ABSTRACT
Searching for and explaining gender differences in mathematics performance fascinates researchers and the general public alike. Renewed debate occurs with each major finding. In the early 1980s, two psychologists, Camellia Benbow and Julian Stanley, touched off a still-reverberating controversy when they published several studies on the mathematics performance of American middle-school students. They reported that among the middleschool students who earned top scores on the math portion of the Educational Testing Service’s Scholastic Achievement Test (the SAT), males outnumbered females (Benbow and Stanley 1980, 1983). These findings renewed the debate about whether, as these researchers and others claimed, there are not some inborn differences in mathematical ability between males and females which accounted for the male testing advantage.
