Have Changes in the SAT Affected Women's Mathematics performance?

How has the SAT changed in content and format? Why was it changed? How have changes to the mathematics test affected men's and women's performance?     

Fables: The Tortoise? The Hare? The Mathematically Underachieving Male?

This article reports on some results from an interview-based study with 70 practising research mathematicians, 35 women and 35 men, at universities in England, Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland. The aim of the study was to explore epistemologies of these mathematicians and any impact of them on how they conducted their professional lives. In this article, three conjectures are examined. The first was that career experiences would differ between females and males, as they indeed did. The second was that women would be differently distributed to men within the disciplinary areas, which was not the case. The third was that gender would have no effect on how these mathematicians understood and practised their discipline, which was the case. In the concluding section of the article, the findings are related to the learning of mathematics, particularly in schools, where the expressed heterogeneity of these mathematicians is replaced with an insistent drive towards homogeneity, and that homogeneity reflects a discipline which has been dominated by male styles, choices and expectations.     

No comparison: Distance education finds a new use for ‘No significant difference’

Media comparison studies have long been criticized as an inappropriate research design for measuring the effectiveness of instructional technology. However, a resurgence in their use has recently been noted in distance education for program evaluation purposes. An analysis of the research design will detail why such a methodology is an inappropriate approach to such an investigation. Increased access to such programming does not seem to serve as a satisfactory benefit for the implementation of distance education efforts. Stakeholders desire to prove that participants in distance-delivered courses receive the same quality of instruction off-campus as those involved in the traditional classroom setting. However, the desire to prove that the quality of such distributed offerings is equal to the quality of on-campus programming often results in comparisons of achievement between the two groups of student participants. Statistically, such a research design almost guarantees that the desired outcome will be attained—that indeed distance learners perform as well as campus-based students.     

“They cannot seem to get past the gender issue”: Experiences of young female athletic trainers in NCAA Division I intercollegiate athletics

Within Division I intercollegiate athletics, women hold 46.4% of graduate assistant and 47% of assistant athletic trainer positions, yet hold only 18.8% of head athletic trainer positions. The purpose of this study was to explore whether issues of power and gender stereotyping contribute to the lack of women in head athletic training positions in intercollegiate athletics. Data were gathered from 14 female athletic trainers at Division I universities through semi-structured interviews and follow-up questions based on those interviews and were analyzed using post-structural feminism as the theoretical framework. The findings revealed that male coaches used gender stereotypes to challenge the professional competence of our participants along with formal and informal work practices to reinforce power over the professional lives of our participants.