Balancing the Equation for Boys and Girls in Math
When I was in the fifth grade, Fridays always meant math drills. Our teacher stood over us with a stopwatch in one hand and a gym whistle in the other. At the first piercing blast, we would rush to solve as many of the equations as we could before time was up. Our names and rankings (a rainbow scale starting at purple and progressing up to red) were posted prominently on the wall, and the top achievers won prizes.
It didn’t take me long to fear the whistle. After most of my classmates – particularly the boys, as I recall -- had advanced up to yellow and even orange, I lingered in the lowly blues. I’m not sure how much of this experience factored into my later struggles with math, but it probably didn’t help.
Now a new study, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, suggests that relatively
It didn’t take me long to fear the whistle. After most of my classmates – particularly the boys, as I recall -- had advanced up to yellow and even orange, I lingered in the lowly blues. I’m not sure how much of this experience factored into my later struggles with math, but it probably didn’t help.
Now a new study, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, suggests that relatively