Teachers tend to rate girls as less good at maths than boys who have similar levels of performance, a major new study reveals.

Researchers in the US suggested that this underrating of girls could be one of the reasons that boys were more likely to score high marks in maths than girls - a gender gap that increases as children get older.

The study, by academics from New York University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and West Chester University, looked at maths test scores from more than 12,500 children and compared them to teachers’ assessments of their maths performance and behaviour.

“Teachers give lower ratings to girls when boys and girls perform and behave similarly,” the research team states in a paper published on AERA Open, an open-access journal from the American Educational Research Association.

“This suggests that teachers must perceive girls as working harder than similarly achieving boys in order to rate them as similarly proficient in maths,” they add.

‘Uniformly underrated’

The researchers looked at the results of maths tests that children took in kindergarten (Year 1) and found that girls and boys were equally likely to be among the top 50 per cent of test scores, but girls made up just 45 per cent of the top 15 per cent of scores and less than a third of the top 1 per cent.

They found that as children progressed through school, the under-representation of girls among the top performers further deteriorated, so that by the spring of 2nd grade (Year 3), girls only made up only around a fifth of the top 1 per cent of test scores.

Teachers “uniformly underrated” girls’ proficiency in maths relative to boys who were similar academically and in behaviour, the researchers found.

“The widening of the gender gap in math achievement we have documented…is likely due in part to the lower expectations that teachers (and society) hold of girls,” the paper, Have Gender Gaps in Math Closed?, says.

It adds that “good girl” behaviour - in which girls tend to use the strategies they have been given by teachers rather than taking more bold mathematical leaps as boys are more likely to do - can also inhibit maths learning.

The study, led by Joseph Cimpian of New York University, used data collected from two groups of children: 5,056 who began school in 1998-99 and 7,507 who began in 2010-11.

Gender stereotyping

Sue Pope, from the UK’s Association of Teachers of Mathematics, said that an awareness of the dangers of gender stereotyping could help to combat the problem.

“There is quite a lot of evidence that teacher expectations are different for boys and girls,” she added. “Classrooms are complicated places and people don’t notice they are treating boys differently.

“It is good for teachers to be aware of this so they can do that self-check: ‘Who do I get to answer my questions? Is it always the boys?’

“You don’t want to label children and you don’t want to exaggerate the differences, but if you are not aware, then you can’t be attuned to what may be influencing you.”

But Heather Mendick, a freelance academic who has researched girls’ attitudes to maths in UK schools, argued that the root of the problem was stereotypes in society that affected both teachers and pupils.

“The idea of who achieves and who doesn’t is not just about gender but social class and race,” she said. “That is something that is very, very hard for individual teachers to change.

“There have been loads of initiatives on girls and maths. I’m not against those initiatives - there is really good work going on - but they are based on this idea that there is a problem with girls, which, in itself, sets up that idea.

“There is a problem, but it’s not in the simple sense that ‘here is a problem and here is an initiative that will solve it’.”

@teshelen