Where Boys OutperformGirls in Math: Rich, Whiteand Suburban Districts
It borders on dangerous lack of journalistic responsibility to write a story like this which does not even mention the effect size observed.<p>The closest statement I can find to something like mentioning an actual effect size is this:<p>&gt; &quot;In the Montgomery Township district in New Jersey, for example, the median household income is $180,000 and the students are about 60 percent white and 30 percent Asian-American. Boys and girls both perform well, but boys score almost half a grade level ahead of girls in math. Compare that with Detroit, where the median household earns $27,000 and students are about 85 percent black. It’s one of the districts in which girls outperform boys in math.&quot;<p>&#x27;Boys score almost half a grade level ahead&#x27; -- ahh so much imprecise terminology that we can&#x27;t know what it even means, let alone if this example was representative or cherry-picked.<p>I&#x27;m not talking about holding a popular newspaper to some unrealistic standard, like giving us informative plots of the spread (uncertainty) of results or minor description of the methodology or anything. I wish, but there&#x27;s no way.<p>I&#x27;m saying they aren&#x27;t even throwing any numbers into the clickbait. The takeaway from this article is <i>purely</i> subjective, because we don&#x27;t know what &#x27; grade level&#x27; or &#x27;almost&#x27; or &#x27;better&#x27; mean in any of the description. What does &quot;5 months of grade level&quot; mean, and how does it vary by state or district, etc?<p>Normally there&#x27;s at least something like, &quot;Boys did X% better on SAT math sections between 2010-2016&quot; or something, and you can look at X% and decide whether it looks huge and meaningful or looks small enough that it might be spurious or have no meaningful effects in students&#x27; lives down the road or something.<p>These just seem like made up numbers in units of months or &quot;grade level&quot;. How do I know what it means? Given that the blue point cloud is roughly around the 0 line, and I don&#x27;t know how much &quot;1 unit&quot; &quot;means&quot; on the vertical axis, I seems like there&#x27;s no conclusion to draw.<p><i>In fact</i> the most salient effect size mention is <i>about girls</i> and <i>about language arts</i>:<p>&gt; &quot;In no district do boys, on average, do as well or better than girls in English and language arts. In the average district, girls perform about three-quarters of a grade level ahead of boys.&quot;<p>Maybe the title should be something like,<p>&quot;Boys, increasingly abandoned in English class, turn to math as a domain in which they can be rewarded for success-- especially in rich, white suburbs.&quot;<p>(The point is, it&#x27;s just as consistent with the utter lack of detail of the article.)