New study shows why boys perform better than girls at math

29 May, 2007: Why are boys better at mathematics than girls? A new study has found an answer.

The study, conducted by a team of researchers led by Sian Beilock at the University of Chicago, the United States, shows that this is because girls, already weighed down by the stereotypes that they are not as good at mathematics as boys, tend to worry more, and this erodes the mental resources needed for problem-solving.

The findings of the study have been published in the May 2007 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

The researchers found that this threat to performance caused by stereotyping can also impede success in other academic areas as well, because mental abilities do not bounce back immediately after being compromised by mathematics anxiety.

As part of the study, researchers selected a group of college women who performed well in mathematics. They were then randomly assigned to two groups – with one set of women being told that they were being tested to see why men generally do better in mathematics than women, and the other group being told simply that they were part of an experiment on mathematics performance.

Researchers found that the information that men do better in mathematics than women undercut performance drastically. The accuracy of women exposed to the stereotype was reduced from about 90% in a pre-test to about 80% after being that told men do better in mathematics. Among women who did not receive that message, performance improved slightly.

The study also showed that the verbal portion of the working memory was the portion of the women’s mental resources that was most strongly undermined by the anxiety.

Women experiencing mathematics anxiety found it more difficult to solve problems when they were written out horizontally than when they appeared vertically. Previous findings have showed that solving horizontal problems relies heavily on verbal resources.

To see if mathematics anxiety had any lasting impact on performance in the short term, the researchers repeated the test and then gave the women a standard memory test involving verbal information.

It was seen that the women did less well on that test if they were exposed to the mathematics stereotyping. This, Sian Beilock concluded, might mean that if a girl takes a verbal portion of a standardized test after taking the mathematics portion, she might not do as well on the verbal portion as she might do if she had not been recently struggling with mathematics-related worries and anxiety.

Likewise, the research suggested that if a girl has a mathematics class first thing in the morning and experiences mathematics-related worries in this class, these worries might carry implications for her performance in the class she attends next, according to Sian Beilock.