AN INVESTIGATION OF GENDER DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE-ABILITIES AMONG CHINESE HIGH-SCHOOL-STUDENTS

This study investigated gender differences in 11 cognitive tests from a sample of grade 11 students in Shanghai, China. Research found that the girls outperformed boys significantly on Word Knowledge and Word Span tasks, and also on a Computational Speed and Accuracy test. Boys outperformed girls only on the Paper Folding test. Factor based scores showed that girls were superior to boys on memory, and verbal composites, whereas boys were superior to girls on the spatial composities. No gender differences were found on the Mathematical Thinking test and other reasoning tests. The research findings seemed to suggest that where the social conditions were more uniform the gender differences on visual-spatial and mathematical reasoning skills would be smaller.