Gender grading bias in junior high school mathematics

ABSTRACT

Admission to high school in Sweden is based on the final grades from junior high. This article compares students’ final mathematics grade with new data from a high school introductory test score in mathematics. Both the grades and the test are based on the same syllabus, but teachers enjoy great discretion when deciding grades. The results show a substantial grading difference, consistent with grading bias against boys.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• grading bias
• mathematics
• educational economics

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I20
• I28
• J16

Acknowledgments

We thank the Education department and Sweco for data and the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation for financial support. We recognize initial work on this paper by Palmgren and Berg under the supervision of Tyrefors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ For example, see Lavy (2008), Hinnerich, Höglin, and Johannesson (2011), Hinnerich and Vlachos (2013), Lindahl (2007)

² On the one hand, we expect our results to be generalizable to the rest of Sweden as the teacher’s education, the syllabus, etc. are decided on by the national government and governmental bodies. On the other hand, we acknowledge that gender bias stems from teachers and teachers may be different with respect to preferences and location. It seems not unreasonable to think that teachers located in Stockholm differ as it is the capital with prominent universities and relatively high salaries. Unfortunately, due to lack of register data of teachers in Sweden, there is not even a possibility to evaluate the generalizability using observable characteristics.

³ The participation drop in 2013 for students in public schools was due to that the Education department did not foresee that some schools would abstain from participating when not monitored. Increased monitoring was introduced again in 2014. The participation rate drop in 2016 and 2017 for voucher schools is due to that the schools belonging to the business group ‘AcadeMedia’ stopped participating.

⁴ Data upon request.

⁵ A discussion is found in Lavy (2008).

⁶ Cooper et al. (1996) review the effects of summer vacation loss on standardized achievement test scores. Although there is a documented summer loss in overall math, it appears unrelated to gender.

⁷ Calculation is available upon request.

⁸ There are missing data on school characteristics explaining why for every characteristics added, the number of observation drops.

⁹ Available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific funding from anywhere.