A growing body of scholarship in the field of writing research from a cognitive perspective suggests that girls tend to outperform boys in particular writing tasks. Still, our understanding about gender differences continues to evolve. The present study specifically focused on gender differences in writing between students from Grade 4 to Grade 9. We examined differences in handwriting and self-efficacy, as well as in three measures of written composition across two genres (viz., spelling, text length, and text quality in stories and opinion essays). Moreover, we tested whether there were differences in written composition above and beyond handwriting and self-efficacy. Findings suggest that girls consistently outperformed boys in handwriting, self-efficacy, spelling, text length, and text quality. These effects were moderated by neither students’ grade nor text genre. In addition, after accounting for handwriting and self-efficacy, females still performed better than males in the three measures of written composition. Overall, findings confirmed the gender difference typically found in writing and indicated that potential explanatory variables for it may be handwriting and self-efficacy.

中文翻译：

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检查写作中性别差异的潜在根源：手写流利度和自我效能信念的作用

从认知的角度来看，写作研究领域的学术研究越来越多，这表明女孩在特定的写作任务上往往比男孩好。尽管如此，我们对性别差异的理解仍在继续发展。本研究特别关注4年级至9年级学生之间在写作方面的性别差异。我们研究了手写和自我效能的差异，以及跨两种体裁的三种书面构成量度（即拼写，文字长度，以及故事和观点文章中的文字质量）。此外，我们测试了在手写和自我效能感之外的书面作文是否存在差异。研究结果表明，女孩在笔迹，自我效能，拼写，文本长度和文本质量方面始终优于男孩。这些影响既不受学生成绩的影响，也不受文本类型的影响。此外，在考虑了笔迹和自我效能感之后，女性在三种写作构成方面的表现仍优于男性。总体而言，研究结果证实了通常在书面形式中存在的性别差异，并指出其潜在的解释变量可能是手写和自我效能感。