Sex differences in academic achievement depending on the professional self-determination of schoolchildren

Abstract

Gender differences in academic achievements (results of the Unified State Examination (USE) in 2010–2012) are analyzed in the study. The sample includes 11160 pairs of twins and is representative to Russian Federation twin population of these age cohorts. The data were analyzed in the entire sample and in the subgroups based on professional self-determination of students. Differences in mean values and variances and weighted effect size (d) (difference in average scores between boys and girls divided by boys and girls group averaged standard deviation) are evaluated in order to determine sex differences. Key findings: significant gender differences are found in academic performance in the following school disciplines: mathematics, Russian language, foreign language (English), history, literature, biology, social science; there are no differences between boys’ and girls’ successfulness in doing USE tasks in physics, chemistry, geography and applied computer science. In cases of significant differences in academic achievement within the discipline, girls pass the USE more successfully except for one school discipline – mathematics. Boys do better than girls in mathematics according to the analysis of the entire sample data and lag behind girls in the subgroup of potential prospective students of technical universities.