Implications for school achievement and causality: A commentary

Description

This article is a commentary on a study published in this issue by Levine et al. (2019). They reported that the relation they observed between sex-related discrepancies in success on standardized tests and health outcomes is significant only in males. We suggest that this finding has important implications for educators and future research and we examine possibilities related to sex differences in school achievement. We also offer arguments suggesting that it is premature to propose a causal explanation for the results presented by Levine and colleagues, given that crucial conditions to establish such causality are not met in their studies. We conclude with a proposal for a study that could potentially determine whether the temporal ordering required to establish causality arises in the relation between health outcomes and the sex-related discrepancies.