Girls do better than boys at school because

they’re morning people, study suggests

This year, some 94,000 more girls than boys applied to British universities, but would
that change if school started in the afternoon?

Researchers in California may have identified one reason why girls tend to do better
than boys at school: because they’re born to be early birds.

The educational gender gap is a source of concern across the developed world. In
the US, 57 per cent of undergraduate bachelor’s degrees go to women. In the UK,
girls do significantly better at GCSE and are vastly more likely to go on to university
than boys. This year, some 94,000 more girls than boys applied to British universities
via Ucas.

According to a recent paper by two economists from the University of California at

Davis, girls’ disproportionate educational achievements may have something to do
with the timing of the school day. Multiple sleep studies have found that boys are
built to wake up later than girls, who also cope better with sleep deprivation.

In what is probably the first analysis of the relationship between gender sleep cycle
differences and the educational performance gap, UC Davis researchers Lester
Lusher and Vasil Yesenov write: “Given the widespread sentiment that overall
students are not receiving enough sleep, these studies suggest that early school
start times could be especially detrimental to boys.”

The study is based on data from an unusual experiment carried out between 2008
and 2014 in one Eastern European school district, where administrators decided to
try starting school in the afternoons. Students would begin school at 7.30am for a
month, and then at 1.30pm for the following month, alternating monthly from
morning to afternoon throughout the school year.

Everything else about the school experience remained constant, such as the
ordering of classes and the teachers who taught them. Lusher and Yesenov
analysed more than 240,000 grades given to middle and high school students for
assignments during that time and found that boys showed significant improvement
when classes began in the afternoon.

While girls remained by far the better students, boys closed the grades gap by up to
16 per cent in the afternoon. The authors’ explanation? “Sleep studies suggest that
boys have longer circadian periods, or ‘body clocks’, predisposing them to later
bedtimes and morning wake-up times. Consequently, girls show a stronger
inclination for activity earlier in the day than boys.”

In other words, girls are more likely to be morning people. Whether that means
school ought to start in the afternoon is another matter.
 Massive Study Finds Girls Are Much Better Than Boys
at Working Together to Solve Problems
Girls are much better than boys at working together to solve problems, according
to a new study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD).The forum of democratic nations came to its conclusion after testing
125,000 15-year-olds in 52 regions around the world -- and, as noted in the study's
findings, girls did not perform just slightly better, but, rather, dramatically better: In
every single region in which the tests were run, girls scored higher than boys,
averaging scores that reflected performance expected after about a half-year
more of schooling than their male counterparts (despite having, in actuality, the
same levels of education). Furthermore, across OECD countries, girls were found to
be 1.6 times more likely than boys to be top performers in collaborative problem
solving, while boys were found to be 1.6 times more likely than girls to be low
achievers.

The OECD study -- believed to be the first of its kind -- examined how well students
work together as a group, their attitudes toward collaboration, and the influence of
factors such as gender, afterschool activities, and social backgrounds. Interestingly,
the test revealed no significant difference between the performance of rich and
poor students, or between immigrant and nonimmigrant students. But students'
exposure to various forms of diversity did seem to improve collaboration skills. For
example, in some countries, students without an immigrant background performed
better in the collaboration-specific aspects of the test when they attended schools
with a larger proportion of immigrant students than when they attended
educational facilities with more homogeneous nonimmigrant populations

As one would expect, students who had stronger reading and math skills were
found to be better at collaborative problem-solving than their less gifted peers.
Students from top-performing countries in those areas of education -- for example,
Japan, Korea, Singapore, Estonia, Finland, and Canada -- also performed higher
than average on the collaborative problem-solving test.

Interestingly, however, students in the United States and several other nations
performed better in collaborative problem-solving than one might expect given the
students' earlier scores in science, reading, and mathematics; students in the
Chinese provinces who took part in the test (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and
Guangdong), on the other hand, performed worse than would be expected given
their prior results.

The differences between boys and girls were largest in Australia, Finland, Latvia,
New Zealand, and Sweden, where the girls averaged a lead over boys’ equivalent
to more than eight months of schooling. The gap was narrowest -- at about two
months' difference -- in Colombia, Costa Rica, and Peru. Considering how many
projects in the world of science and technology involve collaborative problem-
solving, this study should provide further reason to encourage girls to pursue STEM
educations, and, hopefully, also serve as a powerful message to those who
continue to preach sexist ideas about the lack of suitability of women for technical
jobs.