Perspectives from a Feminist Philosophy.” Educational Researcher 27 (June–July

The Fennema, Carpenter, Jacobs, Franke, and Levi study reported earlier is fascinating in its results and implications. In classrooms characterized by encour-agement to use a variety of manipulatives, to create indi-vidual methods to solve problems, and to construct mean-ing, boys did significantly better than girls on almost all measures of importance to educators who emphasize mean-ing in mathematics education. Further, there is reason to predict that the meaning-oriented students (both boys and girls) will do better in future mathematics because they have already demonstrated that they can do better on "ex-tension problems. " What explains these results, and how should we respond to them? We might initially investigate all of the usual suspects. Maybe the results are a fluke; let's see if it happens again. Maybe, unintentionally, teachers gave boys more attention than girls; let's check this. Maybe there was something pe