Boys lag behind: How teachers’ gender biases affect student achievement

Abstract

Boys Lag Behind: How Teachers' Gender Biases Affect Student Achievement * I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls when they grade. This favoritism, estimated in the form of individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts. Gender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling behind girls in math during middle school. On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school.

Biased Teachers and Gender Gap in Learning Outcomes: Evidence from India

“…Moreover, by uti-lizing independently collected test scores as outcome measures, we evaluate the impact of teacher's bias on actual learning outcomes. Thus, our analysis is different from some other studies in the literature that look at discrimination in grading induced by teacher's biased beliefs (Lavy, 2008;Lavy and Sand, 2018;Terrier, 2020).…”

Short, Heavy and Underrated? Teacher Assessment Biases by Children's Body Size

“…The seriousness of maths achievement gaps by gender and race are widely recognized (Lavy, 2008;Burgess and Greaves, 2013;Cornwell et al, 2013;Campbell, 2015;Terrier, 2016), and considerable progress has been made towards understanding the impact of teacher expectations and bias in high school and university course enrolment, occupational choices and earnings in adulthood (Lavy, 2008;Mechtenberg, 2009;Lavy and Sand, 2018). We find that accounting for socioeconomic background, cognitive ability and student behaviours, the teacher-test score gap for a child with obesity is of similar magnitude (0.22 to 0.28 SD) to the size of the teacher-test score gap against girls in our data (0.20 to 0.22 SD).…”

“…Borrowing from the larger literature on teacher-test score gaps by gender, there is empirical evidence of a teacher-test score gap in maths but not literacy (e.g. in France, Terrier, 2016). It has been suggested that teachers hold a belief that maths (but not literacy) is more difficult for girls than boys due to an assumed inferior ability in this area (e.g.…”

Children’s Academic Achievement and Behavior Problems at the Intersection of Gender and Family Environment

“…Teachers also grade boys less favorably even when their performance is equal to girls' in reading, math, and science tests (Cornwell et al 2014). Their gender biases in favor of girls have a strong impact on girls' progress in both math and literacy (Terrier 2016). However, when girls and boys have similar levels of achievement, they give girls' mathematical skills a lower rating than boys' skills (Cimpian et al 2016).…”