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It has been documented that some tests of background knowledge underpredict the performance of female students in college. This study explored whether the underprediction phenomenon would also be found for a test that tapped four subfields of geography. Students (primarily While, N = 315) enrolled in nine geography classes at a comprehensive, midwestern university completed the Knowledge of Geography (KOG) test during the first week of the semester and consented to release their first exam grades, final grades, and ACT scores. Replicating a previous study (Henrie, Aron, Nelson, & Poole, 1997), there were gender differences favoring males across all four subfields of the KOG test. KOG test scores correlated with grades, but males and females achieved comparable course grades despite the lower performance of females on the KOG test. Examples illustrate how small differences between predicted and actual grades can translate into large gender discrepancies whenever minimum scores from tests that underpredict the performance of a subgroup are used to qualify students for educational opportunities.
After decades of attention to gender bias in education and its impact on the career patterns of women (e.g., American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, 1992; Hall & Sandler, 1982), public debate about the effects of discrimination on girls has recently waned. In part, this change resulted from political attention to racial rather than gender issues during the 1990s, a focus driven by battles over the legality of admission practices designed to increase racial diversity on college campuses (e.g., Affirmative action, 1998; Guernsey & Healy, 1999). A more direct influence on public attitudes about gender issues, however, was the changing demographics of higher education. Evidence that females were applying to institutions of higher education with better high school grade point averages and enrolling in disproportionate numbers (Gose, 1997; Koerner, 1999) recently fueled critics to argue that males, rather than females, are the real victims of educational discrimination (Leo, 1999; for a discussion of gender patterns in education, see Kleinfeld, 1999).
Data on high school performance and college matriculation obscure a disturbing reality, however: Females continue to be underrepresented in science and technical fields, fields that provide larger economic rewards than the liberal arts tracks populated predominantly by female students (National Center for Education Statistics, 1996). Two well-known trends,...