An overview of the gender factor in mathematics in TIMSS-2003 for the Asia-Pacific region

This paper highlights the gender factor in the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study in 2003 (TIMSS-2003) of eight participating countries from the Asia-Pacific region: Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong-SAR, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines (Chinese Taipei and Hong Kong-SAR will be referred to as countries in this paper.) in mathematics. The focus is on gender-related data encompassing the overall performance of students from the participating countries and their performance in the content and cognitive domains. At grade 8 level, the gender difference in the overall performance of students mirrored the international average and favored girls in all countries of the Asia-Pacific region (except in Japan and the Republic of Korea). The regional data also showed that, in general, the Philippines and Singapore can be considered to be at one extreme with gender differences favoring girls in both content and cognitive domains, and the Republic of Korea and to some extent Japan are at the other extreme with the gender differences favoring boys. At grade 4 level, girls from the Philippines and Singapore also performed better than the boys whereas the boys from Japan and Chinese Taipei did slightly better than the girls.