Why girls do better than boys in school decoded

Girls get better grades in elementary school than boys because of their eagerness to learn and attentive behaviour in classrooms, a new study has claimed.

Research from the University of Georgia and Columbia University suggests that classroom behaviour of girls may lead teachers to assign them higher grades than their male counterparts.

“The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as ’approaches toward learning,’” said Christopher Cornwell, one of the study’s authors.

“You can think of ‘approaches to learning’ as a rough measure of what a child’s attitude toward school is: It includes six items that rate the child’s attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organisation. I think that anybody who’s a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that,” Cornwell said in a statement.

The study analysed data on more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade.

It examined students’ performance on standardised tests in three categories — reading, math and science — linking test scores to teachers’ assessments of their students’ progress, both academically and more broadly.

The data showed that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favour girls. In every subject area, boys are represented in grade distributions below where their test scores would predict.

The authors attribute this misalignment to what they called non-cognitive skills, or “how well each child was engaged in the classroom, how often the child externalised or internalised problems, how often the child lost control and how well the child developed interpersonal skills“.

“The trajectory at which kids move through school is often influenced by a teacher’s assessment of their performance, their grades. This affects their ability to enter into advanced classes and other kinds of academic opportunities, even post-secondary opportunities,” Cornwell said.

“It’s also typically the grades you earn in school that are weighted the most heavily in college admissions. So if grade disparities emerge this early on, it’s not surprising that by the time these children are ready to go to college, girls will be better positioned,” he said.

The study was published in the Journal of Human Resources.