Today’s post summarizes a paper by Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman, that parses the same set of data, as obtained in their earlier paper (see research summary of that paper here), to come up with new insights about gender differences in self-control and scholastic achievement.
- Girls, typically outperform boys when it comes to getting good grades overall and within each subject. this is true of US; however from what I have seen of Indian board results, the same is true of almost every board exam in India, be it CBSE, ICSE or State Boards.
- The girls however do not outperform boys on achievement tests like SAT or on ability test like IQ tests.
- If one were to assume that achievement and ability test are a better measure and can be used for predicting the grades, then girls grades as predicted by IQ etc fall shorter of what they actually achieve; and boys typically achieve lower actual grades that those predicted on the basis of their IQ. This phenomena is called underprediction and overprediction respectively.
- Traditional accounts of explaining this gender gap focus on how boys are better at achievement tests and are at an advantage. For example, as boys are expected to do better on such tests, girls face ‘stereotype threat’ which leads to poor performance by girls.
- Angela set out to find whether the undeprediction of grades for girls, and the advantage that girls have over boys when it comes to grades, might be due to gender differences in self-control. Specifically she surmised that girls are more self-controlled than boys and this factor could partially explain the female advantage when it comes to grades.
- I had lamented in my earlier research summary, that Anglea hadn’t defined self-control; she does in this paper:
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We use the terms self-discipline and self-control interchangeably, defining both as the ability to suppress prepotent responses in the service of a higher goal and further specifying that such a choice is not automatic but rather requires conscious effort. Examples of self-discipline include deliberately modulating one’s anger rather than having a temper tantrum, reading test instructions before proceeding to the questions, paying attention to a teacher rather than daydreaming, saving money so that it can accumulate interest in the bank, choosing homework over TV, and persisting on long-term assignments despite boredom and frustration.
- Parsing the data from previous study they found that indeed VIII class girls outperformed boys when it came to grades achieved; that their grades were underpredicted if one looked at achievement test results; girls were more self-controlled than boys and that gender differences in self-control partially mediated the relationship between gender and grades. In study 2, they had administered an IQ test also, and that too underpredicted girls’ grades.
- To me, if we put the two papers together, one showing that self-control trumps IQ, and the second showing that girls have an advantage in grades due to self-control over boys, and we club this with the fact that in some IQ tests etc boys show a greater variance than girls on IQ, I think a safe bet for boys, is not to rely too much on IQ, but develop self-control too. Both intelligence and self-control are immensely malleable, and depending on the type of test / grade that my be more meaningful criteria of academic achievement for you, you should develop either or both- but most important do not compromise on your love of learning, curiosity and creativity while being lured by these indices of scholastic achievement- these are way too important in their own way and without being a means to an end.