Gender Differences in Mathematics Participation: an Australian perspective
Summary Gender differences in many areas of participation in school are receding, but the gap favouring males in mathematics study in senior secondary school persists. This study attempted to identify some of the dimensions underlying gender differences in mathematics participation. The data from a survey of Years 10, 11 and 12 students at four high schools were used to examine the relationships between the gender differences in attitudes towards mathematics and the participation in senior school courses. The findings suggest that the separation of senior school mathematics into academic and non-academic subjects was more efficient for boys than for girls because in the junior years of high school boys develop more positive views of mathematics and of themselves as mathematics learners leading to them more often selecting the university-preferred options. Not all girls were disadvantaged, however. Girls from middle-class backgrounds, particularly those from professional and managerial origins, tended to r...
Parallel computing adds an extra dimension of complexity to the design of mathematical programming algorithms. This complexity complicates the comparison of algorithms and introduces an additional set of performance metrics. The paper by Barr and Hickman (BH) is well written as they have knitted together expert opinion and their own experience into a reasonable set of guidelines for avoiding the pitfalls that arise in the use of these metrics. BH motivate the guidelines with an insightful summary of fundamental parallel computer issues and how they relate to measuring algorithm effectiveness. Below we expand on those comments of BH which we have found especially relevant. INFORMS Journal on Computing, ISSN 1091-9856, was published as ORSA Journal on Computing from 1989 to 1995 under ISSN 0899-1499.