The song lyric “Anything you can do, I can do better,” may have some truth to it.

A study by the Chicago Tribune discovered that girls outscored boys on grade school Illinois achievement exams last year. However, area schools showed only minor gender gaps.

According to the study, changes made to the grade school exam last year may have contributed to the score discrepancy. More word problems and reading passages were added to the test, and time limits were relaxed.

Bob Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, a nonprofit group that evaluates exam quality and flaws, said girls typically are more skilled with the type of questions that were added to the test last year.

“Girls do better when problems are set in context and involve constructed responses,” Schaeffer said. “They’re more inclined to look at shades of gray.”

The Tribune studied the math, science, reading and writing scores of the third through eighth-grade, and 11th-grade exams taken last spring. According to the report, girls scored 18 percentage points higher than boys on the eighth-grade writing test and almost nine points higher on the third-grade reading exam. In eighth-grade math and science, girls outscored the boys by 3.2 points.

Local schools have not noticed a significant gender gap. Don Owen, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction in the Urbana School District, said that although there were large gaps in the 1990s, the disparity has decreased in recent years.

“The gender gaps have been very small and fluctuate,” Owen said. “Overall, our data at the K through eight level show that girls do better than boys in reading and math, and boys do better in science.”

The gender gap changes in high school, the study said. On the 11th-grade Prairie State Achievement Exam, boys outscored girls in math and science. Unlike the grade school test, there were no changes to the high school exam this year.

Illinois State Board of Education spokesman Matt Vanover believes this gender gap is not necessarily a result of the changes made to the test but is consistent with test results in the past.

“Historically, studies show that in lower grades girls outperform the boys in certain areas,” Vanover said. “But by the high school level, these gaps will close.”

Schaeffer said he believes girls perform better academically than boys and thinks standardized tests have underrated the abilities of girls in previous years.

He added that achievement exams are supposed to predict how students will perform in college. However, he said boys traditionally outscore the girls on the exams, but then girls do better academically while in college.

“Now the test has been changed so that a female’s superior academic performance shows up,” he said.