All international studies are giving themselves to the fact that girls and boys have the same sense of numbers before entering school. And that a subsequent gap of skills in the matter depends on the cultures and test conditions, according to a report by the OECD.
In France, this gender gap in math and sciences at the end of primary school is the strongest in EU countries, according to an international study. By a snowball effect, it only increases until higher education.
The study presented Wednesday in Nature with the first author and doctor of neuroscience Pauline Martinot, is the first to be based on a “exceptionally large” dataset, taken from Evalaide.
“”For the first time“, she said to AFP,”We measure this gap in a very precise way: from the first exhibition at the elementary school, after only four months of school, and on nearly three million children“.
Launched in 2018, Evalaide tests in mathematics and French all the entrants in elementary school: at the start of the CP, four months later and the following year at the entrance to CE1.
Unsurprisingly, these data confirm the “big impact” of the more or less favored status of families and establishments on the performance of children. With in order the private, the public and ultimately priority establishments.
But the real teaching is that, if at the entry into CP, girls and boys have results “almost identical” to math tests, one “Small but already high gap promotes boys“After four months of school, according to the study. After a year, there are more double boys than girls among the 5% of the best students with math tests.
Confirmed difference on the four cohorts of students studied from 2018, for a total of more than 2.8 million students.
With the conclusion that “phenomenon covers all the strata of society, regardless of the type of school and its kind of pedagogy, the situation of parents, family composition, school environment and geographic location“, According to the study.
“Anxiety”
Supervised by the neuroscientist and professor at the Collège de France Stanislas Dehaene and the teacher in education sciences Pascal Bressoux at Grenoble Alpes University, his authors readily admit that these data, descriptive, cannot “not be used to identify the original cause of the gender difference“.
However, certain explanations agree better with their findings than others. If they dismiss the hypothesis of “fundamental differences of skills according to gender“, they remember, for example, that girls suffer from greater” anxiety “in the face of math, especially in the” competitive “context of a test.
“”When a test is stressful, the anxiety of little girls in math makes them lose their means compared to boys“, Note Pauline Martinot. Stress increased by the fact that counting operations are designated as” maths “from CP.
A formal character capable of inhibiting girls, and which pleads for a way of “thinking of mathematics exercises differently, by performing much more games around the discipline before the CP”, according to Pauline Martinot.
The dissemination of genres by parents’ bias could also play a role, according to the study, when entering school life. The greater investment of the parents of wealthy social categories would thus explain the appearance of a greater gender gap in their offspring. As for example in families whose two parents have scientific trades or in teaching.
The study dismisses, on the faith of its data, solutions relating to the size of the classes, the Goto-Filles ratio or the heterogeneity of levels.
And rather encourages a teacher training effort, so that they pay as much attention to girls as to boys around math. But so that they are also better trained in this discipline, to “increase their self -confidence and their interest” in matter.
Pauline Martinot evokes a bias because “more than 80% of teachers are women“, including a majority from a literary journey.
Gold, “An anxiety measured in women in math teachers will be directly correlated with anxiety in math of little girls in their class“, She notes.