Gender Differences in Reading and Writing Achievement: Evidence From the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

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Author(s)
Reilly, David
Neumann, David L
Andrews, Glenda
Year published
2019
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Show full item recordAbstract
A frequently observed research finding is that females outperform males on tasks of verbal and language abilities, but there is considerable variability in effect sizes from sample to sample. The gold standard for evaluating gender differences in cognitive ability is to recruit a large, demographically representative sample. We examined 3 decades of U.S. student achievement in reading and writing from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to determine the magnitude of gender differences (N = 3.9 million), and whether these were declining over time as claimed by Feingold (1988). Examination of effect sizes found a ...
View more >A frequently observed research finding is that females outperform males on tasks of verbal and language abilities, but there is considerable variability in effect sizes from sample to sample. The gold standard for evaluating gender differences in cognitive ability is to recruit a large, demographically representative sample. We examined 3 decades of U.S. student achievement in reading and writing from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to determine the magnitude of gender differences (N = 3.9 million), and whether these were declining over time as claimed by Feingold (1988). Examination of effect sizes found a developmental progression from initially small gender differences in Grade 4 toward larger effects as students progress through schooling. Differences for reading were small-to-medium (d = −.32 by Grade 12), and medium-sized for writing (d = −.55 by Grade 12) and were stable over the historical time. Additionally, there were pronounced imbalances in gender ratios at the lower left and upper right tails of the ability spectrum. These results are interpreted in the context of Hyde’s (2005) gender similarities hypothesis, which holds that most psychological gender differences are only small or trivial in size. Language and verbal abilities represent one exception to the general rule of gender similarities, and we discuss the educational implications of these findings.
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View more >A frequently observed research finding is that females outperform males on tasks of verbal and language abilities, but there is considerable variability in effect sizes from sample to sample. The gold standard for evaluating gender differences in cognitive ability is to recruit a large, demographically representative sample. We examined 3 decades of U.S. student achievement in reading and writing from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to determine the magnitude of gender differences (N = 3.9 million), and whether these were declining over time as claimed by Feingold (1988). Examination of effect sizes found a developmental progression from initially small gender differences in Grade 4 toward larger effects as students progress through schooling. Differences for reading were small-to-medium (d = −.32 by Grade 12), and medium-sized for writing (d = −.55 by Grade 12) and were stable over the historical time. Additionally, there were pronounced imbalances in gender ratios at the lower left and upper right tails of the ability spectrum. These results are interpreted in the context of Hyde’s (2005) gender similarities hypothesis, which holds that most psychological gender differences are only small or trivial in size. Language and verbal abilities represent one exception to the general rule of gender similarities, and we discuss the educational implications of these findings.
View less >
Journal Title
American Psychologist
Copyright Statement
© 2018 American Psycological Association. This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. Reproduced here in accordance with publisher policy. Please refer to the journal link for access to the definitive, published version.
Note
This publication has been entered into Griffith Research Online as an Advanced Online Version.
Subject
Psychology
Gender psychology
Cognitive and computational psychology