Boys, Girls and Grades: Significant Findings

Our analysis of both the overall provincial data and the individual school results suggests two overriding conclusions.

First, we can see no evidence that a concerted effort exists in our secondary schools to ensure that the special educational needs of both male and female students are routinely being met. This general conclusion is supported by the following specific findings.

1. From the provincial data above, it is clear that in British Columbia's schools there is a substantial difference between the academic performance of boys and that of girls.
2. These data indicate that there has been no significant reduction across the province in gender-based differences reflected by five of the seven individual indicators during the six years studied. We did note a relatively small (but statistically significant) improvement in the indicator showing the difference between the Mathematics 12 Examination Mark and the Mathematics 12 School Mark. There was also a substantial improvement in the Graduation rate results.
3. The differences described by each indicator vary from school to school over a considerable range of values.
4. Within individual schools the differences described by the indicators vary considerably both among indicators and over time.

Second, where an assessment is made at the school, girls, on average, do better than boys. This difference is so pervasive as to suggest that there is a structural bias in favour of girls in the design and practice of school-based assessment.

Some of the implications of these findings are discussed below.

What Does the School Mark Actually Measure?

One of the indicators used in A Secondary Schools Report Card for British Columbia and The 1999 Report Card on British Columbia's Secondary Schools (and included in the present work) reflects the difference between the average examination mark obtained by the school's students and their corresponding school mark. 18 The school mark is the accumulation of school-based assessments of work undertaken by the student during the year. It is our belief that this school mark should serve the students as a gauge of their progress through the course material. We contend that a student who consistently performs school work at a B level should reasonably expect to be sufficiently prepared to achieve a B on the final examination. The calculation of the difference between the two marks provides a reasonable measure of the school's effectiveness in providing an accurate feedback mechanism to its students.

Our use of this measure in A Secondary Schools Report Card for British Columbia and The 1999 Report Card on British Columbia's Secondary Schools prompted some commentators to assert that, since the school mark measured quite different aspects of the curriculum than did the examination mark, to compare them was not reasonable. Following this argument, one would expect that the average differences between the school and examination percentages would vary but one would also expect that the differences would be distributed around a mean approximating zero. Thus, in some schools, in some subjects, the school mark would exceed the examination mark while, in other schools, the reverse would be true. This is not the case. Average school marks tend to exceed average examination marks in all circumstances. For instance, overall, for English and Mathematics, average school marks exceeded the corresponding examination mark in 78 percent of the recorded instances.

There is some indication in the research that, in general, "girls tend to do better on essays and coursework requiring constant application, boys on multiple-choice questions and examinations, requiring occasional bouts of hard work." However, it is unlikely that this tendency alone would account for the present study's finding that, for girls in Mathematics--not a subject in which students are overwhelmed with essay work or oral presentations--the average school mark exceeded the average examination mark in 91 percent of the recorded instances.

Our current study suggests a new dimension in the question of school mark versus examination mark. As noted above, there appears to be systematic bias favouring female students in school-based assessments. In English 12, the difference between the average school mark and the average examination mark was greater for females than for males 76 percent of the time in schools with Grade-12 enrollments larger than 50. 19 In Mathematics 12, females were favoured to an even greater extent--in 81 percent of the instances. This prompts the question: what are school-based results measuring? Do they reflect mastery of the subject matter, work habits, attendance, behaviour, or some other characteristic of student activity? What is their purpose, and what is their value? Since it is not clear what it attempts to measure, we believe that a thorough review of the school-based assessment system in provincially examinable Grade-12 courses is in order.

Why Do More Boys Give Up in Grade 12?

The difference in graduation rates of boys and girls is particularly disturbing. A failure to graduate means that a student who is fully prepared to complete secondary studies at the beginning of the Grade-12 year, yet fails to graduate with his or her class. Seventy-four percent of the school measurements taken in this study showed higher graduation rates for females.

Given the considerable cost in wasted student time and educational resources that this failure to graduate represents, we feel that those schools not doing well in this area should make a concerted effort to identify and address the causes.

However, as we noted in footnote 16, graduation regardless of the level of subject mastery achieved helps neither the student nor those attempting to interpret the transcript.

Female Strength in English 12

Because of the strength and consistency of these results, we suggest that two questions should be considered. First, do these results reflect a meaningful difference in communication skills be-tween the genders? By way of confirmation, it might be useful to examine the by-gender results of the Language Proficiency Index (LPI), a test administered by the University of British Columbia and other post-secondary institutions to most of their incoming freshmen to determine students' ability to communicate in written English. Second, what can be learned from the practice and experience of the English programs in those schools where the differential is relatively less significant? Are there teaching practices that are successful in raising boys to the performance levels measured for girls?

The previously cited PLAP reading and writing assessments suggest that the results presented here reflect the inability of the education system to correct, in the senior years, failures that become apparent as early as Grade 4.

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Last Modified: Thursday, May 20, 1999.