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Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher

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Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher

#161

Post by tremon »

WalterSear wrote: post #120
jokoon wrote: post #21

I'm a man and I really dislike competitive aspects of society. I mean if I'm playing a game and it's for fun, I'm okay with it, as long as everyone play to play, not play to win. If I'm literally competing to earn a living, or if it ends up in praising winners and blaming losers, it won't be enjoyable, and I'd rather not play at all. Having humility also means that when you win, you also congratulate losers for playi…

That is, quite literally, what this experiment showed. Boys did well when it was a non-competitive 'game'. Girls didn't do so well when it was an inconsequential 'game'.

Not entirely: boys did better in a non-competitive setting, but girls performed equally in both settings.

Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher

#162

Post by candu »

jokoon wrote: post #21

I'm a man and I really dislike competitive aspects of society. I mean if I'm playing a game and it's for fun, I'm okay with it, as long as everyone play to play, not play to win. If I'm literally competing to earn a living, or if it ends up in praising winners and blaming losers, it won't be enjoyable, and I'd rather not play at all. Having humility also means that when you win, you also congratulate losers for playi…

IMHO, a lot of the ideas about competition in society come from a deep (and sometimes purposeful) misunderstanding of natural selection. [1] is an decent taste of this line of inquiry, and America's early 20th century obsession with eugenics is fascinating in a really, really, really unsettling sort of way.

That said: I disagree that individual competition brings out the worst in people. It can certainly do that - but applied properly, it can also improve attention, creativity, and other indicators of task-based performance.

Also, life/society as we currently understand it does contain aspects of competition, often in subtle ways. A person might decide between multiple potential mates; a prospective employee might negotiate their starting offer; a student might organize a club to help distinguish themselves from thousands of other graduates. Whenever I buy food or clothes or whatever, I need to buy it from someone (not being a diehard homesteader), so there are multiple vendors competing for my attention and custom. We might be able to do without some of this, but a lot of it is driven by limits on resources (material, population, etc.)

(You might also be interested in the New Games Movement, one of the many weird outcroppings of hippie-era counterculture: they sought to build a corpus of games that highlighted cooperation over competition. The movement died a somewhat predictable death, but its games live on - if you've ever played any of the circle games popular with camps, youth groups, and teachers, you've probably played something that has its roots in the New Games Movement.)

(Last diversion: game-theoretic dilemmas are also really interesting, since most of them revolve around cases in which individual optimal strategies lead to worse overall strategies. See also: bystander effect / volunteer dilemma, tragedy of the commons.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest

Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher

#163

Post by WalterSear »

tremon wrote: post #161
WalterSear wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, quite literally, what this experiment showed. Boys did well when it was a non-competitive 'game'. Girls didn't do so well when it was an inconsequential 'game'.

Not entirely: boys did better in a non-competitive setting, but girls performed equally in both settings.

>In classes given reading evaluations, boys made an average of 33.3 correct answers compared with 43.3 by the girls. But when the tests were framed as animal games, boys’ average scores were significantly higher: 44.7 compared with 38.3 for the girls.

Girls performed worse in the non-competitive setting.

Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher

#164

Post by WalterSear »

hasenj wrote: post #94

This is completely anecdotal, but when I was back in the Middle East, tests essentially were games/competitions. Everyone knew everyone else's scores and they were often announced out loud as the results are handed back. Students who consistently get high scores are looked up to and respected. Your academic performance contributed significantly to your social standing in the classroom. Then I came to Canada and this…

You describe the exact opposite of a game - you describe a competition.

Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher

#165

Post by tremon »

WalterSear wrote: post #163
tremon wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not entirely: boys did better in a non-competitive setting, but girls performed equally in both settings.

>In classes given reading evaluations, boys made an average of 33.3 correct answers compared with 43.3 by the girls. But when the tests were framed as animal games, boys’ average scores were significantly higher: 44.7 compared with 38.3 for the girls. Girls performed worse in the non-competitive setting.

Ah, I stand corrected. I had understood the differences with the girls were insignificant, but it doesn't appear to be.

Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher

#166

Post by JoeAltmaier »

animeweedlord wrote: post #152
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And some of us do worse! Everybody overlooks the other statistic from this experiment: the girls' scores dropped as much as the boys rose, when playing the 'game'. I'd be more worried about that. Its not about reading, folks.

Sounds like a point in favor of going back to gender segegated schools. Let the girls cooperate, and the boys compete, and theoretically everyone will end off better for it.

Sure, its true today that gender-separated schools have better outcomes. But it may not be necessary to go to that extreme for everybody.

Anway, competition is normal in the working world (at least in America). So there's a problem regardless of school effects.

Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher

#167

Post by jrapdx3 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #143
jrapdx3 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly a bit tangential to the discussion, but there's some chance the "pink vs. blue" convention has a biological basis in respect to male/female color vision differences. For example, red-green color blindness affects about 7% of males, and There's also intriguing if incomplete evidence that among humans with normal color vision, females are more likely to have finer color discrimination ability in the yellow-ora…

>> there's some chance the "pink vs. blue" convention has a biological basis That makes no sense to me. I'm Greek and in my neck of the woods boys and girls are not expected to wear specific colours, at least not when I was growing up. If you do a search for Greek traditional dress you'll notice that the colours that dominate are white, black, red and some shade of brown, but they are both pretty much equally distrib…

> If I think of South-East Asian traditional dress, I get an impression of oranges, yellows, and reds for the women (who do tend to wear the most colourful stuff).

Thanks for that info, I wasn't aware of those traditions. Indeed yellow to red is the range of hues that some human females might be able to discriminate better than males. That is, the idea is females see these colors more distinctly or are more visually "sensitive" to these colors.

"Pink" is relevant because it's merely red "diluted" with white, that is, lower saturation of a red hue.

No doubt cultural influences are enormously important re: attributing colors as symbols of gender identity. I was only writing about the possible genetic/biological factors contributing to selecting which colors are assigned to males vs. females, and such factors could certainly be quite secondary.

OTOH the info you contributed is intriguing because it appears to support the hypothesis I was referring to.

Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher

#168

Post by reitanqild »

animeweedlord wrote: post #152
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And some of us do worse! Everybody overlooks the other statistic from this experiment: the girls' scores dropped as much as the boys rose, when playing the 'game'. I'd be more worried about that. Its not about reading, folks.

Sounds like a point in favor of going back to gender segegated schools. Let the girls cooperate, and the boys compete, and theoretically everyone will end off better for it.

Used to think this was good, but not sure if this is a good thing in the long run:

Sooner or later they need to work together anyway.

I'd rather suggest being honest about the fact that statistically speaking boys and girls are different and both have to respect each other.

Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher

#169

Post by Dylan16807 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #105
reitanqild wrote: post #22

Protip: some of us can significantly increase our own throughput if we frame tasks like competitions. I'll add a warning about not overdoing this, as someone who has previously burned out before I am careful not to trick myself too often. Edit: at least -> out

And some of us do worse! Everybody overlooks the other statistic from this experiment: the girls' scores dropped as much as the boys rose, when playing the 'game'. I'd be more worried about that. Its not about reading, folks.

The girls' scores dropped half as much as the boys' rose.

Similar 'good' numbers for both, much worse 'bad' numbers for boys.

Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher

#170

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

jrapdx3 wrote: post #167
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> there's some chance the "pink vs. blue" convention has a biological basis That makes no sense to me. I'm Greek and in my neck of the woods boys and girls are not expected to wear specific colours, at least not when I was growing up. If you do a search for Greek traditional dress you'll notice that the colours that dominate are white, black, red and some shade of brown, but they are both pretty much equally distrib…

> If I think of South-East Asian traditional dress, I get an impression of oranges, yellows, and reds for the women (who do tend to wear the most colourful stuff). Thanks for that info, I wasn't aware of those traditions. Indeed yellow to red is the range of hues that some human females might be able to discriminate better than males. That is, the idea is females see these colors more distinctly or are more visually…

>> Indeed yellow to red is the range of hues that some human females might be able to discriminate better than males.

That's interesting indeed, because I was wrong about the male/female dichotomy in Indian traditional dress: yellows and reds (and also fuschias, turquoises and so on) are worn equally by males and females. Blues and purples are also very commonly worn by women. The difference is in the patterns and the shape of the dress, but not in the colours. Apologies for that- like I said I'm Greek, not Indian.

Additionally, the other cultures I mention have an equal spread of reds, yellows, and what have you among men and women, so again I don't see how any genetic thing is at play here.

Finally- All this doesn't say anything about why pink is "girly" only in specific parts of the world. If pink in particular was a genetic thing then it would be all over the place, not just in a few countries.

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