Boys and Girls and Conscientiousness

This week’s article summary is from Why Girls Tend to Get Better Grades Than Boys

Last year I sent out a number of article summaries on the different ways boys and girls learn and mature.

This article was interesting to me because it focuses on the new initiative in most schools to emphasize grit, self-regulation, and conscientiousness.

Boys on average come to these skills and habits later than girls.

Yet by the time many boys “mature”, they have already become disconnected from and turned off by school—note the article's disturbing statistic of today’s disparity between boys and girls entering college.

It is important for us to stress the importance of grit and self-regulation, yet we need to be cognizant that these habits and skills come later to boys than girls. 

Let's make sure that our expectations for boys in school is reasonable, appropriate, and gender-sensitive. 

Joe

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Across all grade levels and academic subjects, girls earn higher grades than boys. Not just in the United States, but across the globe, in countries as far afield as Norway and Hong Kong.

Reflected in a recent study, the findings are unquestionably robust: Girls earn higher grades in every subject, including the science-related fields where boys are thought to surpass them.

Less of a secret is the gender disparity in college enrollment rates. The latest data from the Pew Research Center shows that 71 percent of female high school graduates went on to college, compared to 61 percent of their male counterparts. In 1994 the figures were 63 and 61 percent, respectively.

Are schools set up to favor the way girls learn and trip up boys?     

Let’s start with kindergarten. Little ones who are destined to do well in a typical 21st century kindergarten class are those who manifest good self-regulation. This is a term that is bandied about a great deal these days by teachers and psychologists. It mostly refers to disciplined behaviors like raising one’s hand in class, waiting one’s turn, paying attention, listening to and following teachers’ instructions, and restraining oneself from blurting out answers. These skills are prerequisites for most academically oriented kindergarten classes in America—as well as basic prerequisites for success in life.

As it turns out, kindergarten-age girls have far better self-regulation than boys. A recent study reveals that boys are often a whole year behind girls in all areas of self-regulation. By the end of kindergarten, boys are often just beginning to acquire the self-regulatory skills with which girls had started the year.

This self-discipline edge for girls carries into middle-school and beyond. One study found that middle-school girls edge out boys in overall self-discipline. This contributes greatly to their better grades across all subjects. They found that girls are more adept at reading test instructions before proceeding to the questions, paying attention to a teacher rather than daydreaming, choosing homework over TV, and persisting on long-term assignments despite boredom and frustration. Girls are apt to start their homework earlier in the day than boys and spend almost double the amount of time completing it. Girls’ grade point averages across all subjects were higher than those of boys, even in basic and advanced math—which, again, are seen as traditional strongholds of boys.

Conscientiousness is uniformly considered by social scientists to be an inborn personality trait that is not evenly distributed across all humans. In fact, a host of cross-cultural studies show that females tend to be more conscientious than males. One such study found that female college students are far more likely than males to jot down detailed notes in class, transcribe what professors say more accurately, and remember lecture content better. Arguably, boys’ less developed conscientiousness leaves them at a disadvantage in school settings where grades heavily weight good organizational skills alongside demonstrations of acquired knowledge.
These days, the whole school experience seems to play right into most girls’ strengths—and most boys’ weaknesses. Gone are the days when you could blow off a series of homework assignments throughout the semester but pull through with a respectable grade by cramming for and acing that all-important mid-term exam. Getting good grades today is far more about keeping up with and producing quality homework—not to mention handing it in on time.

Girls succeed over boys in school because they tend to be more mastery-oriented in their schoolwork habits. They are more apt to plan ahead, set academic goals, and put effort into achieving those goals. They also are more likely than boys to feel intrinsically satisfied with the whole enterprise of organizing their work, and more invested in impressing themselves and their teachers with their efforts.

On the whole, boys approach schoolwork differently. They are more performance-oriented. Studying for and taking tests taps into their competitive instincts. For many boys, tests are quests that get their hearts pounding. Doing well on them is a public demonstration of excellence and an occasion for a high-five. In contrast, the stress many girls experience in test situations can artificially lower their performance, giving a false reading of their true abilities. The testing situation may underestimate girls’ abilities, but the classroom may underestimate boys’ abilities.

It is easy to for boys to feel alienated in an environment where homework and organization skills account for so much of their grades. But the educational tide may be turning in small ways that give boys more of a fighting chance. A number of schools’ grading policies have been revamped to furnish kids with two separate grades, one for good work habits and citizenship--a “life skills grade”, the other a  “knowledge grade” based on average scores across important tests. Tests could be retaken at any point in the semester, provided a student was up to date on homework.
Some schools have also stopped factoring homework into a kid’s grade. Homework was framed as practice for tests. Incomplete or tardy assignments were noted but didn’t lower a kid’s knowledge grade. The whole enterprise of severely downgrading kids for such transgressions as occasionally being late to class, blurting out answers, doodling instead of taking notes, having a messy backpack, poking the kid in front, or forgetting to have parents sign a permission slip for a class trip, is being revamped.

Disaffected boys may also benefit from a boot camp on test-taking, time-management, and study habits. These core skills are not always picked up by osmosis in the classroom, or from diligent parents at home.

Addressing the learning gap between boys and girls will require parents, teachers and school administrators to talk more openly about the ways each gender approaches classroom learning—and that difference itself remains a tender topic.