http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/07/25/girls-and-boys-are-equally-good-at-math-study-finds/ 80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles covering the day\'s most compelling topics. Sat, 22 Nov 2008 22:10:36 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.1 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/07/25/girls-and-boys-are-equally-good-at-math-study-finds/#comment-1857 jzimba Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:11:37 +0000 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/07/25/girls-and-boys-are-equally-good-at-math-study-finds/#comment-1857 Can you please remove the quotation from the Los Angeles Times? It is not reasonable to say (as the LA Times said) that the study "undermines the assumption ... that boys are more likely than girls to be math geniuses." Look at the data on the first page of the published paper. For white students in the top 5%, girls were outnumbered by boys 60-40; and that same table also says that among the top 1% of white students, boys outnumber girls by a factor of 2-to-1. These results do, in fact, argue that "math geniuses" are more likely to be boys - even if the phrasing of the study itself avoids saying this outright. Honestly, this whole aspect of the discussion detracts from the more important headline - the math gap is no more - but how can you stand having this misinterpretation here in print? Can you please remove the quotation from the Los Angeles Times? It is not reasonable to say (as the LA Times said) that the study “undermines the assumption … that boys are more likely than girls to be math geniuses.” Look at the data on the first page of the published paper. For white students in the top 5%, girls were outnumbered by boys 60-40; and that same table also says that among the top 1% of white students, boys outnumber girls by a factor of 2-to-1. These results do, in fact, argue that “math geniuses” are more likely to be boys - even if the phrasing of the study itself avoids saying this outright. Honestly, this whole aspect of the discussion detracts from the more important headline - the math gap is no more - but how can you stand having this misinterpretation here in print?

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