
Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher - fredley
http://www.wsj.com/articles/can-boys-beat-girls-in-reading-1462202491
======
hasenj
This is completely anecdotal, but when I was back in the Middle East, tests
essentially _were_ games/competitions. Everyone knew everyone else's scores
and they were often announced out loud as the results are handed back.
Students who consistently get high scores are looked up to and respected. Your
academic performance contributed significantly to your social standing in the
classroom.

Then I came to Canada and this notion was completely absent. It was one of the
many culture shocks. Your grades don't seem to matter that much.

The fact that in the media, at least American disney shows, "nerd" is used a
pejorative against people who do well academically, was completely puzzling to
me (and actually it still is).

~~~
ajuc
I was a kid in post-communist Poland in 90s, and the concept of nerd was
absent as well. Being good at math etc was not a problem to your social life
(in fact it was sth you could brag about, just not too openly because that's
uncool too).

Also there was almost no "jocks" (there were some sport competitions but no
cheerleaders, and nothing as important culturally as it is in USA, also teams
weren't persistent between classes and there were almost none inter-school
sport events).

Grades were public as well (or at least - nobody tried to hide them so
teachers would just pin a list with results from an exam on the board).
Competition was seen as sth natural (at the time unemployment was 20% and kids
were told that you have to be good or you will essentially be a hobo).

On the other hand you were supposed to pretend you didn't had to study a lot,
because kids that study instead of playing were "kujon"s = boring, lame
bookworms. It was cool to be smart without working for it.

Also cheating had no stigma attached, but telling any authority about any
misbehaving was the ultimate social suicide. This obviously included telling
teachers that other kids were cheating.

This was probably because 50 years of paid spying of citizens on each other by
abusive government. Even now whistleblowing in general is hard because of that
social stigma.

Nerd and geek concept was introduced later through movies and internet and in
mid 00s it was already established, but still not a negative stereotype (but
that may be because I changed environment to CS-related in the meantime and ~
everybody was a nerd/geek/whatever).

~~~
hasenj
> On the other hand you were supposed to pretend you didn't had to study a
> lot, because kids that study instead of playing were "kujon"s = boring, lame
> bookworms. It was cool to be smart without working for it.

Yea, where I grew up there was also a term like "bookworm" which was used
pejoratively, but it wasn't cause for social rejection, it was merely one of
the myriad of ways that kids tease each other. It's not as though the
"bookworm" was humiliated or bullied for being so. At least, that's how I
remember it.

------
jokoon
I'm a man and I really dislike competitive aspects of society. I mean if I'm
playing a game and it's for fun, I'm okay with it, as long as everyone play to
play, not play to win.

If I'm literally competing to earn a living, or if it ends up in praising
winners and blaming losers, it won't be enjoyable, and I'd rather not play at
all. Having humility also means that when you win, you also congratulate
losers for playing.

I agree that we need to compete on some aspects, like technology, science,
construction methods, and business in general. But competing between
individuals brings out the worst in people. And that's where exclusion starts:
if you keep slapping people's self esteem by telling them that life and
society is a game of winners and losers, you'll end up with less and less
people ready to take part in it.

Overall, I sense that men avoid competition much more than women do. Or maybe
it's the political climate that does. I don't really know.

~~~
spectrum1234
Like or dislike, you would be the first to die in 99% of societies, human or
otherwise.

This may get downvoted but don't shoot the messenger. You can't "hate"
something that just "is".

~~~
jokoon
So does that mean I'm part of the 1%?

Because I'm an unemployed man on welfare.

~~~
Camillo
Which is why you dislike competition.

~~~
jokoon
But do I dislike competition because of my social status, or is that the other
way around? Which caused which? Is that really sufficient to sum up my opinion
through my subjective point of view ? Look at the politics of dealing with
losers in our society, it's not pretty.

I think that at some point, if there is more competition than cooperation, a
lot of people will get alienated, and that won't always be a good thing. I
mean trade in general feels more like competition than cooperation.

I agree that competition yields benefits thanks since the economy manages
itself, but it also has huge costs. I mean I don't like society for its
competition, I like it for its cooperation. If I'd really like competition,
I'd live as a hermit. And to be honest, if society become less and less
cooperative as a whole, what's the point of it ?

------
reitanqild
Protip: some of us can significantly increase our own throughput if we frame
tasks like competitions.

I'll add a warning about not overdoing this, as someone who has previously
burned out before I am careful not to trick myself too often.

Edit: at least -> out

~~~
JoeAltmaier
And some of us do worse! Everybody overlooks the other statistic from this
experiment: the girls' scores dropped as much as the boys rose, when playing
the 'game'. I'd be more worried about that. Its not about reading, folks.

~~~
animeweedlord
Sounds like a point in favor of going back to gender segegated schools. Let
the girls cooperate, and the boys compete, and theoretically everyone will end
off better for it.

~~~
reitanqild
Used to think this was good, but not sure if this is a good thing in the long
run:

Sooner or later they need to work together anyway.

I'd rather suggest being honest about the fact that statistically speaking
boys and girls are different and both have to respect each other.

------
Zelmor
"The latest study, in France, involved 80 children, 48 boys and 30 girls"

What do i win for spotting errors?

~~~
austinjp
Two who declined to reveal their gender? Two intersex children? Hmm, yeah,
seems unlikely! Email the editor, or there may be an errata email address.

~~~
tfm
Certainly would be a very odd control group!

Journal article just specifies 80 children, of which 48 were boys, so that
would be an arithmetic problem at the WSJ. Lucky they don't deal with numbers
on a regular basis :-/ Corrections email address: wsjcontact@wsj.com

------
mgraczyk
The paper is paywalled so I can only read the abstract, but I am super curious
to learn how the researchers were able to confidently determine the male
students' rationale. The researchers claim that stereotype threat caused the
male students to perform worse on the reading test when the students were not
told the test was a game. How did the researchers figure this out without even
asking the students?

They are so certain of this conclusion that they put it in the title of the
paper. It's amazing how much they could infer from test scores alone. I'm
curious to read the paper to determine how they were able to rule out
competitiveness, confidence, and every other explanation of the results.

~~~
kuschku
Regarding the paywall:

[http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-
hub.cc/science/article/pii/...](http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-
hub.cc/science/article/pii/S0022103116301202)

~~~
131hn
hmmm, so THAT's how it can be used for ! Thank you for the link.

------
wapapaloobop
Wow. And after the study they went to the cafeteria and ate food from
intentionally smaller plates which tricked their brains into believing they
were full -- for about a week.

Psychology is so full of lies. Both the content of the 'studies' and the
studies themselves (all testing and no theory). Also the motivations for the
studies seem to be quite often political. (Presumably this helps for obtaining
public money.)

Here's a little study I propose. Have children, don't send them to school and
notice how they learn to read _without_ teaching _or_ testing. And how much
better adults report they feel when they aren't trying to do these things to
children.

~~~
goda90
Surely you can't mean without teaching. It'd be pretty hard to learn to read
without someone teaching you.

Perhaps you mean an experiment where a child is raised by a blind caregiver
who never talks about reading. Given full access to children's books and other
media but no one to tell them about reading, will they pick it up?

~~~
iopq
In Russian it's much easier. After someone learns the letter shapes, they're
able to read anything. The pronunciation is only ambiguous in terms of stress.

~~~
bzbarsky
I used to say this, until I actually tried teaching someone to read in
Russian. Then I ran into all sorts of weird cases I had never noticed:
"ничего" and similar, various silent letters, etc.

I mean, I agree that it's much simpler than English in terms of going from
written letterforms to pronounced word, but there's still a bunch of weirdness
floating around.

------
wodenokoto
It not only seems that boys do better when told it's a game, girls do worse
when told it's a game.

~~~
tp101
I guess it is a bit too simplistic to conclude that the boys prefer
competitive environments more than girls?

~~~
Zelmor
What matters is raising and parent models, not gender.

~~~
rfrey
At risk of being patronizing, you're probably being downvoted by parents who
figure you don't have kids.

We have spent many years trying to present gender-neutral environments to our
children. Yet at age 3 my son completely ignored the giraffe we were trying to
point out at the zoo, and would only focus on the irrigation pump. That kind
of experience was repeated often with him and my daughters.

One daughter would only build babies out of the meccanno I taught her to use.
OK, they were robot babies and that's awesome, but still. This was before
school, none of them had daycare, and we never had a TV.

These sorts of stories are repeated ad infinitum among parents, usually in the
context of "I can't believe what I used to think..."

~~~
DanBC
> We have spent many years trying to present gender-neutral environments to
> our children.

[...]

> This was before school

My son's favourite colour before he started daycare was pink. That rapidly got
policed out of him by other children and disappointingly by staff in day care.

We persevered - "anyone can like any colour; boys can have pink as their
favourite colour, girls can have blue as their favourite colour" and it sort
of worked, but he's now in his first year at school and the policing from
other children is pretty fierce (although the teachers are much better).

~~~
jrapdx3
Possibly a bit tangential to the discussion, but there's some chance the "pink
vs. blue" convention has a biological basis in respect to male/female color
vision differences.

For example, red-green color blindness affects about 7% of males, and < 0.5%
females. IOW on the whole males are more likely to be able to see and respond
to blue than red or pink.

There's also intriguing if incomplete evidence that among humans with normal
color vision, females are more likely to have finer color discrimination
ability in the yellow-orange-red end of the spectrum compared to their male
counterparts.

Of course, there are going to be a few males "outliers" who have superior
color discrimination ability, so a boy could very well appreciate pink even if
it's not as likely as it would be among girls.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> there's some chance the "pink vs. blue" convention has a biological basis

That makes no sense to me. I'm Greek and in my neck of the woods boys and
girls are not expected to wear specific colours, at least not when I was
growing up.

If you do a search for Greek traditional dress you'll notice that the colours
that dominate are white, black, red and some shade of brown, but they are both
pretty much equally distributed between men and women.

That's empirical and maybe someone somewhere has a proper data'd study that
contradicts me but you really won't find anyone who can point to examples of
pink dominating women's traditional dress in Greece.

I believe the same goes for other cultures. Every time I see the traditional
ornamentation of people from the Amazon, or sub-Saharan Africa for instance,
vivid bright colours seem to dominate for both sexes. If I think of South-East
Asian traditional dress, I get an impression of oranges, yellows, and reds for
the women (who do tend to wear the most colourful stuff).

And there's nowhere a shade of pink to be found.

So I think this blue vs pink thing is definitely a cultural phenomenon and
that it's really just affecting specific parts of the world.

~~~
jrapdx3
> If I think of South-East Asian traditional dress, I get an impression of
> oranges, yellows, and reds for the women (who do tend to wear the most
> colourful stuff).

Thanks for that info, I wasn't aware of those traditions. Indeed yellow to red
is the range of hues that some human females might be able to discriminate
better than males. That is, the idea is females see these colors more
distinctly or are more visually "sensitive" to these colors.

"Pink" is relevant because it's merely red "diluted" with white, that is,
lower saturation of a red hue.

No doubt cultural influences are enormously important re: attributing colors
as symbols of gender identity. I was only writing about the _possible_
genetic/biological factors contributing to selecting which colors are assigned
to males vs. females, and such factors could certainly be quite secondary.

OTOH the info you contributed is intriguing because it appears to support the
hypothesis I was referring to.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Indeed yellow to red is the range of hues that some human females might be
able to discriminate better than males.

That's interesting indeed, because I was wrong about the male/female dichotomy
in Indian traditional dress: yellows and reds (and also fuschias, turquoises
and so on) are worn equally by males and females. Blues and purples are also
very commonly worn by women. The difference is in the patterns and the shape
of the dress, but not in the colours. Apologies for that- like I said I'm
Greek, not Indian.

Additionally, the other cultures I mention have an equal spread of reds,
yellows, and what have you among men and women, so again I don't see how any
genetic thing is at play here.

Finally- All this doesn't say anything about why pink is "girly" only in
specific parts of the world. If pink in particular was a genetic thing then it
would be all over the place, not just in a few countries.

------
eracle
I think that 80 children is too small. The different results could as been
biased that there were different classes, so different (possibly) skill levels
of the students.

~~~
Volt
What sample size would satisfy you?

~~~
moultano
Replication.

~~~
zardgiv
How long have you been saving up this one-word response? Because the parent
was addressing a complaint about small sample size, and basic reading
comprehension would show you that your response was off-topic and did not
logically follow.

------
ttyl0125
A single study with n=80, in a social psych journal, with a trendy soundbite
conclusion? Of course it's not a false positive! The fact that the authors
cite a paper by Jens Foerster is icing on the cake.

~~~
arvinjoar
n=80 is actually not bad, if that's what you're implying. There are a lot of
studies that are n=30 since that's the rule of thumb most follow.

~~~
kelukelugames
The n isn't the bad part. I'm skeptical of all psych studies. Readers
extrapolate too much from simple, controlled experiments.

------
jacobolus
Here’s a link to the paper
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103116...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103116301202)

Decent discussion at reddit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4i75i0/study_shows...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4i75i0/study_shows_boys_outscore_girls_on_reading_tests/)

~~~
coderdude
The article does a great job of it, too:

"Caveat: The study was relatively small and involved children who were still
learning how to read."

Your only take-away isn't supposed to be some editor's choice for the title.

Added after original post:

This is why I don't like the "tl;dr" meme. If people would take more time to
absorb the information related to topics we care about, there wouldn't be this
desire to have a random person on the net distill that knowledge into
something you can consume in 20 seconds or less. It's like getting all of your
political opinions from Comedy Central. You're willingly getting your
information through yet-another filter, but this filter is presented as
unbiased.

Edit: parent comment ninja'd what I was responding to, now this looks super
off topic.

~~~
jacobolus
This discussion is a distracting tangent. Apparently it’s now impossible to
delete comments after they’ve been responded to, so the best I could do was
edit my comment down.

~~~
coderdude
Ah. I see what was going on then. That's bitten me in the past too.

This is a distracting tangent. Just so it's clear, I wasn't responding
negatively to you. You didn't invent what I'm railing against and as far as I
was concerned you were only the messenger of another community's discussion. I
don't think you said anything that needed to be edited down.

------
brainpool
No, just no.

This kind of articles makes me cringe. The fact that the journalist is
obviously aware of the limited scope in the research by stating the caveats
makes it unresponsible publishing.

~~~
jamesrcole
> _The fact that the journalist is obviously aware of the limited scope in the
> research by stating the caveats makes it unresponsible publishing._

I haven't read the article, but isn't it the opposite? Isn't it being
responsible to state the caveats?

~~~
Kristine1975
This. There are always caveats in an experiment. The fact that they are
mentioned in the article is a sign of good reporting by the WSJ.

------
phkahler
I'm not even sure what they tested has anything to do with reading ability.
Other than identifying certain kinds of words in a list, it certainly didn't
require comprehension or understanding. The task was actually more like a game
that involved words than a reading test. So while they may have observed an
effect (still a smallish sample) I don't think it says anything meaningful
about reading ability.

------
Overtonwindow
Boys likes games and I believe boys are naturally competitive. Tell any boy
something is a game, or a competition, and they will treat it as such. It has
nothing to do with race, society, culture, or social upbringing. It's as close
to human nature as one can get.

------
mabbo
Some statistical problems I can see here:

1\. Sample size n=80. You would need a pretty incredible result for a sample
size this small to be significant.

2\. All students from the same region of France. Will this result carry over
to other countries? Other cultures?

3\. The treatment groups were chosen from pre-existing classes. Classes whose
composition may not be random.

It's a cool result, and it should definitely be tried again elsewhere but pop
science articles shouldn't be saying this is anything worth talking any yet.

~~~
iopq
1\. What sample size is necessary for a result of this magnitude to be
significant? Because boys did 34% better when it was framed as a game. Did
they have to double their scores for it to be significant at this sample size?

~~~
mabbo
> boys did 34% better

No, two particular classes of students had their boys do 34%. In reality, the
sample size was 4, not 80. They choose 4 classrooms, and saw these results.

If the researchers switched the classroom treatment selections, are you
certain we would have seen the same result? Or did we really just find out
that boys in those two classrooms happen to be 34% better at reading?

Those classrooms where boys did worse might have done worse for a large number
of other reasons: those schools might be on the 'bad' side of town where less
affluent students tend to go (happens all the time in small towns); that
classroom might have been the one where the school has put all the trouble-
maker kids because they know this particular teacher has the ability to teach
those kinds of kids (or, conversely, that class might be the one that saw the
huge boost when it was a game); the classes who did worse might have had a
classmate dying in hospital that week, and the boys just didn't do very well
under those conditions.

There are too many other completely reasonable answers that aren't related to
the test itself, given the methods used in this study.

How I'd repeat the experiment: pool all the children before randomly selecting
them for treatment groups to avoid bias from their origin classroom.

Edit: And to be clear, I'm not saying the results are incorrect. They might be
onto something amazing here. They just happen to be bad at statistics. Maybe
they should frame it as a game.

~~~
iopq
That's not how you count sample size. If there were four "classes" of one
million boys and girls, does it still make the sample size four?

~~~
mabbo
I think I'm not stating my point very well. Apologies for that.

The problem with saying that n=80 is that it presumes each 'test' (student
evaluated) was chosen for their treatment independently of each other. This is
clearly not true, as entire classes were chosen together. So any variable like
'actually this happens to be the gifted class' can throw the whole study up or
down because that variable was not independent between the students tested.

For example, let's say we did this same test in America, but two classes
happened to be from the wealthiest part of Boston, and two classes were from
the poorest part of Detroit. If, as we randomly selected which class was
assigned each treatment, we happened to hit the 1 in 4 chance that both
wealthy classes were given the 'this is a game' treatment, would we be ready
to say 'the game was the cause of the better test results'? I don't believe
so.

That is why I find this study flawed, and why I disagree with the idea that
n=80. They _may_ be onto something, but they do not have strong statistical
evidence supporting their hypothesis.

~~~
iopq
That's not a sample size, that's called bias. The sample size is still 80, but
it could be potentially a biased sample.

------
Wintamute
Gender discussion is too often framed as male vs. female these days. That's
come from 30+ years of flawed output from the social science echo chamber and
dogmatic denial of human nature. It doesn't matter if boys and girls do better
under different conditions, they shouldn't be expected to perform equally in
this way. What matters is that we understand those unique conditions and help
children thrive whatever their gender. It's great to see research like this,
especially when boys across the western world are struggling in academic
environments that are perhaps favouring ways of learning more suited to girls.

~~~
littletimmy
You mean whatever their sex? Gender is such a strange term.

~~~
hk__2
Sex is the biology; Gender is the identity. Discrimations are based on gender,
not sex. Women are told to wear pink dresses because of how our society see
women (female gender), not because they have a vagina (female sex).

~~~
lr4444lr
> Sex is the biology; Gender is the identity

That's only a very recent distinction, and still a contentious one. According
to Merriam-Webster ([http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/gender](http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/gender)) and the OED
([http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/gend...](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/gender)),
it's far from clear.

~~~
zajd
Based on what the dictionary says? The idea that gender and sex mean two
different things isn't contentious amongst the people who study the phenomenon
academically.

~~~
littletimmy
Well, gender studies is not very scientific. It is more "theorizing", in the
sense of writing obscurantist explanations for everyday phenomenon.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
The difference in gender and sex also comes up in biology and neuroscience...

