Teachers underestimate short boys' intelligence.

Here is another research study that should be of interest to some of us. The headline says…”Teachers underestimate short boys’ intelligence” (Reported by The Guardian Education-online. September 4th 2007.)
The report states that two researchers Julia Smith of Oakland University in Rochester, Mich. and Nancy Niehmi of Nazareth College of Rocherster, Ny. U.S.A. analyzed test results and other data for about 9,000 boys in the US who started kindergarten in 1998. According to their results, kindergarten teachers systematically perceived boys who were shorter than average were less skilled in reading, mathematics and general knowledge than their test results indicated.
So now, according to this study, some kindergarten teachers are looking at their male students and making decisions about their abilities based on their height. The mind does not even want to go beyond the results of this study to imagine the far- reaching implications of this. According to the article, “…is troubling because it could put smaller-than-average boys at risk for being placed in remedial classes they don’t need or lead to self-fulfilling prophecies for boys’ educational trajectories”.
Must we now imagine the trauma short males will be exposed to from the very start of their school career. What is short anyway? Short in one culture may be tall in another, so hopefully this study may only apply to whatever is considered average height in these US school populations.
Questions that come to my mind include:
What can be the possible connection between a person’s height and how the brain works?
Is this applicable to girls also? Why or why not? Why was the study only focused on boys?
What’s a parent to do about his/her son’s height? (My mind runs away with this one with thoughts of genetic manipulations etc.)
It always seems to be that kindergarten is way too early to be doing any educational research on children. They are (or at least should be) too busy playing to be used to collect any data on academic performance.



Their report appears in the July/August issue of the Journal of Educational Research.
See Also
Information on "Exploring Teacher Perceptions of Small Boys in Kindergarten" is available from Heldref Publications.