1974 study by psychologists Eleanor MacCoby and Carol Jacklin

Found no differences in gender except in cognitive abilities Girls displayed greater verbal ability and boys had stronger spatial and mathematical abilities

 Janet Shibley Hyde experiment where gender abilities in verbal ability was examined Concluded there were no gender differences in verbal ability In the mathematical experiment, however, females outperformed males by a negligible amount and females were superior in computation There are no differences in understanding of mathematical concepts and gender differences favoring males do not emerge until high school years

 Males did have an advantage over females in spatial ability Spatial ability incudes tasks including mentally rotating an object and estimating horizontal and vertical dimensions These are the task needed to solve male-dominated problems such as engineering, architecture, and geometry

 Males also differ from females by being more likely to fall at the extremes of the intelligence range In a study by Hedges and Now ell (1995) they found that males were 7 out of the 8 people with extremely high IQ scores. They also found that males were in the larger proportion of the high IQ scores within the range of mental retardation

CULTURE
A series of comprehensive studies were conducted by a team of researchers led by Harold Stevenson
Observed the academic performance among members of various cultures
In 1980 him and his researchers examined the performance of first- and fifth-grade children in American, Chinese, and Japanese elementary

schools

 During this time American students at both grade levels lagged behind the other two countries in mathematics and came in second in reading . A decade later the study was repeated but with fifth graders and it was

discovered that American students were even worse than before.

Then in 1990 they studied students in eleventh grade. The result was American students retained their low standing in math compared to the Japanese and Chinese

 Why was the intelligence of these three cultures different?

The explanation was advanced by Stevenson and his team He suggested that cultural attitudes toward ability and effort may be in part responsible To test this this hypothesis, he asked students, parents, and teachers in all three countries whether or not they believed effort or ability had a greater impact on academic performance

 From first to eleventh grade American students, they disagreed with the statement saying that everyone in my class has about the same natural ability in math
Meaning that Americans thought that studying hard has little to do with their performance This reflects a belief that mathematical skill is primarily a function of innate ability In contrast, Asians believed that studying hard has everything to do with success in math

 These opinions concerning the origins of academic performance and culturally influenced views of the importance of effort and innate ability has a huge effect on the approach to the task of learning
Students who believe that learning is based on natural ability will see little value in working hard to learn a difficult subject, but students who see value in studying are more likely to work hard (this is why even the brightest of students will not get far without studying)