Teachers tend to give girls higher grades than boys because they find them to be better behaved, neater and easier to teach, a study suggests.
Researchers from the University of Trento in Italy compared the marks achieved by pupils in “blindly evaluated” tests with those given out by teachers based on their personal assessments of pupils’ progress.
They found that the teachers in the study helped to create and widen a “gender grade gap” by giving girls higher grades than boys even when they had “identical competence” in a subject.
This was particularly true in mathematics, according to the research, published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education. The study’s authors suggested that the results might in part be explained by the teachers’
