Performance in Statistics : An International Perspective on Gender Differences

The purpose of this paper is to investigate gender differences in achievement in statistics, making use of the Population A data of the Second International Mathematics Study (SIMS) conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement P A ) . In IEA terms, Population A means all the students in the grade in which most students attain the age of 13.0 to 13.1 1 years by the middle of the school year. The SIMS study used a very large random sample stratified by region and school type in each of the 20 participating "countries", which were in effect 20 different educational systems rather than countries. For example, Canada is represented by two educational systems, British Columbia and Ontario; Belgium by two systems, one Flemish and the other French. A test consisting of 180 multiple-choice items covering five content topics (Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Statistics and Measurement) was administered to the students. Out of these 180 items, 18 were designed to measure achievement in statistics. National centres were asked to indicate the importance accorded within their own country curriculum to each of the nine categories of the statistics test. Their responses indicated that the first four categories were judged to be important (collection, organisation, representation and interpretation of data), while the remaining five were judged less important (combinatorics, sample spaces, independent, mutually exclusive and complementary events). The 18 items on the statistics test were distributed as follows: