Gender and Academic Achievement

Hackett, G., Betz, N. E., Casas, J. M., & Rocha-Singh, I. A. (1992). Gender, ethnicity, and social cognitive factors predicting the academic achievement of students in engineering. Journal of counseling Psychology, 39(4), 527.

Hacket, Betz, Casas, and Rocha (1992) carried out their research to investigate the relationship between occupational and academic self-efficacy, vocational interests, outcome expectations, academic ability, and the academic achievement of men and women at university level engineering and science education. The study considered 197 respondents from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Significant to the topic of gender and academic achievement is that the study found very few gender differences. Women showed high school GPAs better than men, while no significant differences were found in SAT scores, College GPAs, or self-efficacy expectations. Interestingly, this study verifies the results of previous researches in terms of gender differences in academic achievement and hence is in agreement with the previous findings.

Hyde, J. S., Fennema, E., & Lamon, S. J. (1990). Gender differences in mathematics performance: a meta-analysis. Psychological bulletin, 107(2), 139.

Hyde, Fennema, and Lamon (1990) considered one hundred research publications on gender differences in mathematic performance published between 1963 and 1988. This meta-analytic review also verifies the findings of the study discussed above. The results indicated negligible difference between males and females in mathematics performance. Similarly, no differences based on gender were observed in problem solving in elementary and middle school level. The review established that majority of the differences although very slight, have been favoring females and these differences grow larger only among selected samples. The study is very significant to provide links to many related papers as well as in terms of its verification of the previous sources.