Despite the best efforts by the Left to claim that there are no differences between males and females, pesky science continues to rear its ugly head and disprove that notion. A new study out of Queensland, Australia has found that girls perform significantly better than boys in the United States on standardized reading and writing tests. Pair this with studies showing that boys outperform girls mathematically, and the Left may implode. Perhaps biology matters more than they’d like to believe.
Researchers at Australia’s Griffith University examined 27 years of test scores of more than 3.9 million American students from grades four, eight, and 12, collected from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and discovered that the girls performed significantly better than boys in both reading and writing in the fourth grade, and that the gap widened in eighth and twelfth grades, particularly in writing.
“The common thinking is that boys and girls in grade school start with the same cognitive ability, but this research suggests otherwise,” says the study’s lead author David Reilly, a doctoral student at Griffith, in a release by the American Psychological Association. “Our research found that girls generally exhibit better reading and writing ability than boys as early as the fourth grade.”
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Past research has shown that females use both hemispheres of the brain for reading and writing, while males rely on just one, which could be a contributing factor to the phenomenon. Other potential causes for the gap suggested by the researchers include peer pressure on boys to behave in a more masculine way and the increased frequency of behavioral problems amongst boys that may delay their learning.
While the findings of the study aren’t entirely groundbreaking, they should be taken into consideration when producing curriculums. Reilly contends that it may not be necessary to prepare separate curriculums for each sex, but schools should use the information to advocate expressive writing exercises for boys earlier. He also contends that educators should be placing as much of an emphasis on writing and reading as they do on the “STEM” (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) courses.
“For educational practice, I believe this study shows the need for a greater focus on writing beginning in primary continuing throughout high school, but in an ever-crowded curriculum that is focusing more on STEM, it highlights the increased need for further work,” he concludes.
Reilly also contends that the findings of the study could shed some light on other gaps seem amongst the sexes in later years.
“Reading and writing sets the stage for later schooling. While we’ve concentrated on basic literacy, the demands on students for writing grow stronger as they progress through education,” adds Reilly. “In particular, it’s crucial for high school and college entry. Each year, more women than men apply for college entry, and more women than men complete their college degrees. It has a cascading effect on students, either up or down.”
But while females may have an advantage when it comes to reading and writing, males statistically outperform their female counterparts on mathematics tests. In fact, according to a 2016 report by AEI.org, high-school boys outperform girls on the SAT math test by approximately 30 points and have for more than four decades, even when the high-school girls have superior overall high-school records compared to boys.
Biological differences between males and females are on full display here. According to AEI.org, though women outnumber males in AP/Honors math and science classes and are more likely than their male counterparts to take four years of math and science courses, get better grades on average, and are more inclined to graduate in the top 10 percent of their classes, to graduate from college, and to go on to graduate schools, there remains a gap between males and females in degrees awarded and jobs obtained in STEM fields.
ETR.org contends that these gaps can be attributed to the sex differences in spatial ability that are noted early in life. Boys tend to show preferences towards spatial systems when they are young, and some researchers believe that men are biologically more lateralized to perform spatial tasks.
Of course, SJWs refuse to accept that biology affects the sexes differently and prefer instead to level the playing field with artificial and outright biased interventions. Earlier this year at Oxford University, for example, teachers began offering students extra testing time during math and science exams in the hopes that it would alleviate the sex gap in which the males outperformed the female students. It failed, of course, as men continue to be awarded more first-class degrees than women in math and science, according to the Telegraph.
Yet when females outperform males in any particular area, the SJWs do not appear interested in adopting interventions that would level the playing field and give males an increased advantage. It’s likely, in fact, that they would view any such suggestion as sexist.
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