Word: benbow
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Johns Hopkins University researchers tried to settle the eternal nature/ nurture debate. Julian Stanley - who is well respected for his work with precocious math students of both sexes - and Camilla Benbow had tested 10,000 talented seventh-and eighth-graders between 1972 and 1979. Using the Scholastic Aptitude Test, in which math questions are meant to measure ability rather than knowledge, they discovered distinct sex differences. While the verbal abilities of the males and females hardly differed, twice as many boys as girls scored over 500 (on a scale of 200 to 800) on mathematical ability; at the 700 level...
...Benbow and Stanley's findings, which were published in Science, disturbed some men and not a few women. Now there is comfort for those people in a new study from the University of Chicago that suggests math is not, after all, a natural male domain. With Researcher Sharon Senk, Professor Zalman Usiskin, a specialist in high school mathematics curriculums and an author of several math texts, studied 1,366 tenth-graders. They were selected from geometry classes and tested on their ability to solve geometry proofs, a subject requiring both abstract reasoning and spatial ability. Says Usiskin...
...results of their study will be presented at this week's meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City. In a draft that has already been circulated, the Chicago researchers decided to take a few swipes at the recent Johns Hopkins findings. They argued that Benbow and Stanley had measured performance, not ability. Says Usiskin: "To assume that the SAT has no connection with experience is poppycock." Replies Stanley, who now has 50,000 subjects to bolster his conclusion: "People are so eager not to believe that there is a difference in mathematical reasoning ability between...
...Benbow and Stanley study has drawn much criticism both for its interpretation and its methods. Both psychologists and mathematicians claim that too little is known about the development of mathematical ability during childhood to support the assertion of genetic differences between males and females. Others say that the relative performances on the SATs between boys and girls might reflect different test-taking strategies...
Ronald G. Slaby, associate professor of Education, said yesterday that although he was not familiar with the Benbow and Stanly study, he considered it controversial because of its possible implications for educational policy. He cited alternative explanations--differences in the development of sex roles--to account for the apparent disparity in performance among boys and girls. He said that boys and girls in elementary school might receive different sorts of feedback in classroom situations that could lead to alternate studying strategies and interests. "Ability differences might develop out of children's choices to puruse the subject or not," he added...