The evidence for cognitive differences between males and females is slight and irregular (Hyde, 2005; Cheng, 2008; Caplan, Crawford, Hyde & Richardson, 1997;
Pajares & Urdan, 2006). For example, many assume that girls are less interested in mathematics and boys in English, but the assumption of their preferences are more likely to be culturally acquired rather than biologically hard-wired (Hyde, 2005). In the present study, gender difference is discussed more within the scope of the biosocial structure. When students act and learn in a social structure, they do so for personal reasons, exercising their right to shape themselves as different individuals, performing differently. Teachers must therefore pay great attention to why and how learners choose to act in the academic milieu. The followings are some interesting survey results on students’ cognition difference:
According to a recent report in the journal Neuropsychologia (cited by Scientific American on March 5, 2008) and news of Science Daily dated March 5, 2008, researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa both show that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers measured brain activity in 31 boys and 31 girls aged 9 to 15 as they performed spelling and writing language tasks. The findings are that language processing is more sensory in boys and more abstract in girls. Girls decipher abstract information a lot better. “Boys, on the other hand showed a lot of activity in regions tied to visual and auditory functions, depending on the way the words were presented during the exercise.” The findings suggested that males used more sensory machinery to untangle massive abstract data, meaning that in a language classroom, boys might improve their language learning through both visual (with a PowerPoint) and oral (effective audio service) methods to get a full grasp of the subject. Girls, on the other
hand, can easily pick up concepts by either means and in some cases even without any particular means.
Statistics from the Foundation Stage Profile Results for England for 2007-08 show that girls continue to outperform boys in 13 different assessment scales. The gap is particularly wide in the following areas: (1) social development (10 percentage point’s difference between boys and girls), (2) emotional development (11 percentage points), (3) linking sounds and letters (11 percentage points), (4) reading (11 percentage points) (5) writing (18 percentage points) (6) creative development (14 percentage points).
Research on the physical structure of the brain also shows differences between boys and girls, which may partly explain differential attainment (Nikolaenko, 2005). Girls consistently show an advantage over boys in verbal abilities and have better fine motor skills, which may be related to differences in brain organization. Girls acquire language earlier than boys and are able to concentrate longer during conversation. Girls have better memory ability, allowing them to retrieve information from the memory more quickly. Boys, on the other hand, tend to be more visually and spatially aware. They are better at mental manipulation of images, which may benefit problem-solving, design and construction skills (Sax, 2005; Gurian, 2001).
Maitland et al. (2000) conducted a longitudinal research over 7 years on gender difference in the covariance structure and latent means of cognitive abilities across the adult life span: 982 community-dwelling individuals were randomly chosen (442 men and 540 women) from Seattle and the sample was divided into three age groups defined as younger, middle and older adults. They were tested on a six- factor measurement model in Inductive reasoning, Spatial orientation, Verbal comprehension,
Numerical facility, Perceptual speed and Verbal recall. The study demonstrated that (1) the latent structure of cognitive abilities is the same for men and women across the adult life span. (2) Older men and women declined significantly in 4 of 6 latent cognitive abilities, but younger men and women remained stable or improved; the middle age group remained stable or declined, while older group generally performed worse. (3) Women outperformed men in perceptual speed and verbal recall whereas men were significantly better in spatial orientation. (4) No gender differences in latent means were noted for inductive reasoning, numeral facility and verbal comprehension across the adult life span.
To summarize gender difference in academic learning, in a major meta-analysis on psychological gender difference, probably the most comprehensive one, “Gender Similarities Hypothesis”, Janet Hyde (2005, page 583) listed 199 reports (Hyde, Fennema, & Lamon, 1990; Hedges & Nowell, 1995; Hyde & Linn; Feingold, 1988), suggesting that differences between male and female mathematics computation, concepts and problem solving as well as spelling, language learning, verbal reasoning and abstract reasoning are indeed differentiable: females scored higher in language and verbal reasoning while males had the advantage in math computation and mental rotation but ”30% of the effect size was in the close-to-zero range and an additional 48% in the small range”, meaning that 78% of gender differences are small or close to zero. Cheng (2008) shows in the consensus of her report that “overinflated interpretations of small gender difference can do much harm and lead to counter productive policies”. Given that a “null hypothesis testing perspective and a sufficiently large sample size” might be statistically significant in regard to gender difference, the significance could not be represented by just a small number of gender reports. Men and women might differ in their cognition but their performance is alike (Klassen, 2000).