Upper secondary school students' gendered self-evaluation in mathematics

Overview & Synopsis

Self-evaluation is considered one of the key concepts when trying to understand motivation, and it is gaining more interest especially when looking at the age span 15-18 years. Previous studies in selfevaluation and mathematics tend to use data from international large scales assessments, arriving with rather ambiguous conclusions, and smaller studies tend to use only one measure without control factors. The aim of this paper was to test the hypothesis that boys are more confident than girls in mathematics, while using Swedish as a control subject. A questionnaire was handed out to 399 upper secondary school students from different regions in Sweden, both vocational programmes and programmes preparing for further studies. Using both non-parametric analysis and linear regression, the results support the hypothesis. The relationship to the idea of confidence gap is discussed.