Gender Features of Intellectual Development of Students of VI-X Classes

Abstract

The study was conducted as part of the monitoring of giftedness, organized by the City Resource Centre of Giftedness, Moscow State University of Psychology & Education, in 2012. One of the objectives of the study was the identification of gender-specific intelligence in high school students at different grade levels. The sample size was 2023 students of VI-X grades from 24 schools in Moscow, including 990 boys and 1033 girls. Intelligence was measured using Raven's "Standard Progressive Matrices Plus". It is shown that in VI-VIII grades, the percent of girls with "intelligence is clearly above average" is more, and with the "intelligence is clearly below average" is less than of boys, and the proportions of students of both sexes with average intelligence at this stage of training are almost identical. In IX and X grades, the differences in proportions were found. In general, girls also show significantly higher rates for subscales B, C and D and the total scale of the test than boys, and no differences were revealed in the subscales A and E. The tendency was shown of decreasing the differences with age: girls performed better on scales A and B in VI-IX grades (p < 0,01 and p < 0,05), on the scale of C and D in the VI-VII grades (p < 0,001 and p < 0,05). In grade X, no gender differences were shown. We statistically confirmed the trend of rising intelligence with age in both boys and girls. The consideration of these features is required in the school teacher working with the high school students.

Keywords

• gifted students
• general intellectual ability
• Raven’s test "Standard Progressive Matrices Plus"
• gender differences in intelligence
• Mann-Whitney test
• Kolmogorov-Smirnov test
• Student's t test
• Fisher test