The Hanover Collaboration

Reading through the PISA results for this post, I noticed that they demonstrate a cross-culture difference in the way that boys and girls understand science.

In every country besides Chile, girls did better than boys on “Identifying Scientific Issues” and in Chile, the girls were only 5pts down compared to being down by over 20pts on science as a whole.

In every country, boys did better than girls on “Explaining Scientific Phenomena.”

On “Using Scientific Evidence” girls performed slightly better than boys compared to the average for science as a whole.

Looking at the performance of countries, with almost no exceptions they either favored the girls or boys but not both. That is, any country that did well on “Identifying Scientific Issues” did relatively poorly on “Explaining Scientific Phenomena” and vice-versa.

Suppose we make the strong assumption that these titles are meaningful and that the test is a good indicator of them. These results have serious ramifications for the way science is taught. Since I’m not the President of Harvard, I can talk about them.