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Who does better in school: boys or girls? Earlier in
the decade much was written about the disadvantages that girls
faced in the classroom. More recently it has been suggested that,
in fact, it is the boys who are getting short-changed.
Importantly, we find no conclusive evidence in the research that
suggests that boys and girls are destined to achieve at different
levels in any aspect of the academic program. Further, the
provincial Ministry of Education and the British Columbia
Teachers' Federation both assert that in British Columbia's
public schools the individual characteristics of
students--including, presumably, their gender--are taken into
account by teachers and by counsellors. So, by nature and by
policy, boys and girls should achieve the same levels of academic
success. But do they?
To answer this question, we first analyzed student performance
across the province in the eight most popular Grade-12 academic
courses. The results show that girls and boys do not, on average,
fair equally well in our secondary schools. However, an important
question remains: Are girls actually learning more or are
school-based assessments systematically biased against
boys?
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