A substantial sex difference in mathematical reasoning ability (score on the mathematics test of the Scholastic Aptitude Test) in favor of boys was found in a study of 9927 intellectually gifted junior high school students. Our data contradict the hypothesis that differential course-taking accounts for observed sex differences in mathematical ability, but support the hypothesis that these differences are somewhat increased by environmental influences.

Almost 40,000 selected seventh-grade students from the Middle Atlantic region of the United States took the College Board Scholastic Aptitude Test as part of the Johns Hopkins regional talent search in 1980, 1981, and 1982. A separate nationwide talent search was conducted in which any student under age 13 who was willing to take the test was eligible. The results obtained by both procedures establish that by age 13 a large sex difference in mathematical reasoning ability exists and that it is especially pronounced at the high end of the distribution: among students who scored greater than or equal to 700, boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1. Some hypothesized explanations of such differences were not supported by the data.

No. of S's, trials Frequency & magnitude Equal no. of reinforcements Equal no. of reinforcements Massed Spaced Trials Errors

Over the past three decades, the achievement of waves of American students with high intellectual potential has declined as a result of inequity in educational treatment. This inequity is the result of an extreme form of egalitarianism within American society and schools, which involves the pitting of equity against excellence rather than promoting both equity and excellence, anti-intellectualism, the "dumbingdown" of the curriculum, equating aptitude and achievement testing with elitism, the attraction to fads by schools, and the insistence of schools to teach all students from the same curriculum at the same level. In this article we provide recommendations for creating positive change-recommendations that emphasize excellence for all, that call for responsiveness to individual differences, and that suggest basing educational policies on well-grounded research findings in psychology and education. Educational policies that fail to take into account the vast range of individual differences among students-as do many that are currently in use-are doomed to be ineffective.Much has been said about the relative standing of American students in international comparisons of mathematical and scientific achievement. Such comparisons-regardless of who conducted the survey, the instruments used, and the age of individuals studied-repeatedly have shown that students in the United States typically rank toward the bottom of industrialized nations 1 in the range of achievement reported We would like to thank Melissa Holden and Daniel Shea for their assistance with the preparation of this article and Miraca U. M. Gross for her insightful comments. The detailed comments of reviewers James J. Gallagher, Arthur R. Jensen, and Richard E. Snow were extremely helpful. We also greatly appreciate the financial support of an anonymous service agency that made this work possible.

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