Corky Scott wrote in message . ..

Not sure when this study was completed Bob, and I'm also not sure what
age group the study you reference covers, but the information I just
saw two days ago cited just the opposite. Girls were testing MUCH
higher than boys in elementary school.

I've heard from reliable sources that the deck has been stacked against
little boys in grammar school since the '80s. This "information" you
saw two days ago supposedly citing just the opposite would immediately
come under suspicion to me, considering the politics of the last
couple of decades especially.

Sometimes the difference
carries into high school and college, but at some point hormones and
interest in the opposite sex sort of cuts off the competition. As
elementary school girls, boys were not an issue, studying was. But
when they hit puberty, suddenly girls do not want to do better than
boys in class, and the old "no one likes a smarty pants" issue,
believe it or not, seems to still prevail.

That wasn't the attitude when/where I attended high school (1970s). When I
was an undergrad physics major, I, like all physics majors, had to
take lots of upper-level mathematics courses in addition to all
the physics coursework. There were very, very few female physics
majors, even though they were already being encouraged to go into
the sciences at that time. And the few I encountered were never
the top drawer students in the class. However, there were larger
numbers of females in some of the math courses, and some of them were
good students. I remember one in particular who had a real flair for
the proofs that are such a big part of the branch of math called linear
algebra. She aced that senior-level course. I remember another
sharp girl in my one-variable integral calculus class that came early
in my college years. So, I speak from real experience on this.
But I believe that, generally, the average male student in those
math courses was better than the average female.

Another observation I made was that women generally have a much harder
time *applying* what they've learned in class to "real world" applications.

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