It's a fact.....

[Sheryl]

Girls are quicker than boys.

A new study of 8,000 people age 2 to 90 found females handle timed tasks more quickly than males.

The difference is most pronounced among pre-teens and teenagers.



"If you look at the ability of someone to perform well in a timed situation, females have a big advantage," said Stephen Camarata of Vanderbilt University.



The study did not reveal significant overall intelligence difference by gender, however.



"To truly understand a person's overall ability, it is important to also look at performance in un-timed situations," Camarata said. He thinks educators should pay attention to the results at a time when girls are generally outperforming boys in school.



"Consider that many classroom activities, including testing, are directly or indirectly related to processing speed," Camarata and colleague Richard Woodcock write in the May-June issue of the journal Intelligence. "The higher performance in females may contribute to a classroom culture that favors females, not because of teacher bias but because of inherent differences in sex processing speed."



The newly revealed gender gap in processing speed is not related to things like reaction time while playing a video game. "It's the ability to effectively, efficiently and accurately complete work that is of moderate difficulty," Camarata said.



Children in kindergarten and younger process tasks at similar speeds. The difference becomes pronounced in elementary school. On the portions of standardized tests that reflected processing speed, and among those age 14-18 in the study sample, girls scored an average of 105.5 whereas boys scored 97.4.



The study also found that boys consistently outperformed girls in identifying objects, knowing antonyms and synonyms, and completing verbal analogies. The researchers say that debunks the popular notion that girls develop all communication skills earlier than boys.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060425/ ... N5bmNhdA--

[AussiePam]

I went and looked at the reference too, Sheryl. Very interesting article. I'd always thought that the girls outperforming boys in high school had more to do with the earlier onset of maturity in girls. And things evened up or went the other way by tertiary level education. I know that another factor sometimes put forward is the changing way these assessments are now made. Once curricula may have been skewed more in favour of what were considered boy subjects, now some say curricular are skewed more the other way - less chemistry more science in our world. There's obviously a lot of conflicting research.

Anecdotal stuff is of course only that. I've got kids of both sexes. My son is extremely bright and quite an intellectual, but nearly didn't make it to uni at all - he was unfocussed at high school and college, and an underachiever, scraped in to the film and television school not on grades but on some videos he'd made and some music he'd written. He then came good. He's 23 now and in London with his own film company. The teachers at the school my son attended (with his sisters) thought this was a fairly normal scenario.

[chrisb84uk]

Very interesting article indeed, and at least from when I was at school quite true. It did always seem that the girls would outperform the boys at a lot of things. Whenever they were choosing prefects, then most would be girls, because of their excellent work in class, and everytime you looked into a detention room full of people who hadn't done their work, then the vast majority were all boys. However I know for a fact that most of those guys went on and did well at uni, as did the girls, so you really can't judge someone's potential just based on those early years as a teenager.

[Sheryl]

My best friend's little girl is 2 days older than my son. My son crawled, and rolled over first. But that's it. She matured faster than my son and it was amazing to watch.