One of the research says
that Friends' School Achievement Influences High School Girls' Interest In Math
Girls in high school take as many
math courses as boys, influenced by close friends and peers who are doing well
in school. More than boys, girls look to their close friends when they make
important decisions, such as whether to take math and what math classes to
take, confirming how significant peers are during adolescence.
Those are the findings of a new
study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, the
University of Pennsylvania, and Michigan State University. The study is
published in the January/February 2008 issue of the journal Child Development.
Researchers looked at 6,547
high-school girls and boys who had a variety of relationships with peers and
tracked the math courses they took. All of the students had taken part in the
National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health from 1995 to 2001.
The researchers found that, contrary
to popular opinion but in line with recent government findings, girls have
caught up with boys in terms of the math courses they take in high school. One
reason this is so, they found, is the kinds of friends and peers they have in
high school. All teens--girls as well as boys--with close friends and other
peers who made good grades took more higher-level math than other teens,
according to the study. But the connection between these relationships and the
math classes was stronger for girls than for boys.
In the end, social factors meant
more for girls than for boys in decisions about math coursework, especially
when enrollment in math classes was optional and when girls were doing well in
school.
"These findings stress the need
to turn attention away from documenting gender differences in math
course-taking in high school and toward looking at the reasons why girls and
boys take different paths to the same outcomes," according to Robert
Crosnoe, associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin
and the study's lead author. "In other words, just because girls and boys
might have the same academic standing at the end of high school does not mean
that they got there in the same way."
The study was funded, in part, by
the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National
Science Foundation.
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