Girls' Self-Discipline Gives Edge in Grades: Study Finds

The research titled Self-Discipline Gives Girls the Edge: Gender in Self-Discipline, Grades, and Achievement Test Scores by Duckworth and Seligman (2006) point out that girls earn higher grades than boys in all the significant subject even though they do not outperform boys in IQ or achievement tests. The authors provide an alternative explanation that girls are more self-disciplined, which is more relevant to the grades on the report cards than to aptitude tests. According to Duckworth and Seligman (2006), the words self-discipline and self-control are used interchangeably as both represent the ability to suppress prepotent responses to achieve higher goals. The authors then conducted two research experiments to assert whether their explanation is accurate. The research included the collection of parent and teacher questionnaires, self-reports, school attendance, report card grades, and standardized achievement test scores from school records.

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Discussion

The results from both experiments support that the adolescent girls earned grades that are substantially higher as compared to their male classmates. Furthermore, the results also indicated that the overall GPA was more than twice that of the achievement test scores. As a result, Duckworth and Seligman (2006) noted that the achievement scores underpredicted the GPAs of girls and overpredicted the GPAs of boys. Moreover, the SAT scores also underpredicted the GPAs of first-year college students. The combined self-discipline scores facilitated the relationship between gender and overall GPA. Therefore, the experiments validated that the advantage of girls in terms of self-discipline makes a more significant difference in the report card grades as compared to the achievement in the test scores.

The second test incorporated an IQ test that would help to facilitate the relationships among self-discipline, gender, aptitude and achievement tests, and report card grades. This test aimed to assert that self-discipline helps girls less in terms of achievement and intellectual aptitude tests.

Conclusion

This topic is of great interest to me as it highlights the difference in test results in regards to gender difference. The article points out the various suggestions that have been developed to facilitate this difference. Furthermore, the study also points out that the previous explanations favoring boys increases with the increased standardization of the texts. I also think that it would be fascinating to identify other factors that may contribute to why girls earn higher grades in their report cards than the boys while scoring lower in intellectual aptitude and achievement tests. Furthermore, I think that the research should look into whether gender differences in terms of self-discipline continue into adulthood since more men than women earn medical, law, and other first-professional degrees. Overall, I believe that the authors of this study did an excellent job as the factors they used made sense, and the article was easily understandable. The authors also highlighted their limitations when conducting their research, which is good as it increases the reliability of the article. Overall, I enjoyed the article as it provided insight into the advantage of self-discipline in grade performance.

Reference

Duckworth, A. L., & Seligman, M. E. (2006). Self-discipline gives girls the edge: Gender in self-discipline, grades, and achievement test scores. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(1), 198-208. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.98.1.198