Chapter 9: Factors Contributing to Gender Differences in Mathematics Performance of United States High School Students

It is critically important that the mathematical capacity of students in the United States be improved. As the latest performance of American 15-year- olds on the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) demonstrates, the U.S. ranked 24th out of 29 developed nations in mathematics literacy and problem solving (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, 2007). One reason for the poor performance of U.S. students may have been that they were not provided with appropriate instruction that successfully integrated mathematical content learning with experiences fostering understanding about self-regulation of their learning processes (National Research Council, 2006). Interestingly, only one of these 29 countries (Iceland) had results where girls outperformed boys (Lemke et al., 2004).