What Might Be Driving the Gender Gap in Leaving Certificate Higher Level Maths?
New research involving The Tuition Centre’s Higher Level Maths Mock Exam explores the role of assessment design, confidence and access to mathematical experiences.
Why are boys more likely than girls to achieve the very highest grades in Leaving Certificate Higher Level Maths?
It is a question that has interested us for some time. Since the introduction of Project Maths, a persistent gender gap has emerged at the highest attainment levels in Higher Level Mathematics, despite boys and girls participating in the subject in broadly similar numbers.
Earlier this year, The Tuition Centre was delighted to be involved in a research project that set out to explore some of the possible reasons behind this gap.
That research has now been published in the proceedings of the 2026 SMEC STEM Education Conference, hosted by DCU’s Centre for the Advancement of STEM Teaching and Learning (CASTeL). The paper, Gender issues: assessment design, confidence, and access in high-stakes mathematics education, was written by Jennifer Loftus, Eoghan O’Leary, Meighan Duffy, Janet Goodall, Horst Punzet, Ben North and Elizabeth Oldham. It was published on 15 September 2026.
Using The Tuition Centre Mock Exam
An important part of the research was The Tuition Centre’s Higher Level Maths Mock Examination.
A total of 329 students across 22 schools participated in the study. Students sat a specially written mock examination designed to reflect the structure and marking approach of the Leaving Certificate Higher Level Maths examination. The papers were independently marked, while students also completed a survey looking at areas including confidence, subject choice and access to different mathematical experiences.
This allowed the research team to do something particularly interesting: rather than simply looking at an overall mathematics grade, we could examine where differences in performance were emerging.
And this produced one of the most interesting findings of the research.
The gap was particularly evident in problem solving
Leaving Certificate Maths questions can broadly require different types of mathematical thinking.
Some questions are relatively familiar. A student may need to demonstrate that they understand a concept, remember a technique and carry out a mathematical procedure correctly.
Other questions require students to take mathematics they already know and apply it in a less familiar situation. They may need to interpret a context, decide which mathematics is relevant, make connections between different areas of the course and develop a route towards a solution.
In the research, notable gender differences appeared in the “Contexts and Applications” component of the mock examination — the part placing greater emphasis on unseen and unfamiliar problem solving.
That distinction matters.
It suggests that simply saying that one group is “better at maths” than another would miss much of what is happening. The type of question being asked, and the mathematical experiences students have had before encountering it, may also be important.
Confidence and access may matter too
The study did not look at examination performance in isolation.
Students were also asked about their confidence and their educational experiences. The research found gender differences in areas including self-perceived confidence and access to Applied Maths.
That raises some important questions.
Could repeated exposure to unfamiliar problems help students become more comfortable when there is no immediately obvious route to the answer?
Could studying subjects that involve mathematical modelling, spatial reasoning or unfamiliar applications give some students additional problem-solving experience?
And could confidence itself affect what a student does when faced with a difficult question — whether they experiment, persist and try an approach, or decide very quickly that they cannot do it?
These are questions rather than simple conclusions, and that distinction is important.
There probably isn't one simple explanation
The research does not claim to have discovered a single cause of the gender gap.
An assessment result can reflect many things: mathematical knowledge, previous experiences, confidence, the wording and context of a question, familiarity with particular forms of problem solving and many other factors.
The value of this study is that it helps us look beneath the overall examination result.
If two students have similar levels of mathematical knowledge but perform differently when that mathematics must be applied in an unfamiliar situation, that is something worth understanding much more deeply.
For teachers, curriculum designers and those involved in assessment, it also raises an important question:
Are we giving all students enough opportunities to develop confidence in tackling mathematics when they don't immediately know what to do?
Why this matters to us at The Tuition Centre
For us, this research is also an important extension of the work we do at The Tuition Centre.
Of course, our immediate job is to help students understand mathematics, improve their problem-solving skills and achieve the best results they can.
But working with large numbers of students also gives us an opportunity to contribute to the wider conversation about how students learn mathematics, what they find difficult and how mathematics is assessed.
The Tuition Centre Mock Examination being used as part of this study is a good example of that.
Rather than the mock simply being preparation for the Leaving Certificate examination, the results have helped researchers investigate a much wider educational question.
That is something we would like to do more of.
Looking ahead
The findings are particularly timely as Ireland considers the future direction of Leaving Certificate Mathematics.
Problem solving, mathematical reasoning and the ability to apply mathematics in unfamiliar situations are rightly important goals of mathematics education. But as assessment develops, we also need to understand how different students experience these types of questions and whether there are barriers that disproportionately affect particular groups.
This research doesn't provide all the answers.
It does, however, give us better questions to ask.
And understanding why apparently similar students can experience mathematical assessment differently is an important step towards ensuring that every student has the opportunity to develop as a confident and capable mathematical problem solver.
Read the full paper
Gender issues: assessment design, confidence, and access in high-stakes mathematics education was published in the Proceedings of the SMEC 11 STEM Education Conference, pages 44–51, and is freely available through Zenodo.
https://zenodo.org/records/22771584
