Affiliation:
1. Département de didactique Université du Québec à Montréal Montreal Canada
2. Department of Psychology City University of New York New York New York USA
3. Department of Applied Psychology New York University New York New York USA
4. Département de didactique des langues Université du Québec à Montréal Montréal Canada
Abstract
AbstractThere is growing concern about boys' lagging performance in school, not only in language arts, where the gap is particularly pronounced, but also in mathematics. Stereotypes associating one gender with language arts or with mathematics are likely to contribute to these gaps. Such stereotypes can translate into explicit beliefs such as the extent to which students are aware of societal stereotypes or the extent to which they personally believe stereotypes to be true, but also indirectly into performance following a stereotype threat manipulation. However, few studies have considered these multiple stereotype expressions in both mathematics and language arts to examine their importance in predicting boys' and girls' actual grades in school. To fill this gap, two complementary studies examined high school boys' and girls' awareness and endorsement of stereotypes about both language arts (n = 299) and mathematics (n = 243), as well as whether stereotype threat impaired boys' performance on a spelling test. Although the effect of stereotype threat was not significant overall, our results showed that students were aware of and endorsed strong stereotypes advantaging girls in language arts. In mathematics, students endorsed counter‐traditional stereotypes slightly advantaging girls. Our results also showed that these multiple expressions of stereotypes related to students' grades. In doing so, our work provides insights regarding possible targets for interventions to reduce gender gaps disadvantaging boys in school.