Remote school has exposed a number of inequities in education, from rural residents who don’t have high-speed internet service to low-income families who don’t have laptops. Boys could be another student group that falls behind during virtual learning, according to some researchers.
Studies conducted before the coronavirus pandemic reveal an academic achievement gap between boys and girls, with girls ahead. Now, some pediatric researchers say they expect the disparities to only increase.
A 2018 meta-analysis of more than 200 mostly U.S. studies of teacher-assigned grades found that girls had significantly higher grades in elementary school through college than boys, including higher grades in the subjects of science, technology, engineering and math. The findings showed that while males are overrepresented in STEM careers it isn’t because they are outperforming females in those subject areas.
“I expect that remote learning will widen the existing achievement gap between boys and girls, assuming that remote learning demands greater conscientiousness than classroom learning,” said Rose O’Dea, a postdoctoral researcher in the Inter-Disciplinary Ecology and Evolution Lab at the University of New South Wales who led the analysis.
Researchers at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education studied test scores from every public school district in the U.S. between the fall of 2008 and the spring of 2015 and found that girls scored higher than boys in reading and writing in almost every district regardless of economic background or race. By the end of eighth grade, they found, girls were almost a full grade level ahead of boys in reading. In math, boys from affluent and predominantly white school districts scored higher than girls, but in lower-income and more racially diverse districts, girls often outperformed boys in math, too. When I asked one of the authors about how remote school might affect the study’s findings, she declined to comment.
