Gender differences in confidence during number-line estimation
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Gender differences in confidence during number-line estimation Michelle L. Rivers 1 & Charles J. Fitzsimmons 1 & Susan R. Fisk 2 & John Dunlosky 1 & Clarissa A. Thompson 1 Received: 8 June 2020 / Accepted: 1 September 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
Prior research has found gender differences in spatial tasks in which men perform better, and are more confident, than women. Do gender differences also occur in people’s confidence as they perform number-line estimation, a common spatial-numeric task predictive of math achievement? To investigate this question, we analyzed outcomes from six studies (N = 758 girls/women and boys/men with over 20,000 observations; grades 1–5 and adults) that involved a similar method: Participants estimated where a provided number (e.g., ¾, 37) was located on a bounded number line (e.g., 0–1; 0–100), then judged their confidence in that estimate. Boys/men were more precise (g = .52) and more confident (g = .30) in their estimates than were girls/women. Linear mixed model analyses of the trial-level data revealed that girls’/women’s estimates had about 31% more error than did boys’/men’s estimates, and even when controlling for precision, girls/ women were about 7% less confident in their estimates than were boys/men. These outcomes should encourage researchers to consider gender differences for studies on math cognition and provide pathways for future research to address potential mechanisms underlying the present gender gaps. Keywords Confidence judgments . Estimation . Gender differences . Number lines Imagine two first graders who just rated their confidence on a number-line estimation trial in which they estimated where 25 goes on a 0 to 100 number line. Although both first graders greatly overestimated the location of the number on the line, one child was more confident in the estimate than the other. Such differences in confidence can influence the children’s engagement with math, because higher confidence is related to greater self-efficacy and persistence when tasks are difficult. Now imagine that the more confident child is a boy and the less confident child is a girl, and that such differences are not just isolated to these children.
* Michelle L. Rivers [email protected] 1
Department of Psychological Sciences, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA
2
Department of Sociology, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA
Rivers M.L. et al.
Does a gender gap occur in which girls are less confident than boys when they are engaged in math tasks such as number-line estimation? Given that such a gap could have negative shortand long-term consequences for educational and career outcomes, discovering whether such a gender gap exists is critical so that future research can develop interventions to minimize it. The present research evaluates the extent to which gender differences arise in confidence on number-line estimation, a task which taps the fundamental ability to estimate numerical magnitude (and is predictive of future math ach
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