In our Study of the Day feature series, we highlight a research publication related to a John Templeton Foundation-supported project, connecting the fascinating and unique research we fund to important conversations happening around the world.

Since at least the mid-2000s, researchers have noted that in North America, girls were consistently averaging better grades than boys in elementary, middle, and high schools — even though achievement and IQ tests suggested that girls and boys had roughly equal abilities. One explanation for this discrepancy was that the tests were systematically underestimating girls’ intelligence, but in a 2006 paper, psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman demonstrated that another factor might also be at work: self-discipline. The girls they studied scored higher on measures of self-discipline, which turned out to be a better predictor of grades than intelligence assessments alone.

Supportive skills like self-discipline make a big difference in how individuals learn, and in explaining many educational outcome differences between boys and girls. But could these skills become a liability under certain conditions?

A recent paper by psychologists Mia Radovanovic, Ece Yucer, and Jessica  Sommerville, all of the University of Toronto, investigates whether an attribute that would help girls excel in many educational scenarios might turn against them when they are taught badly.

Princesses and frogs

In a series of experiments on North American children aged 7–10, the authors had a teacher figure give students seemingly plausible but incorrect instructions for solving a game-based challenge. They then observed how long the children persisted in using the incorrect advice before abandoning it to explore other methods to solve the game. In the first version of the experiments, in which students played a video game where they navigated a frog character to find a trophy, the researchers found that while girls and boys tested the initial taught solution at equal rates, the girls tended to persist with the taught strategy, while the boys quickly divested and began their own explorations. This divergence held even when the researchers controlled for prior experience playing video games.

To control for whether the initial experiment might have been oversuited to boys’ cultural preferences or comfort zones, the researchers then developed a new version of the experiment, one that would be as stereotypically girly as possible:

The game was shaped like a dollhouse and contained five locked boxes. … The exterior of the dollhouse was painted in lilac and pink, with small accents such as flowers and butterflies. In addition, two Barbie dolls were placed in the house to emphasize that children were “opening the doors for the dolls.”

Even with a very different presentation, the result of the final experiment was the same: girls persisted based on the instruction, while boys more quickly divested to try their own strategies.

Power to the people-pleasers

Studies in older children have shown that girls tend to exceed boys in people-pleasing — the tendency to disregard their own preferences in favor of others’. Radovanovic et al. suspected that the girls in their study’s loyalty to their teachers’ incorrect strategies might be because they were already being socialized towards people-pleasing behavior. To begin exploring this, the researchers adapted an existing measure of sociotropy (excessive concern for maintaining positive relationships) as a proxy for people-pleasing. They found that, among the the participants in the Barbie-house study, the girls indeed scored higher than the boys for sociotropy were more likely to generalize the incorrect strategies they had learned to other scenarios, although sociotropy alone wasn’t enough to explain all the differences between girls’ and boys’ performance in the tasks. It also remains an open question whether the gender variance would also appear in cultural contexts outside of North America — for instance in places where educational systems put a greater emphasis on systemic instruction and respect for the teacher’s authority. 

That said, the negative outcomes in the tests suggest a brighter flipside: that girls’ loyalty to their teachers’ suggestions — perhaps in combination with self-discipline and other virtues — sets them up well to learn and deploy effective strategies from effective teachers.

Still Curious?

Read “Girls Persist More but Divest Less From Ineffective Teaching Than Boys”

Nate Barksdale writes about the intersection of science, history, philosophy, faith and popular culture. He was editor of the magazine re:generation quarterly and is a frequent contributor to History.com.

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