my wild guess is the "unconscious" part might have something to do with that). Someone tell me this is wrong, I am yet to see a single argument how.
Second, one of the guesses in the conclusions section of the paper explicitly states that it could all be simply the effect of teachers trying to use whatever they think is effective for the betterment of the students: they might think boys would be motivated to work harder if they are given lower grades while to girls failure is destructive and they need constant encouragement. Is the original intent good? Sure why not. Is this sexist though? Absolutely. Is withholding failure from girls only strengthens fear of failure in them, hurting them in the long run, while making boys more prepared for competitive environment outside the school system? Should this be more of concern than hurting boys by giving them slightly lower grades? I'd say so.
It doesn't stop at grades. That's the problem. People inclined to discriminate are not discriminating in their discrimination. When I say mistreatment, I mean being sent to the principal for made up reasons because the teacher just doesn't like you. Ignoring bullies terrorizing you right in front of her because "you need to man up." Stuff like that.
People who decide to get even by treating some people different are not good people who actually care about the people they're discriminating against. They have contempt for those people and want to see them suffer.
You are still talking past me and past the topic. Please stop bringing child abuse into a discussion about slight correction of grades. Comparing these two you are trivializing the former, doing a major disservice to actual victims of abuse and bullying, being at best disingenuous and I have to try very hard to not think about what could motivate you in this crusade.
PS. I am yet to hear an argument as to how you correct an unconscious bias without introducing a conscious bias. You have presented none. Come back when you are done moving the goalposts and willing to stay on topic
You seem determined to misunderstand and misrepresent me. I don't know if you're just having a bad day or doing it on purpose, so I'm going to move on and let you figure yourself out.
You seem to bring some wild things to a single simple idea of bias in grades.
Making this discussion about mistreatment and abuse is as appropriate as insisting on talking about sexual assault at the workplace in a discussion about gender salary discrepancy. Like sure, maybe you were traumatized by school experience, some of us were too, it's just not what the question is about.
You can be traumatized by school with perfectly even grades as easily as you can have the most fulfilling experience even if teacher marked you up or down slightly when grading (eg like in the paper encouraging you with lower or higher grades according to what motivates you), these are just orthogonal.
Yes, and this may very well be happening too. I believe the consensus has been established that the average was roughly -2 (meaning prior discrimination against girls in education), but individual teachers who were already better than average would be more liable to overcompensate.
Anecdotally I had a misandrist/sexist teacher in fourth grade. It was the first grade where they split our maths class. I didn't fail the class, but that teacher rode me extremely hard. She did do other abusive things, like encouraging students to bully each other, and she'd throw an eraser and hit me with a ruler on two separate occasions because she believed I wasn't awake enough. She recommended at the end of the year that I was put in a lower math class and that's where I went. I didn't recover my interests in math until after college. With some irony, she cited my lack of interest in maths as a whole. Two years later I was programming, which up until high school I didn't see how that translated to the maths I learned in school.
The American public school system is a veritable penal colony proxy. My experience with math was much the same.
As someone on the tail end of the Bell curve and for whom such a monolithic system was a poor fit, I wasted over a dozen years of my life there, in unfortunately what were my most formative years.
Luckily my siblings are correcting that with their children.
I know someone who got their first B in band because that teacher didn't think that anyone should get all As. Nevermind how hard she worked, nobody was allowed to get all As if that teacher could help it.
She cried, and I am still pissed about it to this day. What an awful person.
It depends entirely where you are. I have fond memories of Math in school; particularly in 6th and 10-12th grades. Teachers were interesting and extremely invested in making sure we enjoyed ourselves and the material. When we were bored, they switched things up to get us interested.
For most (~80%), it's a good fit. However, if you learn several orders of magnitude faster or slower than most, it's not. For example, if you're ready for university-level material when you're thirteen, then no amount of switching it up will serve the student well.
To speak to your experience, I think it's fantastic that you had great teachers.
Some more bits: It was actually a private school, but I don't doubt that during this time period similar things were happening in public school. The private school I went to was very big on standardized testing and what got me into the upper math course in the first place was my standardized testing score. My math scores, throughout my time at that school, declined after fourth grade because the "lower" class was roughly two years behind the upper class. This effect would leak into the sciences too because curriculum obviously was difficult to align at that point.
Similar experience at school in Russia, also with maths. No sexism, just an extreme bully and encouraged bullying. Forever put me off maths.
I sincerely think she completely sucked at her job but sociopath-politicked her way to teaching the classes with the kids that were labeled the brightest (i.e. mostly from good families, upper middle class, almost no ethnic minorities, etc.), they tend to succeed and go to good universities for some unfathomable reason (sarcasm) and she could take the credit.
I think we've all that misandrist teacher who tried to destroy us.
I get people are emotional animals, and women were oppressed. Some women see it as their divine right to hurt boys for the sins of their ancestors.
But it's not.
Leave the kids alone.
The original title is misleading, as the paper doesn't answer "why".
> The researchers then looked whether factors, such as the type of school and the size and gender make-up of classes, were driving the gender grade gap.
> They also investigated whether characteristics of teachers themselves, such as how senior or experienced they were and whether they were male or female, helped explain girls' more generous grades.
> Only two factors were found to have an effect—and only in maths. The gender gap in maths grades was greater when classes were bigger. Girls were also graded as being further ahead than boys in technical and academic schools than they were in vocational schools.
> None of the other factors had any significant effect in reducing the gender grading gap.
Indeed. They are answering the question "Do teachers give girls higher marks than boys", and the answer is Yes, girls do get better grades than boys for the same work.
We do not get a final answer to why teachers are giving girls higher marks than boys.
The majority of teachers are female and while I'm not going to claim it's misandry per se, it's likely that they identify more with the girls and thus are biased.
Sounds like they had a control for this, though, because they claim to have investigated whether the teacher was male or female. Only differences seemed to be class size and whether the school was technical/academic or vocational.
My pet theory would be boys tend to have worse handwriting. So it could be that the worse handwriting is more frequently misinterpreted or simply marked as wrong by teachers.
The fact that the Math scores are the ones that changed between the classroom and national tests is surprising - I would have assumed that these exams would have the most "objective" right or wrong answer.
I worked as a teacher for a little while. Discount my anecdote if you like, but it always seemed to me that girls are more likely to be grade grubbers than boys.
(For those unfamiliar with the idiom, it means someone who pleads to the teacher to be given a higher grade. I don't know if there's a word in Italian.)
They're also more able to cry when they do this. I knew multiple girls when I was in school who openly admitted to making themselves cry when they asked a teacher for a better grade or to retake a test or something.
I was a (mostly) straight A student. I would ask teachers for extra credit if I was sitting right at the line of B/A. I think only one teacher told me no which I think was crap as a student should be able to increase their grade if they're able to demonstrate they've put forth additional effort and learned the content. Too bad I can't make myself cry.
Kinda related, but I remember a girl was able to lobby her English teacher to round up her 92.5 grade to a 93, since, you know 92.5 rounds to 93, and the range for an A was 93-100. Then something similar happened in the math class, and teacher rolled his eyes, and drew a number line on the board and drew a point of the 92.5 outside the 93-100 range.
And unfortunately the education system encourages this. We all know that grades incorporate a lot of things besides understanding of the subject matter - typically you'll have multiple graded tests and quizzes which record the rate at which you learn material, often assignments are graded based at least in part on timely completion, most courses offer either a curve, extra credit, or both to boost grades, and of course there's a massive benefit to simply being a good test taker. Further, every teacher grades their classes differently such that A in one class can't be directly compared to another, even in the same subject matter. And yet, major life altering decisions such as what schools you can attend, what scholarships are available, what internships you can do, and where you'll be able to start your career after school are all heavily influenced by a single number which is determined solely by letter grades.
Of course in the real world we need cutoffs and there is no perfect way to measure understanding, it's just that we know grades to be such an obviously poor proxy, and it's way over used. We should have a way to distinguish "disciplined and hard working but doesn't know shit about this topic" from "clearly knows their stuff but snores a little too loud in the back"
Clickbaity title, since they don't have the answer and the paper says as much. They do have some guesses, anyone interested just skip the article and go to the conclusions section.
Guess 1 is female student behavior adaptation to what teachers want aside from academic performance:
> School and classroom environments might indeed be adapted to traditionally female behaviours (Lavy 2008). Female students might thus adopt such actual behaviours during class, including precision, order, modesty, and quietness, which go beyond the individuals’ academic performance, but which teachers may highly reward in terms of grades. ... Conversely, teachers may be likely to associate such behaviours only with female students, because girls are traditionally thought of as possessing these traits.
Guess 2 is gender bias over-compensation:
> Another theoretical explanation calls into play teacher overcompensation towards females. Girls are indeed often discussed in discrimination contexts, especially in speeches about gender differences in cognitive ability in dealing with the ‘hard subjects’. A possible explanation for the reason teachers are more generous in grading female students could be that teachers wish to avoid possible discrimination against girls as an ability-stigmatized group. Therefore, teachers may over-assess girls in the same way they sometimes over-assess non-native students, to avoid negative stereotyping (Alesina 2018). From another perspective, it is also possible that the over-assessment of female students’ competences in Mathematics partly represents a sort of ‘push’ to encourage the weaker students (Terrier 2015). As a consequence, this may translate into a positive discrimination which favours girls.
Guess 3 is simply noisy data (teachers using grades to manipulate students into performing better, according to whatever teachers think motivates boys vs. girls):
> A final interpretation of our results could stem from a limitation of our data. Indeed, our measure of student grading is derived from the midterm report card, rather than the final report card of the academic year. Teachers may consciously adopt specific grading practices at the midterm to trigger students’ effort differently according to their gender, to in turn obtain the best possible performance by the end of the academic year. Specifically, teachers could perceive that male students’ effort is more easily triggered by lower grades, which could encourage them to study harder to achieve a better grade, while female students’ effort to achieve higher grades may be more easily triggered via encouragement.
Speculatively, even things as simple as boys being more likely to turn an assignment in late could contribute to results like this. How conceivable is it that this is just the effect of gender-aligned behavior differences?
> boys being more likely to turn an assignment in late
Sure, but that runs against the popular narrative of "no biological differences". If we accept that boys are more likely to "x", we have to also accept that _girls_ are more likely (or less likely to) "y", which opens all sorts of pandora's boxes. They're looking for an explanation that discounts biology.
From the article, the comparisons were made between classroom exams (graded by the teachers) vs national exams (standardized grading), not homework assignments.
Net potentially gendered behavior differences, like asking for regrades or points back from the classroom teacher, could still exist. But yeah, thought about classroom grade not classroom test grade, because I didn't carefully curate things in my head.
Story time, kind of related to the title but you may find it amusing.
I had an older Russian teacher, heavy accent, knew his stuff fairly well, worked for few big Corps. He was teaching data structures. We had this fairly attractive girl in our class, 30 guys and I think 2-3 girls. There was this guy, let's call him "Bob". Bob was sitting next to that girl. That girl has used Bob for most of her homeworks and quizzes. Bob was really into her, it wasn't mutual though. Then, the midterm came. She was in trouble, as she had barely done any work and she had 0 understanding of material. Well, after Bob finished his midterm, they switched papers. Bob changed some variable names, and according to him added a few small mistakes.
2 weeks later Bob got a 'C' and the girl got an 'A'. Bob, loudly said "FUCK" in class and we all were cracking up. Teacher was a bit spooked too, since everyone was whispering about it. Bob stopped talking to her. I think she stopped attending the class. I am honestly not sure if anyone went to the dept. head, as the behavior between the teacher, girl and bob got really awkward.
I hope Bob is doing well, he was nice just a bit naive.
We just had a baby boy and I'm not going to lie, stuff like this has me worried. We were already considering home schooling (we split time between multiple countries and that's not conducive to a normal school schedule) but this is also a good argument for it.
I'd hate for biases in institutional schooling to lead him to hate school and potentially lead to poor life outcomes.
And now that I think about it, there was a massive spread between the grades I was given by teachers and my standardized test results (talking like 30 point difference).
Thanks for the recommendation. Reading the synopsis and reviews it does mirror some of what I've seen in society and some of the less successful/ambitious men my age that I know so has already got me curious. Will probably pick up the ebook.
There is a cliche apparently so far not mentioned:
"Girls pay attention to people and boys, to things."
So, this cliche can be used to explain the Italian results: The girls did better when graded by people because girls are a LOT better working with people, e.g., understanding subtle hints of what the teacher would like, how to please the teacher, and then doing so.
For more, for some years in grade school, girls are ahead of boys in manual dexterity and, thus, in handwriting.
Girls are better than boys in rote memory, language learning and skills, reading, spelling, and some cases of precision in work, e.g., adding columns of numbers.
E.g., by the eighth grade, my handwriting was still just awful. So, given a lot of simple arithmetic to do, my accuracy was awful -- I misread my own writing. The teacher assumed I didn't understand the math. Naw, I understood the math just fine right away -- the reason for my poor accuracy was just my awful handwriting from poor manual dexterity. So, the teacher, with her poor understanding, called me aside and with good intentions warmly, fervently advised me never to take anymore math.
I told Dad, a high end educator, and he laughed. So, I did very well in all the math the school had -- a college prep school, 97% of the students went on to college, deliberately by far the best school in the city. No one beat me on the Math SATs by much! I never took first year calculus -- taught it, applied it, published research in it but never took it -- and started in the second year of calculus. In college I gave weekly lectures to a prof on topology and got "Honors in Math" -- wrote on group representations. My Ph.D. was in pure/applied math. Saw a problem in a class, worked on it for 2 weeks, solved the problem, later published the work.
That 8th grade teacher didn't understand math.
Maybe you have noticed that it is standard for companies greatly to prefer females for positions working with people -- clerks, customer service, human resources, etc. So, managers in companies didn't have to wait for these Italian results and have understood very well quite broadly going way back that women are much better at human facing work -- MUCH better.
The boys/men don't intend to mess up. Instead, they just don't understand people nearly as well and, thus, don't know when they are messing up.
Good for the Italian researchers doing well uncovering part of what has been common wisdom for a very long time!
Ah, Wotan is ripping his guts out over what he has to do to his DAUGHTER
I think its implicit bias mixed with priming. Teachers - female teachers especially - are primed to view boys as “behavior” over education; girls its the opposite. Because teachers are primed to view boys as more of a behavioral concern, they subconsciously apply that label every time, through every activity.
I will give you one statistic to get your head going.
I studied theoretical math (long time ago, not in the US). At the university I attended, there were 17 applicants for each admission. My class was 125 people of which about 30 were men and almost a hundred were women.
During first 3 semesters, the class went from 125 to 70 at the end of the first semester, 35 at the end of the second and 20 at the end of third. Out of those 20, 15 graduated in the end, of which 11 were men and only 4 were women.
Now, the rest is subjective view of what happened.
I noticed that most of women that were admitted had really good grades all over (you had to have max points to be even considered) but were not super interested in math. My feeling was that most of girls either did not have a plan at all or their plan was they will be teaching math.
When girls organised, this was either for extracurricular reasons or if it was about math at all, it was to share notes and work together to solve problems that were required by the prof.
And finally when they were learning the material my subjective feeling at the time was that they depended more on rote memorisation. And as everybody knows, theoretical math is worst place possible to be relying on your memory alone.
Most guys on the other hand almost immediately organised into one group of people who actually liked math for math's sake. This might be potentially explained by the fact there was relatively few of us but I don't think this was the only reason.
Now, I cannot speak to how good some of those women were at math and whether they were treated fairly. I was young and I did not pay much attention to it at the time.
But it is interesting to me how much girls were overrepresented in the initial population even if they did not seem to have a strong drive for mathematics -- purely because they had stellar grades and they just could choose any place they could go to.
It is also a bit tragic they got penalised for this choice. I blame the education system which treated math as rote memorisation problem up to this point and never explained to us that this is not mathematics.
i've always said this but women have much better emotional regulation compared to men at the same age, they can make themselves do things that are boring but are valuable for their future in the long term. Men, i've observed are either too into something (at the expense of everything else) or can't care at all.
Hard life makes monke strong. Will make life hard for small monke to make them strong. Teacher make life hard for small boy monke, that good. Teacher make life easy for small girl monke, bad for small girl monke.
> The study's limitations include using grades which were awarded part-way through the school year.
I think this explains a lot more than they seem to give it credit for. It's already been established in studies that boys will tend to cram for an exam while girls will work steadily throughout the year (hence, why courses that are heavy on coursework favour girls, and those heavy on exams favour boys.)
So it's entirely possible that the girls really were ahead of the boys part-way through the year, and the boys crammed for the exams at the end and overtook the girls.
> Train teachers to be aware of their own gender biases The report also shows that teachers generally award girls higher marks than boys [for the same exact work], given what would be expected after considering their performance in PISA. This practice is particularly apparent in language-of-instruction courses. Girls’ better marks may reflect the fact that they tend to be “better students” than boys: they tend to do what is required and expected of them, thanks to better self-regulation skills, and they are more driven to excel in school. In addition, girls appear to be stronger in displaying the knowledge they have acquired (i.e. solving an algebraic equation) than in problem solving, the latter of which is a central component of the PISA test. But this report reveals that the gender gap observed in both school marks and PISA scores is not the same in both language-of-instruction classes and mathematics. The fact that it is much wider in the language-of-instruction courses suggests that teachers may harbour conscious or unconscious stereotyped notions about girls’ and boys’ strengths and weaknesses in school subjects, and, through the marks they give, reinforce those notions among their students and their students’ families
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Cappelen, A. W., Falch, R., & Tungodden, B. (2019). The Boy Crisis: Experimental Evidence on the Acceptance of Males Falling Behind. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3348981
Abstract
> The ‘boy crisis’ prompts the question of whether people interpret inequalities differently depending on whether males or females are lagging behind. We study this question in a novel large-scale distributive experiment involving more than 5,000 Americans. Our data provide strong evidence of a gender bias against low-performing males, particularly among female participants. A large set of additional treatments establishes that the gender bias reflects statistical fairness discrimination. The study provides novel evidence on the nature of discrimination and on how males falling behind are perceived by society.
From the conclusion
> The emergence of the ‘boy crisis’ prompts the question of whether people interpret gender inequalities differently depending on whether males or females are lagging behind. We study this question in a novel large-scale economic experiment conducted with a general population from the United States. The participants act as spectators and distribute earnings between two workers in a controlled labor market environment. When initial earnings are based on merit, we find that the spectators are gender-biased against males. We show that this gender bias is driven by female spectators and we provide evidence suggesting that the underlying mechanism is statistical fairness discrimination, where spectators interpret a male loser as someone who has exerted less effort than a female loser. Our study provides new evidence on the nature of gender discrimination, by showing how the perception of females being disadvantaged may cause people to infer that low-performing males have exerted less effort than low-performing females. […]
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Perspectives in Male Psychology, Louise Liddon & John Barry, page 79, about "Lavy, V. (2008, October). Do gender stereotypes reduce girls’ or boys’ human capital outcomes? Evidence from a natural experiment. Journal of Public Economics, 92(10–11), 2083–2105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2008.02.009":
> An Israeli study of nearly 30,000 pupils in more than 300 schools...
My friend once told me about a story about his son, who came back home from school, crying, for what reason. My friend, who was obviously shocked, asked his son what had happened. Turns out, he got into an argument with a girl from his class, and that argument escalated, and very much turned into a fight between the two. As expected, sooner or later, a teacher showed up, and broke the fight up. Instead of sending them BOTH to detention, as the teacher should've done, she instead asked the two what had happened. The girl said that the boy hit her first because of his temper, which he didn't, that is, according to my friend's saying. Very peculiarly, the teacher asked no further questions, and sent the boy to ISS. (In School Suspension). The girl went to her next class, and unlike the boy, did not get into trouble with the teachers. The boy had to stay after school as a result of getting into detention. His father, my friend, knew about the incident, as the school had contacted him about it. He was shocked, his little boy had never gotten into detention before, and was ready for his son to come back home to explain himself. That lead up to the events I had talked about in the beginning, where he came back home, crying because of what had happened. Even today, I am still vexed as to why most schools are this way. No student should be able to escape their punishment just because of their gender, and instead, should be taught a lesson, since it'll teach them to learn from their past experience, and improve it based off of what happened.
141 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadWhich is “better”? Impossible to say. Neither captures the whole picture. But the headline and apparent conclusion of the study is misleading at best.
Taking practice tests and familiarization with standardized tests helps, but a person who can't test their way out of a paper bag can do very little to improve their standardized test scores other than hire a ringer to take the test for them.
In business, you should never outsource your core competency. I wonder if I really should be outsourcing the raising of my kids,that I love most in the world (of course I love my husband too).
Then again, research suggests that homeschooling doesn't have an adverse socialization impact [1]...
[1] https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/summaries/home...
"Correct."
When teaching a child to swim, you don't typically throw them into the deep end of the pool, but instead start out in a shallow structured situation until they have learned the basics.
i must therefore disagree with that premise. i was bullied (thankfully just mildly) in school, and i learned nothing from it that would have been useful later.
what we need to kids to learn is that bullying is not part of life and should not be tolerated anywhere, but should be stopped whereever possible. if we want to help children then not by letting them learn how to cope with being bullied, but teaching all children how to not be a bully, and how to recognize when others are being bullied, and how to help both the one being bullied, as well as the bully, who may well act out because they are themselves coming from a difficult situation eg at home.
doing that in a school requires active involvement from teachers and parents. absent that, going to school doesn't provide any benefit on that issue.
Bullying is real, but there is no damn reason to force little kids into it.
I don't know many workplaces that are organized into teams of 25 employees all the exact same age with just one single supervisor decades older as the sole person they spend much time with that isn't their exact age.
School's great weakness regarding socialization is it mostly teaches people how to get along with others who are the exact same age. It overemphasizes this and creates a strange cultural bubble where kids (and later young adults) are overly disconnected from the culture of older and younger generations. So much of what kids "learn" in school is from being around each other-- and what do other kids know? Not much, either. This is the blind leading the blind.
There is no good reason for this, it's just an artifact of running schools in a seemingly cost efficient way. But because we've grown up with it for a few generations now, many of us will try to justify segregating people by exact age as natural and valuable in and of itself, when it's not.
If schools mixed ages more, I'd be willing to consider school "good for socialization" but there is very little about the school environment that resembles anywhere most kids will have to spend a lot of time in as adults, especially successful ones.
btw: montessori teaches a lot of independent learning and is therefore effectively a lot less labor intensive. a single teacher can devote a lot more time to individual students because there is less need to supervise the rest of the class, because each child is busy with they own learning projects
And of course I'm terrified of the social aspect.
Regarding the social aspect, do you mean your children not getting enough social interaction with other children of the same age, or how home schooling is viewed socially?
I laughed out loud! This is a great term! And yes, these absolutely exist and are more popular now than ever!
Put them in a homeschool pod.
That said, on the other hand multiple people I knew from high school have since overdosed. So there's a spectrum no matter what you do.
The stakes are high, and teaching is _hard_.
(Of course, deployment of energy and resources must also be considered. Homeschooling is a TON of effort and might not be worth it for only marginal gains...)
For homeschooling to be the best option, the local schools need to be not only worse than you, they need to be net negative. There are some places with such terrible schools, but if you have the disposable income to spend all day at home teaching the kids, use it to move someplace with better schools.
Your kids aren't a business, life isn't a business, we should stop trying to optimise everything as if it was a startup, you're already outsourcing 99.9% of your life anyways
Home schooling properly isn't easy, you'll infuses your biases deep into your kids without even noticing it, unless you country's schools are dogshit I'd let them go there
Homeschooling is a feature, not a bug.
> corrupt
In what way ?
it goes without saying that there would be a lot of money and power invested in infusing the future voting public with certain biases not necessarily in their best interest
https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/im-former-teac...
https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/feqtuo/te...
Parents send their kids to school to get an education, not be pushed propaganda.
Maybe youre part of the problem?
No comment from them on the reddit post calling for these teachers to be terminated?
Imagine that.
Lobbies are like ideologies right ? You only hate the ones you don't agree with ?
I'm open to anything but don't come to me with a pro trump conservative lobby as if it was god's truth lol... talking about biases and coming up with these really isn't advancing your point
These groups were created because a number of parents are getting upset with what is taking place in the classrooms.
when i went to school teachers never spoke about their political views. They have a DUTY not to do this. These days, math teachers are SJW's in a classroom with a captive audience.
it is unfortunate you opted to post and state that calling out indoctrination for what it is "is part of the problem".
is the Toronto sun (a news agency) some "conservative think tank" as well?
Is this why parents send their kids to school, to learn this instead of math
"Whether or not teaching children about microaggressions and colonialism is a good idea, infusing mathematics with such collateral issues inescapably detracts from the learning of real mathematics."
> This is exactly your type of persona I had in mind when I was thinking about failed homeschooling.
you should step back and question your assumptions. I was NOT home schooled, nor were my three kids. You could not have been more wrong if you tried.
[0]https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-student...
[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/us-students-c...
In 2017, FIRE was listed as one of the sponsors of the conservative campus group Turning Point USA's
FIRE has received major funding from groups which primarily support conservative and libertarian causes
ok... I can also find books from the other end of the spectrum saying the opposite
If that's your only issue find a school that is leaning toward your own political tribe
Your statement sums up the problem nicely.
Schools are places children go to get an unbiased education.
Politics have no place in schools.
In the two topic examples given, you can avoid politics by avoiding trying to teach the why of social things, but I'd argue then you're not giving a particularly good education.
Homeschooling is not just for anti-establishment weirdos anymore, "normal" people seem to take the leap a lot more.
Not sure what's holding us back; some combination of inertia, fear, doubt, finances no doubt.
You're overstating most teachers' competency, not to mention, most of grade school is pretty damn basic... Most commentators on this site are more educated than the typical teacher.
Not to mention, the difference between teaching a class of 30 versus only 1-3 children.
I do question that having a single teacher for 20+ students teaching all subjects for the entire school year is obviously going to work better than motivated homeschooling parent(s). While teachers do have formal education on the matter, it also includes how to manage many children in a classroom setting and how to interface with schools and their processes. The part of the education pertaining to the subjects teachers teach is actually pretty incomplete. To teach elementary students, you have a major, but still teach them subjects that you might only have an average understanding of (like a history major teaching a music class).
Given all that, it doesn't seem hard to believe that parents could do better for a single child than pre-school and elementary school teachers.
As a child gets older their needs evolve such that no one person has everything required to best support that child. That is an advantage of schools (usually high school), but could also be solved with tutoring and other programs available to homeschoolers.
Teachers are babysitters first and foremost.
I chose a middle-of-the-road approach: the schools can teach them socialization skills that I can't, but I can be their full-time tutor when tests come along. That does mean you'll need to spend time re-acquainting yourself with long-forgotten high-school algebra, though.
If they show any aptitude or creative spark in some area that won't be well-served in the industrial education system, do it.
Many of the kids in my college program who were home schooled were also kind of weird and sometimes socially crippled.
A lot of home schooled kids are clearly from incredibly conservative religious fundamentalist families, so that's a stereotype you may have to deal with and quite potentially the type of people you place your children around for extra-curricular socialization activities or in hybrid home schooling environments.
I worked with a lot of MIT graduates, and there was a definite trend of private education amongst them.
Of course that's from outside looking in, probably better to interview those who have been home schooled to get their perspectives.
I wonder if anti-social tendencies are more of a function of a child's home environment, in general, and not specifically related to homeschooling (though, of course, spending more time in the home would amplify the effect of that environment on a person's upbringing....).
I say that because I have spent time around a good number of home-schooled teenagers who live in stable, middle-class, non-extremist households and I can say that basically all of them are able to socially function at a very high level (well above average). Sure they might be hip with the latest Zoomer lingo (are teenagers still Gen-Z?) but they understood how to have intelligent conversations with adults as well as their peers (e.g. look someone in the eye when speaking to them, express their thoughts and opinions clearly, listen and understand what was being said to them).
As an evolutionary developmental biologist, I was trained that the key ingredient to adapting to changing environments is phenotypic diversity (diversity has to precede natural selection). If you think the current system of mass technology, mass corporations, and mass culture are sustainable and desirable, leave your children in a system originally created to meet the needs of the barons of the industrial revolution. They'll fit right in and never notice what they are missing.
Long-term, monocultures are rarely sustainable and generally quite boring. So, if you question the value of our current system (e.g., wealth/power distribution) or think it is unsustainable (e.g., global warming), you might want to raise your children outside of the system. They can always choose to conform later, but it is much harder to reacquire the true creativity that comes from not feeling the internal need to conform.
I was raised outside "the system", but entered the system to get a PhD in evolutionary computational biology and now work for a health related biotech. I got my position because I have a distinctively different approach to problems than most.
On the other hand I can't stand the evangelism of many homeschoolers such as yourself. We tend to avoid homeschooling groups. They (we? :( ) aren't good for just having normal conversations and a laugh with.
> When playing with similarly aged peers, they are consistently the leaders of play because they...
Yeah I know the type. Otherwise known as the precocious brat children everyone else can't wait to get away from.
Absolutely true about me since I have zero interest in being normal and prefer discussing science/philosophy over chitchat. I have a son on the autism spectrum and he didn't fall far the tree. My wife, on the other hand, is much more approachable. To each their own.
> precocious brat children everyone else can't wait to get away from
Perhaps you misunderstood what I was saying about the value of creative play. Other kids beg to come play with our kids because they don't get the chance to experience creative, imaginative play to the same degree in other contexts.
> Other kids beg to come play
Jesus
How does your approach differ?
According to the article they don't "have the answer" at all - they have a couple of theories:
> The study's authors say it's possible that, in reading, teachers unconsciously reward students exhibiting traditionally female behaviour, such as quietness and neatness, which make teaching easier for the teachers. Another theory is that inflated grades in mathematics are a way of trying to encourage girls, who are often seen as weaker in this subject.
> She adds that although other European countries also grade girls more generously than boys, the reasons for this could differ from place to place and won't necessarily mirror those in Italy.
If your target is X = 0, and you think or you've been told that you act as if X = -2, then you act as if X = 2 and hope for the best.
To go back, someone commented that boys are consciously graded lower, to which I wrote that conscious bias is the only way to correct for previous unconscious bias. Now you talk about teachers not seeing persons in students and mistreatment. I lost track of what point you are making and how it relates to anything. Are you still commenting on TFA and grading bias or venting your beef with quality of teaching and education system as a whole? If the latter then by all means join the club
In a better system there would be no grades, but as long as we have a system centered around grades and discussing an article about gender bias in grading that's the topic. And within it it's bordering on deliberate, malevolent ignorance to say "oh no, boys are being mistreated by receiving slightly worse grades" without acknowledging that before that girls were discriminated against incomparably more strongly and while it's not ideal it would seem as if there are attempts to improve the system here.
The original argument was that there was an unconscious bias against girls before, and I posit that conscious bias is the only way to correct for unconscious bias, and sometimes conscious bias overcompensates without any ill intent (because humans are complicated and your unconscious bias against a person is not something you can measure with a stick, my wild guess is the "unconscious" part might have something to do with that). Someone tell me this is wrong, I am yet to see a single argument how.
Second, one of the guesses in the conclusions section of the paper explicitly states that it could all be simply the effect of teachers trying to use whatever they think is effective for the betterment of the students: they might think boys would be motivated to work harder if they are given lower grades while to girls failure is destructive and they need constant encouragement. Is the original intent good? Sure why not. Is this sexist though? Absolutely. Is withholding failure from girls only strengthens fear of failure in them, hurting them in the long run, while making boys more prepared for competitive environment outside the school system? Should this be more of concern than hurting boys by giving them slightly lower grades? I'd say so.
People who decide to get even by treating some people different are not good people who actually care about the people they're discriminating against. They have contempt for those people and want to see them suffer.
PS. I am yet to hear an argument as to how you correct an unconscious bias without introducing a conscious bias. You have presented none. Come back when you are done moving the goalposts and willing to stay on topic
Making this discussion about mistreatment and abuse is as appropriate as insisting on talking about sexual assault at the workplace in a discussion about gender salary discrepancy. Like sure, maybe you were traumatized by school experience, some of us were too, it's just not what the question is about.
You can be traumatized by school with perfectly even grades as easily as you can have the most fulfilling experience even if teacher marked you up or down slightly when grading (eg like in the paper encouraging you with lower or higher grades according to what motivates you), these are just orthogonal.
Which is a far more common outcome of "unconscious bias correction policies" than actual progress.
As someone on the tail end of the Bell curve and for whom such a monolithic system was a poor fit, I wasted over a dozen years of my life there, in unfortunately what were my most formative years.
Luckily my siblings are correcting that with their children.
She cried, and I am still pissed about it to this day. What an awful person.
Turns out in order to get an A in "Absolute Beginner's Crash Course In [Language]" you had to be fluent. :-\",
To speak to your experience, I think it's fantastic that you had great teachers.
I sincerely think she completely sucked at her job but sociopath-politicked her way to teaching the classes with the kids that were labeled the brightest (i.e. mostly from good families, upper middle class, almost no ethnic minorities, etc.), they tend to succeed and go to good universities for some unfathomable reason (sarcasm) and she could take the credit.
I get people are emotional animals, and women were oppressed. Some women see it as their divine right to hurt boys for the sins of their ancestors. But it's not. Leave the kids alone.
> The researchers then looked whether factors, such as the type of school and the size and gender make-up of classes, were driving the gender grade gap.
> They also investigated whether characteristics of teachers themselves, such as how senior or experienced they were and whether they were male or female, helped explain girls' more generous grades.
> Only two factors were found to have an effect—and only in maths. The gender gap in maths grades was greater when classes were bigger. Girls were also graded as being further ahead than boys in technical and academic schools than they were in vocational schools.
> None of the other factors had any significant effect in reducing the gender grading gap.
Story of the internet, right there.
We do not get a final answer to why teachers are giving girls higher marks than boys.
My pet theory would be boys tend to have worse handwriting. So it could be that the worse handwriting is more frequently misinterpreted or simply marked as wrong by teachers.
(For those unfamiliar with the idiom, it means someone who pleads to the teacher to be given a higher grade. I don't know if there's a word in Italian.)
Of course in the real world we need cutoffs and there is no perfect way to measure understanding, it's just that we know grades to be such an obviously poor proxy, and it's way over used. We should have a way to distinguish "disciplined and hard working but doesn't know shit about this topic" from "clearly knows their stuff but snores a little too loud in the back"
Teachers let them, if a boy acted the way they did, well they'd just be shutdown.
As boy in a America, you learn fast, the only special treatment you get is hostility
Guess 1 is female student behavior adaptation to what teachers want aside from academic performance:
> School and classroom environments might indeed be adapted to traditionally female behaviours (Lavy 2008). Female students might thus adopt such actual behaviours during class, including precision, order, modesty, and quietness, which go beyond the individuals’ academic performance, but which teachers may highly reward in terms of grades. ... Conversely, teachers may be likely to associate such behaviours only with female students, because girls are traditionally thought of as possessing these traits.
Guess 2 is gender bias over-compensation:
> Another theoretical explanation calls into play teacher overcompensation towards females. Girls are indeed often discussed in discrimination contexts, especially in speeches about gender differences in cognitive ability in dealing with the ‘hard subjects’. A possible explanation for the reason teachers are more generous in grading female students could be that teachers wish to avoid possible discrimination against girls as an ability-stigmatized group. Therefore, teachers may over-assess girls in the same way they sometimes over-assess non-native students, to avoid negative stereotyping (Alesina 2018). From another perspective, it is also possible that the over-assessment of female students’ competences in Mathematics partly represents a sort of ‘push’ to encourage the weaker students (Terrier 2015). As a consequence, this may translate into a positive discrimination which favours girls.
Guess 3 is simply noisy data (teachers using grades to manipulate students into performing better, according to whatever teachers think motivates boys vs. girls):
> A final interpretation of our results could stem from a limitation of our data. Indeed, our measure of student grading is derived from the midterm report card, rather than the final report card of the academic year. Teachers may consciously adopt specific grading practices at the midterm to trigger students’ effort differently according to their gender, to in turn obtain the best possible performance by the end of the academic year. Specifically, teachers could perceive that male students’ effort is more easily triggered by lower grades, which could encourage them to study harder to achieve a better grade, while female students’ effort to achieve higher grades may be more easily triggered via encouragement.
Sure, but that runs against the popular narrative of "no biological differences". If we accept that boys are more likely to "x", we have to also accept that _girls_ are more likely (or less likely to) "y", which opens all sorts of pandora's boxes. They're looking for an explanation that discounts biology.
I had an older Russian teacher, heavy accent, knew his stuff fairly well, worked for few big Corps. He was teaching data structures. We had this fairly attractive girl in our class, 30 guys and I think 2-3 girls. There was this guy, let's call him "Bob". Bob was sitting next to that girl. That girl has used Bob for most of her homeworks and quizzes. Bob was really into her, it wasn't mutual though. Then, the midterm came. She was in trouble, as she had barely done any work and she had 0 understanding of material. Well, after Bob finished his midterm, they switched papers. Bob changed some variable names, and according to him added a few small mistakes.
2 weeks later Bob got a 'C' and the girl got an 'A'. Bob, loudly said "FUCK" in class and we all were cracking up. Teacher was a bit spooked too, since everyone was whispering about it. Bob stopped talking to her. I think she stopped attending the class. I am honestly not sure if anyone went to the dept. head, as the behavior between the teacher, girl and bob got really awkward.
I hope Bob is doing well, he was nice just a bit naive.
I'd hate for biases in institutional schooling to lead him to hate school and potentially lead to poor life outcomes.
And now that I think about it, there was a massive spread between the grades I was given by teachers and my standardized test results (talking like 30 point difference).
"Girls pay attention to people and boys, to things."
So, this cliche can be used to explain the Italian results: The girls did better when graded by people because girls are a LOT better working with people, e.g., understanding subtle hints of what the teacher would like, how to please the teacher, and then doing so.
For more, for some years in grade school, girls are ahead of boys in manual dexterity and, thus, in handwriting.
Girls are better than boys in rote memory, language learning and skills, reading, spelling, and some cases of precision in work, e.g., adding columns of numbers.
E.g., by the eighth grade, my handwriting was still just awful. So, given a lot of simple arithmetic to do, my accuracy was awful -- I misread my own writing. The teacher assumed I didn't understand the math. Naw, I understood the math just fine right away -- the reason for my poor accuracy was just my awful handwriting from poor manual dexterity. So, the teacher, with her poor understanding, called me aside and with good intentions warmly, fervently advised me never to take anymore math.
I told Dad, a high end educator, and he laughed. So, I did very well in all the math the school had -- a college prep school, 97% of the students went on to college, deliberately by far the best school in the city. No one beat me on the Math SATs by much! I never took first year calculus -- taught it, applied it, published research in it but never took it -- and started in the second year of calculus. In college I gave weekly lectures to a prof on topology and got "Honors in Math" -- wrote on group representations. My Ph.D. was in pure/applied math. Saw a problem in a class, worked on it for 2 weeks, solved the problem, later published the work.
That 8th grade teacher didn't understand math.
Maybe you have noticed that it is standard for companies greatly to prefer females for positions working with people -- clerks, customer service, human resources, etc. So, managers in companies didn't have to wait for these Italian results and have understood very well quite broadly going way back that women are much better at human facing work -- MUCH better.
The boys/men don't intend to mess up. Instead, they just don't understand people nearly as well and, thus, don't know when they are messing up.
Good for the Italian researchers doing well uncovering part of what has been common wisdom for a very long time!
Ah, Wotan is ripping his guts out over what he has to do to his DAUGHTER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ojhx-cFsJw
I studied theoretical math (long time ago, not in the US). At the university I attended, there were 17 applicants for each admission. My class was 125 people of which about 30 were men and almost a hundred were women.
During first 3 semesters, the class went from 125 to 70 at the end of the first semester, 35 at the end of the second and 20 at the end of third. Out of those 20, 15 graduated in the end, of which 11 were men and only 4 were women.
Now, the rest is subjective view of what happened.
I noticed that most of women that were admitted had really good grades all over (you had to have max points to be even considered) but were not super interested in math. My feeling was that most of girls either did not have a plan at all or their plan was they will be teaching math.
When girls organised, this was either for extracurricular reasons or if it was about math at all, it was to share notes and work together to solve problems that were required by the prof.
And finally when they were learning the material my subjective feeling at the time was that they depended more on rote memorisation. And as everybody knows, theoretical math is worst place possible to be relying on your memory alone.
Most guys on the other hand almost immediately organised into one group of people who actually liked math for math's sake. This might be potentially explained by the fact there was relatively few of us but I don't think this was the only reason.
Now, I cannot speak to how good some of those women were at math and whether they were treated fairly. I was young and I did not pay much attention to it at the time.
But it is interesting to me how much girls were overrepresented in the initial population even if they did not seem to have a strong drive for mathematics -- purely because they had stellar grades and they just could choose any place they could go to.
It is also a bit tragic they got penalised for this choice. I blame the education system which treated math as rote memorisation problem up to this point and never explained to us that this is not mathematics.
I think this explains a lot more than they seem to give it credit for. It's already been established in studies that boys will tend to cram for an exam while girls will work steadily throughout the year (hence, why courses that are heavy on coursework favour girls, and those heavy on exams favour boys.)
So it's entirely possible that the girls really were ahead of the boys part-way through the year, and the boys crammed for the exams at the end and overtook the girls.
Its clear in the comp science program, the profs are under pressure to make girls pass. They get special attention, extra feedback,etc.
Special perks for sure. Its just unfair and demoralizing, but also honestly enraging.
> Train teachers to be aware of their own gender biases The report also shows that teachers generally award girls higher marks than boys [for the same exact work], given what would be expected after considering their performance in PISA. This practice is particularly apparent in language-of-instruction courses. Girls’ better marks may reflect the fact that they tend to be “better students” than boys: they tend to do what is required and expected of them, thanks to better self-regulation skills, and they are more driven to excel in school. In addition, girls appear to be stronger in displaying the knowledge they have acquired (i.e. solving an algebraic equation) than in problem solving, the latter of which is a central component of the PISA test. But this report reveals that the gender gap observed in both school marks and PISA scores is not the same in both language-of-instruction classes and mathematics. The fact that it is much wider in the language-of-instruction courses suggests that teachers may harbour conscious or unconscious stereotyped notions about girls’ and boys’ strengths and weaknesses in school subjects, and, through the marks they give, reinforce those notions among their students and their students’ families
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Cappelen, A. W., Falch, R., & Tungodden, B. (2019). The Boy Crisis: Experimental Evidence on the Acceptance of Males Falling Behind. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3348981
Abstract
> The ‘boy crisis’ prompts the question of whether people interpret inequalities differently depending on whether males or females are lagging behind. We study this question in a novel large-scale distributive experiment involving more than 5,000 Americans. Our data provide strong evidence of a gender bias against low-performing males, particularly among female participants. A large set of additional treatments establishes that the gender bias reflects statistical fairness discrimination. The study provides novel evidence on the nature of discrimination and on how males falling behind are perceived by society.
From the conclusion
> The emergence of the ‘boy crisis’ prompts the question of whether people interpret gender inequalities differently depending on whether males or females are lagging behind. We study this question in a novel large-scale economic experiment conducted with a general population from the United States. The participants act as spectators and distribute earnings between two workers in a controlled labor market environment. When initial earnings are based on merit, we find that the spectators are gender-biased against males. We show that this gender bias is driven by female spectators and we provide evidence suggesting that the underlying mechanism is statistical fairness discrimination, where spectators interpret a male loser as someone who has exerted less effort than a female loser. Our study provides new evidence on the nature of gender discrimination, by showing how the perception of females being disadvantaged may cause people to infer that low-performing males have exerted less effort than low-performing females. […]
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Perspectives in Male Psychology, Louise Liddon & John Barry, page 79, about "Lavy, V. (2008, October). Do gender stereotypes reduce girls’ or boys’ human capital outcomes? Evidence from a natural experiment. Journal of Public Economics, 92(10–11), 2083–2105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2008.02.009":
> An Israeli study of nearly 30,000 pupils in more than 300 schools...