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Gender and racial achievement gaps in math
July 24, 2015
I spent the morning watching this one hour lecture by David Kung, who has been studying the gender and racial achievement gaps in mathematics. Interesting stuff, with historical perspective – math has a sad history – and a call for the end to passive lecturing and much more:
Watch it if you have time. You can skip to 7:20 to start.
Categories: Uncategorized
mathbabe 
I’ve always thought this study of the some of the high school match contest scores was fascinating.
http://economics.mit.edu/files/4298
Especially this sentence at the top of page 3 about the distribution of top scores for girls:
“Whereas the boys come from a variety of backgrounds, the top-scoring girls are almost exclusively drawn from a remarkably small set of super-elite schools: as many girls come from the top 20 AMC schools as from all other high schools in the U.S. combined.”
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Great link, thanks!
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When my mother was in high school in the 1960s, her algebra teacher said that the only people who needed to know algebra were boys who were going to become engineers, and that nobody needed to understand algebra, just to learn the rules how to evaluate equations. As a result, he refused to help anybody in class of maybe 20-25 except for the two boys he thought were going to be engineers.
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I had a similar speech from my 6th grade teacher (a woman) in 1983.
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Oh my god that makes me angry.
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