Gender Differences in Young Children's Math Ability Attributions

Oliver Dickhäuser and Wulf-Uwe Meyer set out to understand how boys and girls between eight and nine years old explain their own math ability. The question behind the study was not whether children can do math, but what reasons they give themselves when they succeed or fail at it.

To get at that, the researchers gathered several measures for each child. They looked at general ability, school grades, how the teacher rated the student's math ability, and how the student thought the teacher rated them. That last piece matters: a child's perception of what a teacher believes can diverge from what the teacher actually believes.

The grades and the general ability scores told a plain story. Girls and boys were, on average, equally capable and earned comparable marks. Nothing in their actual performance separated them.

Their explanations were a different matter. When a girl did well in math, she was less likely than a boy to credit high ability. When she did poorly, she was more likely to point to low ability as the cause. Same performance, different attributions.

Path analyses pointed to distinct routes behind these attributions for the two groups. For girls, the dominant input was perceived teacher evaluation. They leaned on what they believed their teacher thought of their math ability when deciding how able they were. Boys drew on that too, but they also weighed the quality of their own objective performance.

One further result stood out. The perceived teacher evaluation lined up with the teacher's real evaluation only among the girls. For boys, what they imagined the teacher thought did not track what the teacher actually recorded.

The study appeared in Volume 48 of 2006, published by Pabst Science Publishers. Dickhäuser was at the Institute of Psychology II at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg; Meyer was in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bielefeld.