Gender Differences in the ACT Mathematics Tests: A Cross Cultural Comparison.

This study focused on gender differences in scores on the American College Testing Program (ACT) assessment in mathematics for a large sample of U.S. high school graduates (over 1,700,000) and a sample of 321 Chinese twelfth graders. A smaller gender difference was found for the Chinese sample than for the U.S. sample. However, a similar pattern of difference was found for both cultures. Gender differences existed not only in score means but also in score distributions. Gender differences increasingly favored males as subject ability level increased, and the magnitude of gender differences was varied across tasks for both cultures. The homogeneous culture for Chinese males and females might be one cause of the smaller gender difference in the Chinese sample. (Contains 5 tables, 9 figures, and 6 references.) (Author/SLD)