COE lecturer's research on gender, achievement wins inaugural Psychological Corporation/NASP Junior Faculty Award

Do boys really lag behind girls in reading achievement, and do girls really lag behind boys in math? Diana Joyce, a lecturer in UF’s Department of Educational Psychology, took another look at this bit of conventional wisdom. The results earned her the Psychological Corporation/National Association of School Psychologists’ inaugural Junior Faculty of the Year Award.

Joyce analyzed 8,000 test scores from the Woodcock- Johnson Tests of Achievement, widely used in school evaluations to measure academic achievement. She wanted to use the large sample to take a closer look at widely accepted notions about race, gender and achievement in different academic subjects. With women now ahead of men in college enrollment, and major reforms going on in K-12 education, were the old assumptions about boys and girls still valid?

“Past studies had shown girls ahead in reading and there is always the contention that boys are generally ahead in math,” she said. “I wanted to see if that was still happening, and I wanted to break the results down by ethnicity.”

She found that, in this sample at least, the old trends generally held true. Girls performed better in reading and writing, while boys maintained a hold to their claim on better math scores in some narrow skill areas such as applied math problems. National scores indicate girls are actually gaining some ground  in math, but boys still generally performed better on some senior-level math aptitude tests.

“Probably the most significant finding was that the gender differences held true across ethnic groups, which would indicate that this is indeed a gendered issue,” Joyce said.

Joyce’s paper was  presented at NASP’s annual conference  held in New York in March . The Psychological Corporation’s judges compared the manuscript to others submitted by junior faculty from around the country, and awarded Joyce one a Junior Faculty of the Year honor – one of three given this year, the first time the award has been given.

Joyce said her study’s results don’t mean that boys are innately better at math, or girls at reading. The preponderance of boys in remedial reading classes may mean that early interventions for boys need to be improved, she said. Or boys may be turned off by a reading curriculum that is more attuned to girls’ interests, she said.

The reasons for girls’ post-secondary math performance are a little clearer. Studies clearly show that while girls, on average, get good grades in math classes, they sometimes don’t elect to take pre-requisite advanced math courses and are underrepresented in STEM career program enrollment. The reasons why are murky, but they’re something Joyce would like to study.

“I know that in interviews, girls often say they want a career that helps people,” said Joyce, who also works as a school psychologist at P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School, UF’s K-12 laboratory school.

“One hypothesis is that girls stay away from math and science classes because they don’t see them as disciplines that are people-oriented,” Joyce said. “We need to remind them that STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines are about more than building roads or bridges – these skills can be used, in fields like medicine, to help people in a direct way.”