Who knew that turning around the math/science gender gap could be so easy? The hand-held electronic devices known as clickers, it turns out, are the key. This article in Science Daily has the scoop:

Ohio State University students who used the devices to answer multiple-choice questions during physics lectures earned final examination scores that were around 10 percent higher - the equivalent of a full-letter grade — than students who didn’t.

The clickers also appear to level the playing field between male and female students. In clicker classes, male and female students performed equally well. In the traditional, non-clicker classes, male students outperformed female students.

Skeptical? Then try another idea laid out in Eduwonkette.  This posting examines the research behind “stereotype threat”:

 Can asking women to simply bubble in their gender before a test hurt their performance on math tests? Conversely, does mentioning that a math test is gender-neutral boost women’s achievement? More than a decade of research on “stereotype threat” suggests that the answer to these questions is yes.

Still skeptical? Here’s yet another take on the male/female math divide: It may not exist, or at least it may be far smaller than imagined. I know, you’re thinking of the SATs where men outscore women in math. But on those tests, far more poor and minority women than men take the exam, which skews the results. And then there’s NAEP, which shows boys (slightly) outscoring girls in math (while girls whomp them in reading scores).

I”m still trying to get a good answer on the best barometer of the gender gap, NAEP, which is a sampling test, versus state tests, where every child gets tested. I’m betting on the latter, and the latter, at least in the states I’ve been looking at, show girls slightly ahead of boys in math and far ahead in reading. My last post on that.

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