In the United States it has been shown that males have dominated the faculties of American universities in the fields of mathematics, engineering and science. Many research projects have been conducted to study this phenomenon, attempting to determine if gender actually affects intelligence. Many studies have demonstrated that females preform at higher levels when it comes to subjects requiring phonological sequencing and males preform better in analog imaging. But when it comes to gifted students, are the discrepancies still the same? That is what Paula Olszewski-kubilius and Seon-young Lee wanted to test. They did this by exploring “Gender and Other Group Differences in Performance on Off Level tests: Changes in the 21^st Century and taking organizational data from the off level test scores from 257, 829 gifted students between the years of 2000 and 2008. Of those students 111,796 took the SAT, 94,054 took the ACT and 51,976 took the EXPLORE. Their participants were 52.2 % male and 47.8% female, all between the ages of 4^th to 8^th grade. In their study, socioeconomic and racial status of the participants were also assessed, in an attempt to see the effects those factors had on the performance of the students. The study focused on three questions, the main question being “Are there differences between the scores of male and female students on the math portion of the SAT, ACT and EXPLORE tests and the importance of these differences?” They analyzed their data using  the method SPSS 16.0. For the SAT scores, specifically, they discovered that over all males averaged higher in the math portion while the females averaged higher in the reading portion.

While the study appears to be well done, there were many terms I did not understand and no explanation as to what they were. Nonetheless they were very thorough with their research and gathered a rather large sample size in an attempt to represent a decent portion of the gifted population. One fact that I found very interesting was that true to their stereotypes, Asian students over all scored the highest mean scores on the math and reading tests.

Olszewski-Kubilius, P., & Lee, S. (2010). Gender and Other Group Differences in Performance on Off-Level Tests: Changes in the 21st Century. Gifted Child Quarterly, 55(1), 54-73. doi:10.1177/0016986210382574