Again from alot of websites I copied alot of articles to bring you the difference between men and women.
I. MYTH: “Real” women don’t do math.
Related myths: You’re too pretty to be a math major.
Women are qualitative; men are quantitative.
Results:
High school girls who think of math as a “male thing” are less likely to go
on in math and are less likely to do well in math.
Girls are much less apt than equally talented boys to go into mathrelated
careers including engineering and the physical sciences.
Solutions: We all should:
• stop saying things like “Women aren’t good in math.”
• challenge others, both students and adults, when they make
stereotypic comments about girls and math.
• provide girls and boys with lots of examples of women and girls who
are successful in math and science (and who are also cool).
II. MYTH: There is a biological basis for sex differences in
math.
Related myths: There is a sex-linked math gene.
Hormones cause everything.
Results:
Parents have lower expectations for girls in math and science.
Some educators use the “math gene” as an excuse for their own
gender-biased classroom behaviors.
Biology is used to justify the smaller number of girls on math/science
teams and the smaller number receiving math/science awards.
Solutions: We should all:
• be aware that while there is no evidence of a “math gene,” there is a lot
of evidence that practice and encouragement improves math and
science skills for girls (and for boys).
• provide students with needed practice and encouragement
• read “scientific” studies with a critical eye, looking for what are facts
and what are opinions.
Myths and Realities
III. MYTH: Girls learn better from female teachers.
Related myths: Role models must always be of the same sex as
the student.
Results:
Some female teachers feel that being a woman is enough to encourage
girls, and it isn’t necessary to do anything else.
Some male teachers feel that it isn’t possible to reach girls so it isn’t
necessary to try.
Some adults and students feel that girls avoid classes taught by men.
Solutions: Explain to others:
• it makes little difference to most students whether they are taught by a
man or a woman. It is the quality of the teaching, not the gender of the
teacher, that matters.
• while teachers treat male and female students differently, this is
true for both female and male teachers. The gender of the teacher has
little or no effect on how they treat girls and boys.
• while women and men can teach girls well (or poorly), if students never
see women teaching math or science, the myths about who does and
doesn’t do math and science are reinforced.
IV. MYTH: It is not necessary to look at the interaction of
gender and race when dealing with girls in math
and science.
Related myths: If something applies to White girls it also applies
to African American and Hispanic girls.
If something applies to African American boys it
also applies to African American girls.
Results:
There is little research about African American and Hispanic girls and
about the best ways to encourage them in math and science.
There is potential for African American and Hispanic girls to be ignored
and to feel invisible.
Solutions:
• demand that information be broken down by gender and race.
• when looking at results, look for both similarities and differences.
• when analyzing your own classes, look at what is happening in terms of
gender and race.
• sometimes just look at statistics for African American or Hispanic girls.
For the first time — and in unambiguous findings — researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa show both that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks.
“Our findings — which suggest that language processing is more sensory in boys and more abstract in girls — could have major implications for teaching children and even provide support for advocates of single sex classrooms,” said Douglas D. Burman, research associate in Northwestern’s Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers measured brain activity in 31 boys and in 31 girls aged 9 to 15 as they performed spelling and writing language tasks.
The tasks were delivered in two sensory modalities — visual and auditory. When visually presented, the children read certain words without hearing them. Presented in an auditory mode, they heard words aloud but did not see them.
Using a complex statistical model, the researchers accounted for differences associated with age, gender, type of linguistic judgment, performance accuracy and the method — written or spoken — in which words were presented.
The researchers found that girls still showed significantly greater activation in language areas of the brain than boys. The information in the tasks got through to girls’ language areas of the brain — areas associated with abstract thinking through language. And their performance accuracy correlated with the degree of activation in some of these language areas.
To their astonishment, however, this was not at all the case for boys. In boys, accurate performance depended — when reading words — on how hard visual areas of the brain worked. In hearing words, boys’ performance depended on how hard auditory areas of the brain worked.
If that pattern extends to language processing that occurs in the classroom, it could inform teaching and testing methods.
Given boys’ sensory approach, boys might be more effectively evaluated on knowledge gained from lectures via oral tests and on knowledge gained by reading via written tests. For girls, whose language processing appears more abstract in approach, these different testing methods would appear unnecessary.
“One possibility is that boys have some kind of bottleneck in their sensory processes that can hold up visual or auditory information and keep it from being fed into the language areas of the brain,” Burman said. This could result simply from girls developing faster than boys, in which case the differences between the sexes might disappear by adulthood.
Or, an alternative explanation is that boys create visual and auditory associations such that meanings associated with a word are brought to mind simply from seeing or hearing the word.
While the second explanation puts males at a disadvantage in more abstract language function, those kinds of sensory associations may have provided an evolutionary advantage for primitive men whose survival required them to quickly recognize danger-associated sights and sounds.
If the pattern of females relying on an abstract language network and of males relying on sensory areas of the brain extends into adulthood — a still unresolved question — it could explain why women often provide more context and abstract representation than men.
Ask a woman for directions and you may hear something like: “Turn left on Main Street, go one block past the drug store, and then turn right, where there’s a flower shop on one corner and a cafe across the street.”
Such information-laden directions may be helpful for women because all information is relevant to the abstract concept of where to turn; however, men may require only one cue and be distracted by additional information.
Parents have heard it for decades: Boys play with guns and girls play with dolls because society brainwashes them into rigid sex roles. Oh, really? Anyone who’s raised both boys and girls can tell you how different they seem from the get-go — and there’s not much you can do about it. When my wife and I wouldn’t give our son a toy weapon to play with, he made swords out of fence slats and guns out of Tinkertoys. Our daughter, by contrast, was always too busy managing the intricate social world of toy animals to have the slightest interest in hunting for anything. Was this subconsciously our fault?
Probably not. Sure, parents can condition kids without realizing it — cooing and talking more to baby girls, for instance, or roughhousing more with boys. But a growing body of research suggests that something deeper is at work. High-tech scans, for example, show that in both boys and girls, certain areas of the brain are bigger or busier than in the opposite sex. In the womb, these areas of the brain get higher doses of certain hormones, suggesting that girls and boys start with natural tendencies at birth. “There’s a strong relationship between differences we see in the brain and the way children act,” asserts Ruben Gur, PhD, director of the brain behavior laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.
As children grow, those inborn sex differences can guide what kids like to learn — and what gets reinforced. “Learning itself changes the brain,” says Lise Eliot, PhD, assistant professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, in Chicago. When kids play and think, cells in the most active parts of the brain grow new, livelier connections while cells that don’t get much action are pruned. In other words, gender differences that are present at birth become even more entrenched.
Such discussions, of course, raise all sorts of concerns and objections. Remember the furor last year when Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, suggested that the shortage of female scientists may be, in part, because of innate differences between men and women? Still, it’s hard to argue with science, and evidence is mounting that male and female brains are simply not the same. Here are the key areas of difference.
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