Are Boys Left Behind at School? Reviewing and Explaining Education-Related Gender Disparities

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Based on the applicants' research approach "Academic development as identity development of children and adolescents", the prior research project tested several different possible explanations for boys' relatively lower academic success by using experimental and quasiexperimental design studies. Our results indicate firstly that boys react to the stereotype of boys as "scholastic failures" by lower achievements in stereotypically female school subjects (like German), but at the same time with higher motivation in stereotypically male school subjects. Secondly, we did not find indications for automatic or implicit associations between school and femininity in boys, but rather that it is their explicit and purposeful enactments of masculinity at school which clash with scholastic demands. In the submitted research proposal we aim at describing, analysing, and testing the effects of a deliberate self presentation as male at school which encompasses a whole cluster of attitudes and behaviours that we call "acting male". We propose that acting male at school has effects on academic motivation and achievement. Specifically, we plan studies regarding two different aspects of acting male: boys' attempts to avoid the impression of effort investment at school (Studies Block Ia) and boys' attempts to present themselves as autonomous persons who are not controlled by teachers and do not care about their appreciation (Studies Block Ib). Additional studies are testing treatments that can be translated to interventions at schools which aim at making acting male at school for boys psychologically superfluous or at reducing the negative effects of acting male on boys' academic motivation and performance (Studies Block II).