I was recently invited by the University of Luxembourg as a keynote speaker at an International Conference, ‘Gender Variations in Educational Success: Searching for Causes’. It quickly became apparent that boys’ achievement with respect to girls’ is an international, hot topic. National and political concerns in Germany, Switzerland and Luxembourg have created a mass of research dominated by multivariate analysis and structural equation modelling. Scholars from these countries drew heavily on data available from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to search for the ‘causes’ of boys’ underachievement. Alongside PISA data they used national public examination and test scores, psycho metric measures of cognitive competencies in, for example, reading, mathematics and problem solving, scales of well-being and data gathered from questionnaires designed by researchers to capture, for example young people’s motivations to learn. Continue reading “Has research on Gender and Education come of age as a properly scientific field or is something else happening?”