International Herald Tribune, November 3, 2006
CONCORD, Massachusetts: Sitting by the open kitchen doors of my house on the Fenn School campus in Concord, I can see and hear the exertions of our football team at practice. It is the expression of the engaged, community- building life of boys at play in the presence of trusted mentors.
Here the curriculum and schedule fit the natural rhythms of boys at work and play. Too few boys get the same chance to spend so much time playing freely or competitively while also enjoying opportunities to act, sing, paint or play a musical instrument.
Too few boys can easily and unselfconsciously discuss the significance of a novel or poem openly in class, emboldened to be personally engaged because it's the normal thing to do.
Right now I need to be separated from these boys whom I love to teach. On leave as an English teacher at Fenn, I have embarked on a rigorous, six- month chemotherapy program for advanced inflammatory breast cancer.
Today in Opinion Life holds a new, acute meaning for me. I have lots of time to reflect on my life as a wife, mother, first-time grandmother and longtime teacher. Not a day passes that I do not think about the joys of teaching these boys. Given the kind of place that cares for boys in their "boyness," they have a great capacity for goodness and camaraderie, artistry and athletic prowess, competition and cooperation, and empathy and emotional expressiveness.
Recently, a spate of horrifying school shootings has given rise to a discussion about the pathologies and failures of males in our society. My fear is that we might easily slip into hand-wringing despair over our apparent inability to reach them. If boys are falling behind girls in school, as some argue, we should not ask whether, in our admirable quest to level the playing field for girls, we have shortchanged boys.
The right question to ask is, what must we do to ensure that both boys and girls grow to their full moral and intellectual potential? We can start by taking them away from each other at crucial junctures in their schooling. Before coming to teach here, I spent 20 years at Wellesley College as a class dean and writing teacher. I worked to help young women claim an identity of competence and independence in class, on the playing fields, in theater and studio, social service and college government.
In my experience, good single-sex schools and classes for males and females allow young people to release themselves temporarily from the developmental and learning differences between the sexes, from the undue burden of the hyper-sexualized society in which they live, giving them the opportunity to explore freely what it means to be human.
By focusing on them alone as a gender in class or in school, the paradox is that their sex no longer matters in the most essential educational processes. Take an example from school life at Fenn. Without a girl to play the part of a young Jewish woman in the Warsaw ghetto in a fifth-grade drama production, a boy takes on the role, as my then-shy son did years ago.
Today in Opinion
Life holds a new, acute meaning for me. I have lots of time to reflect on my life as a wife, mother, first-time grandmother and longtime teacher. Not a day passes that I do not think about the joys of teaching these boys.
Given the kind of place that cares for boys in their "boyness," they have a great capacity for goodness and camaraderie, artistry and athletic prowess, competition and cooperation, and empathy and emotional expressiveness.
Recently, a spate of horrifying school shootings has given rise to a discussion about the pathologies and failures of males in our society.
My fear is that we might easily slip into hand-wringing despair over our apparent inability to reach them. If boys are falling behind girls in school, as some argue, we should not ask whether, in our admirable quest to level the playing field for girls, we have shortchanged boys.
The right question to ask is, what must we do to ensure that both boys and girls grow to their full moral and intellectual potential?
We can start by taking them away from each other at crucial junctures in their schooling.
Before coming to teach here, I spent 20 years at Wellesley College as a class dean and writing teacher. I worked to help young women claim an identity of competence and independence in class, on the playing fields, in theater and studio, social service and college government.
In my experience, good single-sex schools and classes for males and females allow young people to release themselves temporarily from the developmental and learning differences between the sexes, from the undue burden of the hyper-sexualized society in which they live, giving them the opportunity to explore freely what it means to be human.
By focusing on them alone as a gender in class or in school, the paradox is that their sex no longer matters in the most essential educational processes.
Take an example from school life at Fenn. Without a girl to play the part of a young Jewish woman in the Warsaw ghetto in a fifth-grade drama production, a boy takes on the role, as my then-shy son did years ago.
At this all-boys school, it happens all the time and without stigma. Such an experience can lead boys to uncover the deep emotional and spiritual currents that underlie our common humanity, male and female alike. It may also lead them, as it did my son, to recognize that theater can be a way out of shyness by taking another identity onstage. The same thing happened when he put on football gear and learned how to play the game from a coach who was also his Latin teacher - an experience that led this sensitive, artistic boy to an unexpected development as a strong high school and college athlete.
In my view, these happy outcomes are directly related to a single-sex educational environment. Schools that use gender as a lens to understand boys and girls on their own terms create opportunities that open them up, not close them down, and that make them feel good about being boys and girls learning new things.
These schools foster a sense of being in control responsibly. Some exist now. Many more could become those places if they would consider giving boys and girls a chance to take time out from each other - to learn to be who they are and achieve their potential in all of their gendered and human glory.
At this all-boys school, it happens all the time and without stigma. Such an experience can lead boys to uncover the deep emotional and spiritual currents that underlie our common humanity, male and female alike.
It may also lead them, as it did my son, to recognize that theater can be a way out of shyness by taking another identity onstage.
The same thing happened when he put on football gear and learned how to play the game from a coach who was also his Latin teacher - an experience that led this sensitive, artistic boy to an unexpected development as a strong high school and college athlete.
In my view, these happy outcomes are directly related to a single-sex educational environment.
Schools that use gender as a lens to understand boys and girls on their own terms create opportunities that open them up, not close them down, and that make them feel good about being boys and girls learning new things.
These schools foster a sense of being in control responsibly. Some exist now. Many more could become those places if they would consider giving boys and girls a chance to take time out from each other - to learn to be who they are and achieve their potential in all of their gendered and human glory.
Lorraine Garnett
Lorraine Garnett Ward chairs the English Department at the Fenn School.
The Why Chromosome. How a teacher’s gender affects boys and girls.
By Thomas S. Dee
Gender gaps in educational outcomes are a matter of real and growing concern. We’ve known for a long time, since the 1970s, that girls outscore boys in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading tests, while boys tend to outperform girls in math and science.
Boys are increasingly less likely than girls to attend college and to receive a bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile, female college students continue to be underrepresented in such technical fields as engineering and computer science.
One popular, if controversial, response to these patterns has been a renewed push for single-sex education—an effort that has drawn support from across political divides. An amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act authorizing the creation of single-sex public schools was sponsored by Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas, but the measure passed in large part due to the support of Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, a Wellesley College graduate grateful for her opportunity to attend one of the country’s premier women’s colleges. (“Wellesley nurtured, challenged, and guided me,” she declared in her 1992 Commencement Day speech.) The National Association for Single-Sex Public Education reports that, as of April 2006, at least 223 public schools in the United States were offering gender-separate educational opportunities, up from just 4 in 1998. Although most were coeducational schools with single-sex classrooms, 44 were wholly single-sex.
The majority of arguments for single-sex schools and classrooms focus on the effects on interactions among students, but they also present the possibility of greatly increasing the number of students with teachers of the same gender. Is there any convincing evidence that doing so could make a difference in education—for boys and girls alike? So far the jury has been out, but my analysis of national survey and test-score data collected by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) allows me to offer new and convincing evidence of the differential impact of a teacher’s gender on student learning.
The Gender Gap
The evolution of the gender gaps in achievement as children mature suggests that what occurs in schools and classrooms may play an important role. According to the Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, when children enter kindergarten, the two genders perform similarly on tests of both reading and mathematics. But a few years later, by the spring of the 3rd grade, boys, on average, outperform girls in math and science, while the girls outperform the boys in reading. Disconcertingly, NAEP results show that for children between the ages of 9 and 13, the gender gaps in science and reading roughly double and the math gap increases by two-thirds. For children between the ages of 13 and 17, there is modest growth in the math and reading gender gaps but a substantial expansion of the gap in science.
The gender gaps in achievement as students finish high school are far from trivial. In reading, 17-year-old boys score 31 percent of a standard deviation below 17-year-old girls, a deficit equal to about one grade level. This is nearly half the size of the black-white test-score gap in reading. In science and math, meanwhile, girls of that age score 22 percent and 10 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, also a difference worthy of concern.
Drowned out by the din of public argument over the role of nature vs. nurture is a debate, far from settled, over exactly how the experience of going to school shapes learning among boys and girls. One school of thought contends that teachers, both men and women, treat boys and girls differently in the classroom. For example, some controversial evidence, based on classroom observations, suggests that both are likely to offer praise and remediation in response to comments by boys but mere acknowledgment to comments by girls. Some cognitive scientists suggest that teachers may subtly communicate different academic expectations of boys and girls and these biased expectations may become self-fulfilling.
Teacher Gender Matters
Other theories, of special interest here, suggest that much depends on the gender of the teacher. One theory asserts that the teacher’s gender shapes communications between teacher and pupil, while another says the teacher acts as a gender-specific role model, regardless of what he or she says or does. According to this second theory, students are more engaged, behave more appropriately, and perform at a higher level when taught by one who shares their gender.
Tests of these theories have relied primarily on information about teachers and students in college and graduate school. Findings have been mixed, so the issue remains unresolved. Studies have not focused on young adolescents, the time when students are particularly sensitive to gender differences and when gender gaps in achievement are pronounced.
I investigated the effect of a teacher’s gender using the National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS), which contains data on a nationally representative sample of nearly 25,000 8th graders from 1988. In addition to examining the effect of teacher gender on students’ test-score performance, I examined teacher perceptions of a student’s performance and student perceptions of the subject taught by a particular teacher. I was especially interested in the influence of a teacher’s gender on students’ perceptions, because engagement with an academic subject may be an important precursor to subsequent achievement levels, course selection in high school and college, and also occupational choice. For example, the underrepresentation of women in fields like engineering and computer science may be due to levels of confidence and interest in related subjects in high school.
Indeed, my results confirm that a teacher’s gender does have large effects on student test performance, teacher perceptions of students, and students’ engagement with academic material. Simply put, girls have better educational outcomes when taught by women and boys are better off when taught by men. These findings persist, even after I account for a variety of other characteristics of students, teachers, and classrooms that may influence student learning. They are especially important for young men when one considers that the percentage of 6th-grade teachers who were female ranged from 58 to 91 percent across four core subjects (math, science, reading, and history). Although these percentages decline in later grades, 83 percent of the English teachers in 8th grade are female, as are more than half of 8th-grade math and science teachers.
A Mother Lode of Gender Data
Key to my findings is the National Education Longitudinal Survey, initiated in 1988 as a survey of a nationally representative sample of 8th-grade students from 1,052 public and private schools. The DOE resurveyed a sample of these students during four follow-up reviews, in 1990, 1992, 1994, and 2000. For my study I rely only on the NELS data from 1988, which is based on surveys of 24,599 students and two of each student’s teachers.
In particular, I exploit a unique feature of the teacher surveys. For each sampled student, NELS administered questionnaires to teachers from two academic subjects: mathematics and English; mathematics and history; science and English; and science and history. Two completed teacher surveys are available for 21,324 of the 8th-grade students—a bit smaller than the full sample of NELS students because some teachers did not complete their questionnaires and some students did not have a class in one or both of the academic subjects randomly assigned to their school for which teacher surveys were administered.
The teacher survey solicited a variety of information about the teacher’s background, including gender. It also included several questions about how the teacher viewed the behavior and performance of the specific students in the study. I was most interested in the effect of gender on three assessments that appear to be particularly good indicators of academic development. Teachers were asked to simply respond yes or no as to whether the student was frequently disruptive, consistently inattentive, or rarely completed homework.
The student component of NELS includes additional outcome data for the subjects taught by each sampled teacher, including the results from multiple-choice achievement tests. The survey also asked students questions about their engagement with the subject. In particular, students indicated whether they were afraid to ask questions in that subject, looked forward to their class, and saw the subject as useful for their future. NELS also solicited information about each student’s gender as well as a variety of other demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.
NELS is a goldmine of information for those interested in gender dynamics within the classroom. Especially noteworthy is the fact that data are available from the same student in two different subjects taken from two different teachers, which enables us to account for educationally relevant characteristics of students that cannot be ascertained by conventional background characteristics. In other words, these “matched-pairs” data allow us to see how the outcomes of the same student vary with two different teachers.
When estimating the effect of a teacher’s gender, I use standard statistical techniques to adjust for the effect of several other teacher and classroom characteristics that may affect student outcomes. For example, I take into account whether the student shares the teacher’s race and ethnicity, because some of my own prior research suggests that the race of a teacher may influence student outcomes (see “The Race Connection,” Education Next, Spring 2004). I also consider the size of the class, the percentage of students in the classroom with limited English proficiency, the number of years a teacher has been working in the profession, and whether the teacher is state-certified in the subject he or she is teaching. What does this valuable set of data reveal about the connections between gender and learning?
The Most Important Findings
For three subject areas—science, social studies, and English—the overall effect of having a woman teacher instead of a man raises the achievement of girls by 4 percent of a standard deviation and lowers the achievement of boys by roughly the same amount, producing an overall gender gap of 8 percent of a standard deviation, no small matter if it can be assumed that this happened over the course of a single year. In fact, these estimates suggest that the effects of a year with a teacher of a particular gender are quite large relative to the gender gaps in achievement in the national datasets mentioned above. But I am hesitant to draw that conclusion in the absence of information about the gender of the teacher the student had in preceding years. Some of what I attribute to the 8th grade might have occurred in previous years, if the student had had multiple years of schooling from a teacher of the same gender.
While these results summarize the overall impact of teacher’s gender on test scores, the effects vary somewhat from one subject to the next. Test-score benefits for girls of having a female teacher are concentrated in social studies. I estimate that a female social-studies teacher increases a girl’s performance by 9 percent of a standard deviation. In contrast, the impact in English is not statistically significant. For boys, the largest effect appears in science. Their scores drop by 5 percent of a standard deviation if they have a female teacher. In English and social studies, the drops appear to be almost as large but are not statistically significant.
It does not seem likely that one can explain these results by the quality of the student’s teacher, because almost all teachers, whether men or women, are teaching boys and girls together. Yet the effect differs, depending on whether the genders of teacher and student match.
Still, to double-check this possibility, I isolate those situations where students of different genders had the same teacher. For the typical teacher who was surveyed by the NELS, there were three to four students included in the study. Given this information, I was able to re-estimate the effect of a teacher on students of the opposite gender, while adjusting for the overall effect of any individual teacher on student learning. In other words, because the same teacher is sometimes observed with sampled boys and girls, we can assess whether gender interactions matter after adjusting for the teacher’s unobserved traits. The overall results—the average for the three subject areas—indicate an average positive impact on student achievement of 4 percent of a standard deviation whenever the teacher-student gender was the same.
Classroom Dynamics
Exactly why gender makes so much of a difference in student learning is difficult to ascertain. But the NELS data offer some suggestive evidence that the opinions of teachers about their students—and of students about their teachers—is shaped in part by gender characteristics.
Regardless of the academic subject, boys are two to three times more likely than girls to be seen as disruptive, inattentive, and unlikely to complete their homework. However, how boys and girls view academic subjects varies across subjects in ways that parallel the gender gaps in subject test scores. For example, girls are more likely than boys to report that they are afraid to ask questions in math, science, and social studies. They are also less likely to look forward to these classes or to see them as useful for their future. Meanwhile, boys, as compared to girls, register more negative perceptions of English classes.
But while boys and girls may exhibit different behaviors and prefer different subjects, that is not quite the same thing as having a different experience because of the gender of the teacher. So is there any evidence that teachers relate better to students whose gender they share—or vice versa? Significant patterns can be detected within the NELS data. When a class is headed by a woman, boys are more likely to be seen as disruptive, while girls are less likely to be seen as either disruptive or inattentive.
Furthermore, when taught by a man, girls were more likely to report that they did not look forward to a subject, that it was not useful for their future, or that they were afraid to ask questions. This dynamic is strongest in science, where student reports indicate that female science teachers are far more effective in promoting girls’ engagement with this field of study. The estimated effects in the other two subjects pointed in the same direction but were statistically insignificant when examined separately.
Boys also had fewer positive reactions to their academic subject when taught by an opposite-gender teacher. In particular, when taught by a female teacher, boys were significantly more likely to report that they did not look forward to the subject. This effect appears to have been particularly pronounced when the female teacher was in history. The patterns for boys in other subjects are quite consistent with those observed in history, though I should again be cautious in drawing strong conclusions because many of the results fall short of conventional levels of statistical significance.
Math Results Unclear
Results in math differ strikingly from those in the other subject areas, but I place little weight on the findings in this area for reasons that require explanation. My initial analysis showed that both boys and girls suffered if they had a woman teacher. Both girls and boys scored 7 percent and 8 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, than if they had a man. But before rushing to the conclusion that math is a subject uniquely suited for male instruction, one needs to take into account other possible explanations.
I can rule out some obvious candidates. There is no evidence, for example, that female math teachers were given larger classes or were less likely to hold the proper subject-specific qualifications, such as proper state certification or a subject-specific degree at either the undergraduate or graduate level.
But I was concerned about the likelihood that women teachers are assigned the less-promising math students. Administrators may think that women are better equipped to handle more difficult students or that men are better able to challenge the bright ones. If so, then it could appear that students benefit less from women teachers simply because they are given the lower-achieving ones in the first place.
To check this out, I estimated the effect of having a female math teacher on students’ science scores. This can be ascertained because students were tested in all four subjects, although only two of their teachers were surveyed. The reasoning behind this admittedly indirect test is that the gender of a student’s math teacher should have relatively small effects on performance in science class taught by another teacher, especially in 8th grade, when science instruction usually does not have a significant mathematical component. If a student with a female math teacher also scores poorly in science, that would be a sign of a lower-performing student overall, not evidence that the gender of the teacher in the math class is having a negative impact.
And that is precisely what I found. The apparent impact of having a female math teacher on a girl’s performance in science was a negative 4 percent of a standard deviation, a fairly large effect (though one that was only weakly significant from a statistical point of view). In fact, the apparent impact on science performance was two-thirds the size of the effect on math performance. That suggests that any estimates of the effect of teacher gender on girls’ math achievement may well be biased by the fact that women are more likely to be assigned to lower-performing math students.
For that reason, and because I found no similar connections in other subject areas when I did the same kind of analysis, I excluded the math results from the main analysis reported above. Nor should it be particularly surprising that women are assigned lower-performing students in math, though that was not the case in other subjects.
In most middle schools, for most subjects, separating students by ability levels is the exception rather than the rule. But the one subject where it is most likely to happen is in fact math, where administrators may think that a certain level of accomplishment is necessary before algebra or some other advanced math material can be introduced. And when math classes are tracked, one can easily imagine that male teachers are more likely to be assigned to the advanced class. Thus, I place little weight on the math results that were observed.
If Not Single-Sex Schooling, Then What?
My results indicate that learning from a teacher of the opposite gender has a detrimental effect on students’ academic progress and their engagement in school. My best estimate is that it lowers test scores for both boys and girls by approximately 4 percent of a standard deviation and has even larger effects on various measures of student engagement.
Adverse gender effects have an impact on both boys and girls, but that effect falls more heavily on the male half of the population in middle school, simply because most middle-school teachers are female. My estimates suggest that, if half of the English teachers in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades were male and their effects on learning were additive, the achievement gap in reading would fall by approximately a third by the end of middle school. Similarly, these results suggest that part of boys’ relative propensity to be seen as disruptive in these grades is due to the gender interactions resulting from the preponderance of female teachers.
Unfortunately, in a coeducational setting, some of this gap closing would take place at the expense of the opposite gender, an outcome few would embrace. No one wants to see girls do worse in reading, or boys fare worse in science.
Some may therefore find in these results a strong case for a particular form of single-sex education, where teachers and students share the same gender. However, one should hesitate before drawing such policy conclusions from these findings. They may not be perfectly transferable to single-sex classrooms, where gender dynamics may differ from coeducational learning environments. Moreover, single-sex education may have other drawbacks, regardless of its potential impact on the outcomes examined in this study.
Would more limited interventions prove effective? Much depends on whether the gender impacts are due primarily to interactions within the classroom or more subtle “role-model” effects. If teachers had gender-specific training based on evidence about the different learning styles of boys and girls, could gender effects be limited? What if this training were aimed at combating gender biases in teacher behavior and expectations? My study suggests that gender interactions in the classroom matter, but it is still far from clear exactly why this is so. Perhaps the best policy solution is to keep an open mind about a variety of strategies that neither unequivocally endorse single-sex education nor rule it out of order altogether.
Thomas S. Dee is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at Swarthmore College and a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
The Why Chromosome
Gender gaps in educational outcomes are a matter of real and growing concern. We’ve known for a long time, since the 1970s, that girls outscore boys in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading tests, while boys tend to outperform girls in math and science.
Boys are increasingly less likely than girls to attend college and to receive a bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile, female college students continue to be underrepresented in such technical fields as engineering and computer science.
One popular, if controversial, response to these patterns has been a renewed push for single-sex education—an effort that has drawn support from across political divides. An amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act authorizing the creation of single-sex public schools was sponsored by Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas, but the measure passed in large part due to the support of Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, a Wellesley College graduate grateful for her opportunity to attend one of the country’s premier women’s colleges. (“Wellesley nurtured, challenged, and guided me,” she declared in her 1992 Commencement Day speech.) The National Association for Single-Sex Public Education reports that, as of April 2006, at least 223 public schools in the United States were offering gender-separate educational opportunities, up from just 4 in 1998. Although most were coeducational schools with single-sex classrooms, 44 were wholly single-sex.
The majority of arguments for single-sex schools and classrooms focus on the effects on interactions among students, but they also present the possibility of greatly increasing the number of students with teachers of the same gender. Is there any convincing evidence that doing so could make a difference in education—for boys and girls alike? So far the jury has been out, but my analysis of national survey and test-score data collected by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) allows me to offer new and convincing evidence of the differential impact of a teacher’s gender on student learning.
The Gender Gap
The evolution of the gender gaps in achievement as children mature suggests that what occurs in schools and classrooms may play an important role. According to the Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, when children enter kindergarten, the two genders perform similarly on tests of both reading and mathematics. But a few years later, by the spring of the 3rd grade, boys, on average, outperform girls in math and science, while the girls outperform the boys in reading. Disconcertingly, NAEP results show that for children between the ages of 9 and 13, the gender gaps in science and reading roughly double and the math gap increases by two-thirds. For children between the ages of 13 and 17, there is modest growth in the math and reading gender gaps but a substantial expansion of the gap in science.
The gender gaps in achievement as students finish high school are far from trivial. In reading, 17-year-old boys score 31 percent of a standard deviation below 17-year-old girls, a deficit equal to about one grade level. This is nearly half the size of the black-white test-score gap in reading. In science and math, meanwhile, girls of that age score 22 percent and 10 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, also a difference worthy of concern.
Drowned out by the din of public argument over the role of nature vs. nurture is a debate, far from settled, over exactly how the experience of going to school shapes learning among boys and girls. One school of thought contends that teachers, both men and women, treat boys and girls differently in the classroom. For example, some controversial evidence, based on classroom observations, suggests that both are likely to offer praise and remediation in response to comments by boys but mere acknowledgment to comments by girls. Some cognitive scientists suggest that teachers may subtly communicate different academic expectations of boys and girls and these biased expectations may become self-fulfilling.
Teacher Gender Matters
Other theories, of special interest here, suggest that much depends on the gender of the teacher. One theory asserts that the teacher’s gender shapes communications between teacher and pupil, while another says the teacher acts as a gender-specific role model, regardless of what he or she says or does. According to this second theory, students are more engaged, behave more appropriately, and perform at a higher level when taught by one who shares their gender.
Tests of these theories have relied primarily on information about teachers and students in college and graduate school. Findings have been mixed, so the issue remains unresolved. Studies have not focused on young adolescents, the time when students are particularly sensitive to gender differences and when gender gaps in achievement are pronounced.
I investigated the effect of a teacher’s gender using the National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS), which contains data on a nationally representative sample of nearly 25,000 8th graders from 1988. In addition to examining the effect of teacher gender on students’ test-score performance, I examined teacher perceptions of a student’s performance and student perceptions of the subject taught by a particular teacher. I was especially interested in the influence of a teacher’s gender on students’ perceptions, because engagement with an academic subject may be an important precursor to subsequent achievement levels, course selection in high school and college, and also occupational choice. For example, the underrepresentation of women in fields like engineering and computer science may be due to levels of confidence and interest in related subjects in high school.
Indeed, my results confirm that a teacher’s gender does have large effects on student test performance, teacher perceptions of students, and students’ engagement with academic material. Simply put, girls have better educational outcomes when taught by women and boys are better off when taught by men. These findings persist, even after I account for a variety of other characteristics of students, teachers, and classrooms that may influence student learning. They are especially important for young men when one considers that the percentage of 6th-grade teachers who were female ranged from 58 to 91 percent across four core subjects (math, science, reading, and history). Although these percentages decline in later grades, 83 percent of the English teachers in 8th grade are female, as are more than half of 8th-grade math and science teachers.
A Mother Lode of Gender Data
Key to my findings is the National Education Longitudinal Survey, initiated in 1988 as a survey of a nationally representative sample of 8th-grade students from 1,052 public and private schools. The DOE resurveyed a sample of these students during four follow-up reviews, in 1990, 1992, 1994, and 2000. For my study I rely only on the NELS data from 1988, which is based on surveys of 24,599 students and two of each student’s teachers.
In particular, I exploit a unique feature of the teacher surveys. For each sampled student, NELS administered questionnaires to teachers from two academic subjects: mathematics and English; mathematics and history; science and English; and science and history. Two completed teacher surveys are available for 21,324 of the 8th-grade students—a bit smaller than the full sample of NELS students because some teachers did not complete their questionnaires and some students did not have a class in one or both of the academic subjects randomly assigned to their school for which teacher surveys were administered.
The teacher survey solicited a variety of information about the teacher’s background, including gender. It also included several questions about how the teacher viewed the behavior and performance of the specific students in the study. I was most interested in the effect of gender on three assessments that appear to be particularly good indicators of academic development. Teachers were asked to simply respond yes or no as to whether the student was frequently disruptive, consistently inattentive, or rarely completed homework.
The student component of NELS includes additional outcome data for the subjects taught by each sampled teacher, including the results from multiple-choice achievement tests. The survey also asked students questions about their engagement with the subject. In particular, students indicated whether they were afraid to ask questions in that subject, looked forward to their class, and saw the subject as useful for their future. NELS also solicited information about each student’s gender as well as a variety of other demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.
NELS is a goldmine of information for those interested in gender dynamics within the classroom. Especially noteworthy is the fact that data are available from the same student in two different subjects taken from two different teachers, which enables us to account for educationally relevant characteristics of students that cannot be ascertained by conventional background characteristics. In other words, these “matched-pairs” data allow us to see how the outcomes of the same student vary with two different teachers.
When estimating the effect of a teacher’s gender, I use standard statistical techniques to adjust for the effect of several other teacher and classroom characteristics that may affect student outcomes. For example, I take into account whether the student shares the teacher’s race and ethnicity, because some of my own prior research suggests that the race of a teacher may influence student outcomes (see “The Race Connection,” Education Next, Spring 2004). I also consider the size of the class, the percentage of students in the classroom with limited English proficiency, the number of years a teacher has been working in the profession, and whether the teacher is state-certified in the subject he or she is teaching. What does this valuable set of data reveal about the connections between gender and learning?
The Most Important Findings
For three subject areas—science, social studies, and English—the overall effect of having a woman teacher instead of a man raises the achievement of girls by 4 percent of a standard deviation and lowers the achievement of boys by roughly the same amount, producing an overall gender gap of 8 percent of a standard deviation, no small matter if it can be assumed that this happened over the course of a single year. In fact, these estimates suggest that the effects of a year with a teacher of a particular gender are quite large relative to the gender gaps in achievement in the national datasets mentioned above. But I am hesitant to draw that conclusion in the absence of information about the gender of the teacher the student had in preceding years. Some of what I attribute to the 8th grade might have occurred in previous years, if the student had had multiple years of schooling from a teacher of the same gender.
While these results summarize the overall impact of teacher’s gender on test scores, the effects vary somewhat from one subject to the next. Test-score benefits for girls of having a female teacher are concentrated in social studies. I estimate that a female social-studies teacher increases a girl’s performance by 9 percent of a standard deviation. In contrast, the impact in English is not statistically significant. For boys, the largest effect appears in science. Their scores drop by 5 percent of a standard deviation if they have a female teacher. In English and social studies, the drops appear to be almost as large but are not statistically significant.
It does not seem likely that one can explain these results by the quality of the student’s teacher, because almost all teachers, whether men or women, are teaching boys and girls together. Yet the effect differs, depending on whether the genders of teacher and student match.
Still, to double-check this possibility, I isolate those situations where students of different genders had the same teacher. For the typical teacher who was surveyed by the NELS, there were three to four students included in the study. Given this information, I was able to re-estimate the effect of a teacher on students of the opposite gender, while adjusting for the overall effect of any individual teacher on student learning. In other words, because the same teacher is sometimes observed with sampled boys and girls, we can assess whether gender interactions matter after adjusting for the teacher’s unobserved traits. The overall results—the average for the three subject areas—indicate an average positive impact on student achievement of 4 percent of a standard deviation whenever the teacher-student gender was the same.
Classroom Dynamics
Exactly why gender makes so much of a difference in student learning is difficult to ascertain. But the NELS data offer some suggestive evidence that the opinions of teachers about their students—and of students about their teachers—is shaped in part by gender characteristics.
Regardless of the academic subject, boys are two to three times more likely than girls to be seen as disruptive, inattentive, and unlikely to complete their homework. However, how boys and girls view academic subjects varies across subjects in ways that parallel the gender gaps in subject test scores. For example, girls are more likely than boys to report that they are afraid to ask questions in math, science, and social studies. They are also less likely to look forward to these classes or to see them as useful for their future. Meanwhile, boys, as compared to girls, register more negative perceptions of English classes.
But while boys and girls may exhibit different behaviors and prefer different subjects, that is not quite the same thing as having a different experience because of the gender of the teacher. So is there any evidence that teachers relate better to students whose gender they share—or vice versa? Significant patterns can be detected within the NELS data. When a class is headed by a woman, boys are more likely to be seen as disruptive, while girls are less likely to be seen as either disruptive or inattentive.
Furthermore, when taught by a man, girls were more likely to report that they did not look forward to a subject, that it was not useful for their future, or that they were afraid to ask questions. This dynamic is strongest in science, where student reports indicate that female science teachers are far more effective in promoting girls’ engagement with this field of study. The estimated effects in the other two subjects pointed in the same direction but were statistically insignificant when examined separately.
Boys also had fewer positive reactions to their academic subject when taught by an opposite-gender teacher. In particular, when taught by a female teacher, boys were significantly more likely to report that they did not look forward to the subject. This effect appears to have been particularly pronounced when the female teacher was in history. The patterns for boys in other subjects are quite consistent with those observed in history, though I should again be cautious in drawing strong conclusions because many of the results fall short of conventional levels of statistical significance.
Math Results Unclear
Results in math differ strikingly from those in the other subject areas, but I place little weight on the findings in this area for reasons that require explanation. My initial analysis showed that both boys and girls suffered if they had a woman teacher. Both girls and boys scored 7 percent and 8 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, than if they had a man. But before rushing to the conclusion that math is a subject uniquely suited for male instruction, one needs to take into account other possible explanations.
I can rule out some obvious candidates. There is no evidence, for example, that female math teachers were given larger classes or were less likely to hold the proper subject-specific qualifications, such as proper state certification or a subject-specific degree at either the undergraduate or graduate level.
But I was concerned about the likelihood that women teachers are assigned the less-promising math students. Administrators may think that women are better equipped to handle more difficult students or that men are better able to challenge the bright ones. If so, then it could appear that students benefit less from women teachers simply because they are given the lower-achieving ones in the first place.
To check this out, I estimated the effect of having a female math teacher on students’ science scores. This can be ascertained because students were tested in all four subjects, although only two of their teachers were surveyed. The reasoning behind this admittedly indirect test is that the gender of a student’s math teacher should have relatively small effects on performance in science class taught by another teacher, especially in 8th grade, when science instruction usually does not have a significant mathematical component. If a student with a female math teacher also scores poorly in science, that would be a sign of a lower-performing student overall, not evidence that the gender of the teacher in the math class is having a negative impact.
And that is precisely what I found. The apparent impact of having a female math teacher on a girl’s performance in science was a negative 4 percent of a standard deviation, a fairly large effect (though one that was only weakly significant from a statistical point of view). In fact, the apparent impact on science performance was two-thirds the size of the effect on math performance. That suggests that any estimates of the effect of teacher gender on girls’ math achievement may well be biased by the fact that women are more likely to be assigned to lower-performing math students.
For that reason, and because I found no similar connections in other subject areas when I did the same kind of analysis, I excluded the math results from the main analysis reported above. Nor should it be particularly surprising that women are assigned lower-performing students in math, though that was not the case in other subjects.
In most middle schools, for most subjects, separating students by ability levels is the exception rather than the rule. But the one subject where it is most likely to happen is in fact math, where administrators may think that a certain level of accomplishment is necessary before algebra or some other advanced math material can be introduced. And when math classes are tracked, one can easily imagine that male teachers are more likely to be assigned to the advanced class. Thus, I place little weight on the math results that were observed.
If Not Single-Sex Schooling, Then What?
My results indicate that learning from a teacher of the opposite gender has a detrimental effect on students’ academic progress and their engagement in school. My best estimate is that it lowers test scores for both boys and girls by approximately 4 percent of a standard deviation and has even larger effects on various measures of student engagement.
Adverse gender effects have an impact on both boys and girls, but that effect falls more heavily on the male half of the population in middle school, simply because most middle-school teachers are female. My estimates suggest that, if half of the English teachers in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades were male and their effects on learning were additive, the achievement gap in reading would fall by approximately a third by the end of middle school. Similarly, these results suggest that part of boys’ relative propensity to be seen as disruptive in these grades is due to the gender interactions resulting from the preponderance of female teachers.
Unfortunately, in a coeducational setting, some of this gap closing would take place at the expense of the opposite gender, an outcome few would embrace. No one wants to see girls do worse in reading, or boys fare worse in science.
Some may therefore find in these results a strong case for a particular form of single-sex education, where teachers and students share the same gender. However, one should hesitate before drawing such policy conclusions from these findings. They may not be perfectly transferable to single-sex classrooms, where gender dynamics may differ from coeducational learning environments. Moreover, single-sex education may have other drawbacks, regardless of its potential impact on the outcomes examined in this study.
Would more limited interventions prove effective? Much depends on whether the gender impacts are due primarily to interactions within the classroom or more subtle “role-model” effects. If teachers had gender-specific training based on evidence about the different learning styles of boys and girls, could gender effects be limited? What if this training were aimed at combating gender biases in teacher behavior and expectations? My study suggests that gender interactions in the classroom matter, but it is still far from clear exactly why this is so. Perhaps the best policy solution is to keep an open mind about a variety of strategies that neither unequivocally endorse single-sex education nor rule it out of order altogether.
Thomas S. Dee is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at Swarthmore College and a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
The Why Chromosome
Childhood versus the Pussycat Dolls
Mercatornet, 29 March 2007
Written by Theron Bowers
A widely publicised report on the sexualisation of girls belabours the obvious and fails to make effective recommendations. Why?
First, Madonna, then Britney, today's queens of pop eroticism are the Pussycat Dolls. The former burlesque dance troupe turned singers are everywhere posing in lingerie and chirping, "Doncha". Last spring the toy company Hasbro even announced a plan for a Pussycat fashion doll. According to the New York Times, the toy line was "intended for children age 6-9" and aimed "to mimic the act’s playfully risqué style". Other sexy dolls have been hits -- the Spice Girls dolls generated 150 million. The Bratz dolls, mini-skirted valley girls, are popular and have a Saturday morning cartoon show. So the Hasbro deal didn’t raise any eyebrows. The business section of the Times reported on the story no differently than any other commercial deal. Readers were probably left wondering, what’s next, pole-dancing Barbie?
Fortunately, parents responded quickly to the prospect of their 6-year-old daughters mimicking the Pussycat Dolls. Less than a month later, Hasbro dropped its plans. Unfortunately, moms and dads had slowed the march against childhood for only a moment.
The American Psychological Association (APA) has also noticed these assaults on girlhood. Last month, it released a report from its Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Like many professional organisations, the APA is a subsidiary of the progressive movement. A few years ago the organisation published a study which suggested that child sexual abuse wasn’t very harmful. Lately, the APA has taken up the battle against American Indian mascots, abstinence education and teaching intelligent design.
The APA claims that the task force was begun in response to "public concern". The concern is hardly new. More than 25 years ago, the starlet Brooke Shields became a 15-year-old teenage sex kitten in provocative Calvin Klein ads for jeans. In 1999, after the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, we were introduced to the Felini-esque world of child beauty pageants with six-year-old girls coquettishly batting their eyelashes and prancing around in swim suits.
The APA's report spins a tale of a monistical cultural web involving the media, families and peers which harass and sexualise young female victims. In a Stockholm Syndrome twist, the girls adopt the men’s sexual image of women. The story ends with women suffering from impaired cognitive functioning, body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, physical health problems and exploitation.
The Task Force has an easy time proving the obvious. The media frequently presents women as sexual objects. Unfortunately, the title of the report states, "Girls." Most of the sexualised images are of women. The authors of the report state that girls model themselves after women, hence the images are relevant.
Their justification is acceptable. Girls grow up with bed-hopping shows like Friends and Sex and the City. Former Disney Wonderkid, now trampy boozer, Linsay Lohan has praised Sex and the City stating that the show ''changed everything for me, because those girls would just sleep with so many people!''
However, the Task Force has a tougher problem demonstrating harm. Most researchers work at universities where there is a shortage of 12-year-old girls. The majority of the studies involve college women. While the old lemons and lemonade approach may work for some problems, good research isn’t so flexible. The Task Force tries to finesse the lack of relevant subjects by reasoning that "what young women believe about themselves and how they feel at the present moment were shaped by how they were treated and what they were exposed to when they were girls." Excuse changing the metaphor, but this lemon is hard swallow. People’s beliefs and feelings are also changed by what they experienced one hour ago. Anyone who has been to college knows how easily some young people can change after a few weeks.
None the less, the Task Force arrives at some interesting conclusions about the consequences of sexualisation. The attention grabber in several stories has been the swim suit versus the sweater experiment. The authors described an experiment with college students. Students were asked to try on and evaluate either a sweater or a swim suit. While waiting in a dressing room, they were asked to complete a math test. The women who wore the sweater did significantly better on the math test than women in the swim suites. The report notes similar results among minority women.
The writer concludes that thinking about the body and comparing it to sexualised ideas disrupted "mental capacity" (although it appears that performance was disrupted rather than capacity). The Task Force gushes over this series of studies: "The implications are stunning and suggest that sexualisation may contribute to girls dropping out of higher level mathematics in high school."
As for mental illness, the Task Force argues that cultural beauty ideas lead to eating disorders. However, the studies cited noted that only when the beauty idea emphasises thinness is there an association with anorexia.
Looking at the culture through the microscopic lens of science, the Task Force distorts the evidence throughout the report. The microscope shows decreased cognitive performance. Yet, the big picture reveals that college attendance is higher than ever and women outnumber men. The microscope focuses on the influence of beauty on thinness but ignores the influence of class values and health on thinness. Remember Gloria "You can never be too rich or too thin" Vanderbilt?
The Task Force places most of the responsibility for solving the problem with the government, through schools, legislation and research money. When mentioned, parents are portrayed as either ignorant dupes or as promoters of a sexualised message. Mothers are criticised for "fat talk" and fathers appear lecherous. Despite the emphasis on modesty and virtues other than attractiveness in traditional Western faiths, religion is only briefly mentioned and more attention is paid to eastern meditative practices than traditional Christianity.
Some headlines have proclaimed that the report calls for a removal of sexualised images of girls. In fact, the Task Force's recommendations are quite tepid. Although a minuscule proportion of advertisements involve sexualised image of children, the Task Force only suggests that the government "reduce" the use of sexualised images of girls. The Task Force recommendations are silent about limiting the use of eroticised adult female images or pornography. The Task Force fails to heed their previous evidence that girls are sexualised by modelling themselves after the images of adult women. The Pussycat fashion dolls may have a new life after this report.
The APA Task Force calls for a safe surrender and no meaningful changes in our current climate of sexualisation, illustrated by their emphasis on comprehensive sex education. Sex education is a harm-reduction strategy which is not intended to combat or support resistance to sexualisation any more than needle exchange programs fosters overcoming addiction. Meanwhile, the APA has declared a jihad against abstinence-only programs. Unlike cucumber and condom programs, the abstinence-only approach may actually encourage girls and boys to respect themselves, their sexuality, marriage and children.
The APA Task Force knows the problem but not the solution. For the Task Force, strengthening families and returning to traditional values is not a consideration. The Pussycat Dolls can curl up by their milk and sleep well tonight. The APA is no threat to Doll Power.
Theron Bowers MD is a psychiatrist Deep in the Heart of Texas and may be contacted at tcbowers@sbcglobal.net.
Written by Theron Bowers
A widely publicised report on the sexualisation of girls belabours the obvious and fails to make effective recommendations. Why?
First, Madonna, then Britney, today's queens of pop eroticism are the Pussycat Dolls. The former burlesque dance troupe turned singers are everywhere posing in lingerie and chirping, "Doncha". Last spring the toy company Hasbro even announced a plan for a Pussycat fashion doll. According to the New York Times, the toy line was "intended for children age 6-9" and aimed "to mimic the act’s playfully risqué style". Other sexy dolls have been hits -- the Spice Girls dolls generated 150 million. The Bratz dolls, mini-skirted valley girls, are popular and have a Saturday morning cartoon show. So the Hasbro deal didn’t raise any eyebrows. The business section of the Times reported on the story no differently than any other commercial deal. Readers were probably left wondering, what’s next, pole-dancing Barbie?
Fortunately, parents responded quickly to the prospect of their 6-year-old daughters mimicking the Pussycat Dolls. Less than a month later, Hasbro dropped its plans. Unfortunately, moms and dads had slowed the march against childhood for only a moment.
The American Psychological Association (APA) has also noticed these assaults on girlhood. Last month, it released a report from its Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Like many professional organisations, the APA is a subsidiary of the progressive movement. A few years ago the organisation published a study which suggested that child sexual abuse wasn’t very harmful. Lately, the APA has taken up the battle against American Indian mascots, abstinence education and teaching intelligent design.
The APA claims that the task force was begun in response to "public concern". The concern is hardly new. More than 25 years ago, the starlet Brooke Shields became a 15-year-old teenage sex kitten in provocative Calvin Klein ads for jeans. In 1999, after the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, we were introduced to the Felini-esque world of child beauty pageants with six-year-old girls coquettishly batting their eyelashes and prancing around in swim suits.
The APA's report spins a tale of a monistical cultural web involving the media, families and peers which harass and sexualise young female victims. In a Stockholm Syndrome twist, the girls adopt the men’s sexual image of women. The story ends with women suffering from impaired cognitive functioning, body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, physical health problems and exploitation.
The Task Force has an easy time proving the obvious. The media frequently presents women as sexual objects. Unfortunately, the title of the report states, "Girls." Most of the sexualised images are of women. The authors of the report state that girls model themselves after women, hence the images are relevant.
Their justification is acceptable. Girls grow up with bed-hopping shows like Friends and Sex and the City. Former Disney Wonderkid, now trampy boozer, Linsay Lohan has praised Sex and the City stating that the show ''changed everything for me, because those girls would just sleep with so many people!''
However, the Task Force has a tougher problem demonstrating harm. Most researchers work at universities where there is a shortage of 12-year-old girls. The majority of the studies involve college women. While the old lemons and lemonade approach may work for some problems, good research isn’t so flexible. The Task Force tries to finesse the lack of relevant subjects by reasoning that "what young women believe about themselves and how they feel at the present moment were shaped by how they were treated and what they were exposed to when they were girls." Excuse changing the metaphor, but this lemon is hard swallow. People’s beliefs and feelings are also changed by what they experienced one hour ago. Anyone who has been to college knows how easily some young people can change after a few weeks.
None the less, the Task Force arrives at some interesting conclusions about the consequences of sexualisation. The attention grabber in several stories has been the swim suit versus the sweater experiment. The authors described an experiment with college students. Students were asked to try on and evaluate either a sweater or a swim suit. While waiting in a dressing room, they were asked to complete a math test. The women who wore the sweater did significantly better on the math test than women in the swim suites. The report notes similar results among minority women.
The writer concludes that thinking about the body and comparing it to sexualised ideas disrupted "mental capacity" (although it appears that performance was disrupted rather than capacity). The Task Force gushes over this series of studies: "The implications are stunning and suggest that sexualisation may contribute to girls dropping out of higher level mathematics in high school."
As for mental illness, the Task Force argues that cultural beauty ideas lead to eating disorders. However, the studies cited noted that only when the beauty idea emphasises thinness is there an association with anorexia.
Looking at the culture through the microscopic lens of science, the Task Force distorts the evidence throughout the report. The microscope shows decreased cognitive performance. Yet, the big picture reveals that college attendance is higher than ever and women outnumber men. The microscope focuses on the influence of beauty on thinness but ignores the influence of class values and health on thinness. Remember Gloria "You can never be too rich or too thin" Vanderbilt?
The Task Force places most of the responsibility for solving the problem with the government, through schools, legislation and research money. When mentioned, parents are portrayed as either ignorant dupes or as promoters of a sexualised message. Mothers are criticised for "fat talk" and fathers appear lecherous. Despite the emphasis on modesty and virtues other than attractiveness in traditional Western faiths, religion is only briefly mentioned and more attention is paid to eastern meditative practices than traditional Christianity.
Some headlines have proclaimed that the report calls for a removal of sexualised images of girls. In fact, the Task Force's recommendations are quite tepid. Although a minuscule proportion of advertisements involve sexualised image of children, the Task Force only suggests that the government "reduce" the use of sexualised images of girls. The Task Force recommendations are silent about limiting the use of eroticised adult female images or pornography. The Task Force fails to heed their previous evidence that girls are sexualised by modelling themselves after the images of adult women. The Pussycat fashion dolls may have a new life after this report.
The APA Task Force calls for a safe surrender and no meaningful changes in our current climate of sexualisation, illustrated by their emphasis on comprehensive sex education. Sex education is a harm-reduction strategy which is not intended to combat or support resistance to sexualisation any more than needle exchange programs fosters overcoming addiction. Meanwhile, the APA has declared a jihad against abstinence-only programs. Unlike cucumber and condom programs, the abstinence-only approach may actually encourage girls and boys to respect themselves, their sexuality, marriage and children.
The APA Task Force knows the problem but not the solution. For the Task Force, strengthening families and returning to traditional values is not a consideration. The Pussycat Dolls can curl up by their milk and sleep well tonight. The APA is no threat to Doll Power.
Theron Bowers MD is a psychiatrist Deep in the Heart of Texas and may be contacted at tcbowers@sbcglobal.net.
Single-sex schooling
Mercatornet, 02 August 2005
Written by Andrew Mullins
Comparing the benefits of single-sex education and coeducation.
Author Andrew Mullins is Headmaster of Redfield College, an independent Years 2-12 Boys’ school in the northwest of Sydney. His career has included over 25 years' teaching the humanities in Australian secondary schools, leading to his interest in presenting the wisdom of classic thinkers and philosophers. He has developed a strong policy of involving parents in the process of reflecting desirable values to young people. He is the author of Parenting for Character (Finch Publishing, 2005).
Current controversies The comparative benefits of single-sex and coeducational schooling have been much debated over the past 50 years. The proponents of single-sex education argue that boys and girls have differing needs and that their styles of learning are different. They point to data demonstrating the comparative under-performance of both boys and girls in co-ed classrooms.
Proponents of coeducation argue that mixed education is more in keeping with the mores of modern Western society, and that children from co-ed schools are better adjusted. Both contend that their own approach is truly holistic. The debate has a social component as well. Coeducation is sometimes regarded as a solution to the failure of the modern family to provide sufficiently for the effective socialization and moral development of children. The financial savings of using shared facilities have led governments to amalgamate formerly single-sex schools and open new co-ed schools, both public and private. In some countries governments have told independent schools to embrace coeducation or forfeit public funding. A new element in the debate is widespread agreement that somehow education is failing boys. Boys are generally outperformed by girls; statistics of self harm and depression amongst boys are alarming; there seems to be a growing alienation of boys from their parents and fathers in particular.
Psychologists write of the “father hunger” of boys who grow up without sufficient input from their natural father. As Western society strives for gender equality, everyone has become more alert to the unfairness of discrimination on the basis of sex. This argument is used by both sides. Proponents of single-sex education argue that only through single-sex education are the specific needs of boys and girls met. Proponents of coeducation argue that coeducation ensures equity of access to educational facilities and courses. Single-sex education supporters reply that equality of the sexes does not necessitate identical provision for males and females, and that the best way of attending to the needs of boys and girls is to offer them facilities and courses that satisfy their unique requirements.
The advantages of single-sex education Boys and girls are wired to learn in different ways It seems beyond dispute that boys and girls learn at different paces and in different ways. This is not a matter of gender bias, but of experience verified time and again by psychological research. The view from the 1970s that gender traits are mere cultural constructs has been discredited.
Cross-cultural studies over the past 30 years reveal that gender differences across the wide variety of cultures are remarkably constant (1). Here are some relevant differences. According to a 2001 study (2), women use the right and left hemispheres of the brain to process language; men use only the left hemisphere. In general men are more likely to use one area of the brain for a given activity; women are more likely to use more of the brain. Studies show that women respond to directions that include data about what they will see and hear; men prefer abstract directions (3) . Girls’ brains develop through adolescence so that girls are better able to discuss their feelings; boys’ brains do not. Research is revealing major physiological differences in the brains of even pre-adolescent boys and girls (4) . For example, seven-year-old girls hear better than boys (5). These physical differences lead to differences in the way boys and girls learn.
Teachers need to encourage girls, while boys need a reality check. Direct challenging works well with boys and they tend to respond to clear boundaries. Emotional activity is processed in a completely different part of the brain in older girls compared with older boys. It has been suggested that girls respond more innately to literature and that they more easily make links between ideas and emotions. In stories, girls tend to respond to nuances of character, boys to action 6. Role-playing exercises allowing a student to explore character work particularly well for girls. Inductive exercises allowing girls to act hypothetically also work well. There is evidence that boys respond more to structured lessons, finite tasks, and perhaps to the more abstract. Girls tend to respond more readily to group work and team work. One fascinating study suggests that under certain circumstances stress has a beneficial effect on male learning, but that it can impair the learning of a female, and that this characteristic is wired in the male brain from before birth 7.Most children learn better in a single-sex environment On average, children in single-sex education outperform children of comparative ability in co-ed contexts. In a 20-year Australian study of 270,000 students, Ken Rowe found that both boys and girls performed between 15 and 22 percentile points higher on standardised tests when they attended single-sex schools.(8)
The National Foundation for Educational Research in England (9) found that, even after controlling for student ability and other background factors, boys and girls performed significantly better academically in single-sex schools than in co-ed schools. Students in Jamaica attending single-sex schools outperformed students in co-ed schools in almost every subject tested.(10) A 1997 study by Jean and Geoffrey Underwood showed that girl-girl pairings performed best on tasks, and that girl-boy pairings tended to depress the achievement of the girls involved. (11) Boys and girls experience the benefits of schooling in different ways. British studies suggest that females more than males benefit academically from single-sex education: they participate more in class, develop higher self esteem, score higher in aptitude tests, are more likely to choose sciences and other male domains at tertiary level, and are more successful in careers.
Research suggests that boys dominate the classroom in a co-ed environment. Boys can behave more loudly. Some research has shown that girls receive fewer encouraging comments than boys in co-ed environments. Studies by Cornelius Riordan suggest that children from underprivileged backgrounds are the greatest beneficiaries of single-sex schooling.(12) The message of all this research is simple: there are no differences in what girls and boys can learn, but here are big differences in the best way to teach them.Single-sex education meets the needs of boys better Boys and girls have different needs and education which respects personal differences must take this into account. On a practical level, the intuitively directed and affectively oriented styles of learning which suit most girls are not always compatible with the more structured and practical approaches which appeal to boys. Single-sex schooling allows teachers to tailor their teaching style to the boys and facilitates a more rounded educational experience. In a co-ed school, boys can opt out of curriculum areas where they would be out-performed. Furthermore, there is evidence that mixed classrooms can discriminate against either boys and girls depending on the subject, the gender of the teacher, the teacher’s methodologies, and the prevailing culture in the school. Some schools have now started running single-sex classrooms in English and other humanities subjects to improve the performance of boys. The pilot study that demonstrated improved performance of boys in this context has been known as the Cotswold Experiment. (13) Single-sex education meets the needs of girls betterSingle-sex education has clear benefits for girls. In the first place, it often gives them expanded educational opportunities by allowing them to pursue non-traditional disciplines for girls such as mathematics or science.
Single-sex schooling also offers more opportunities to girls to exercise leadership. When girls and boys are in the same classroom, the boys tend to dominate and overshadow equally talented girls. On an emotional level, single-sex education puts less pressure on girls, especially in adolescence. At that age, girls are more prone than boys to suffer from low self esteem. It is difficult to manage this issue in a co-ed climate when boys dominate in the classroom and when they receive more recognition, allowance for misbehaviour and encouragement. Single-sex education makes greater provision for gender role modelingThe shortage of male teachers in the primary classroom is a concern in many countries. In the first six years of school, many boys in co-ed schools seldom encounter a male teacher. Because children imitate those they admire, it is common sense to ensure that boys and girls find in their teachers truly admirable role models. The example of professionalism, values and consistently positive behaviour is most important. But there are other aspects of example that are gender-specific. A boy learns what it means to be a man from his father, but this is reinforced if there are other admirable men in his life. This is also true for girls and their female teachers.Single-sex schooling allows boys and girls to mature at their own pace Girls mature earlier than boys: they are better behaved, more diligent and more sensible and they find it easier to relate to the adult world. For all these reasons, it is often argued that girls exert a civilising influence on boys. Whilst this may be true in some situation, the converse is also true: boys can uncivilise girls. When adolescent girls and boys study together, there is much evidence that a proportion will end up distracted from their work.
Single-sex schooling is often criticised for reinforcing negative images of masculinity. Unfortunately this can even happen in co-ed schools. The problem is not solved by bringing girls and boys together, but by vigilantly managing the culture in a school and sub-groups in the school. Single-sex schooling does not handicap children socially There is no evidence that children who have attended co-ed schools enter adult relationships that are more stable or fulfilling with the opposite sex. Assertions that children from co-ed backgrounds are better prepared for adult life seem to be flawed. There is a higher rate of unplanned pregnancies (and by implication, of terminated pregnancies) for girls in co-ed schools. One study has shown that students from single-sex schooling are not noticeably thwarted in the development of relationships with the opposite sex either at school or later at university.(14) Coeducation can allow socialising to complicate intellectual development. Of course a positive school culture and the superior training of teachers can work against this. But it is difficult to protect impressionable young people from the images of precocious intimacy that saturate the media. Since emotional attraction and physical attraction works first of all at the level of physical proximity, there seems a strong argument to separate a teenager’s academic world from his or her social world.
In a coeducational secondary classroom the lines between social life and school can become blurred. Single-sex education allows children to think about things “other than their hormones”. Single-sex schooling makes it easier to be a good parent Single-sex schools also provide parents with an opportunity to manage more effectively the social development of their children, particularly in the early years. It makes it easier for them to impart education about sexual matters in a way consistent with their values. Of course when parents choose to send their children to single-sex schools they will need to have much more initiative in providing for the social development of their children. They should set up many opportunities for boys to mix with girls in a family setting during childhood, well before they turn 14 or 15. It is very late to be starting to talk with a child about these issues once he or she has reached mid secondary school. An undeniable problem for all families is the gulf between home life and a teenager’s social world. Children must feel they can bring their friends home. Coeducational schooling does little to help because it creates a social environment which is totally beyond the parents’ knowledge and largely outside their control. Unhappily when youth culture becomes divorced from family life, a certain percentage of children are sure to end up badly damaged. Even if single-sex schooling is better for children, it demands more of their parents because they have to take responsibility for helping their children acquire mature social skills.
It is easier for parents who send their children to co-ed schools to shirk this responsibility, even though this is not a task which can be delegated to anyone else. Indeed, the notion that parents can wash their hands of the problems of teenage social life may account for some of the popularity of co-ed education. But although relinquishing their leadership role might make parents’ lives easier, the children often suffer from their neglect.
Quotes
• “You cannot tell from looking at a slice of someone’s brain if that person was Black or Asian, a Jew or a Christian, or a Hindu or a Muslim. But you can tell whether that person was male or female.” ~ National Association for Single Sex Public Education:
•“Girls’ schools provide an environment that not only is good in and of itself, but that in its redefinition of competitiveness and collaboration, of autonomy and connectedness, presents a model that other schools do well to emulate.” ~ Dr David Riesman, Harvard University
•“When girls go to single-sex schools, they stop being the audience and become the players.” ~ Professors Myra and David Sadker, American University
Internet links National Association for Single Sex Public EducationA site set up by Dr Leonard Sax. An excellent summary of the research. National Coalition of Girls’ Schools Useful quotes, references to research, lists of benefits of girls-only education. Do Girls and Boys Do Better in Separate Classrooms?4 Troubled Teens websiteThe New Gender Gap: From kindergarten to grad school, boys are becoming the second sex. BusinessWeek online. May 26, 2003. Boys just can’t be boys! Sid Sidebottom. Submission to Australian Parliamentary inquiry into education of boys. 2002.
References
(1) Paul Costa, Antonio Terracciano, & Robert McCrae, “Gender differences in personality traits across cultures: robust and surprising findings,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, volume 81, number 2, pp. 322-331, 2001.
(2) Michael Phillips, Mark Lowe, Joseph T. Lurito, Mario Dzemidzic, and Vincent Matthews. Temporal lobe activation demonstrates sex-based differences during passive listening. Radiology, 220:202-207, 2001.
(3) N. Sandstrom, J. Kaufman, S. A. Huettel. Males and females use different distal cues in a virtual environment navigation task. Brain Research: Cognitive Brain Research, 1998, 6:351-360.
(4) María Elena Cordero, Carlos Valenzuela, Rafael Torres, Angel Rodriguez, “Sexual dimorphism in number and proportion of neurons in the human median raphe nucleus,” Developmental Brain Research, 124:43-52, 2000.
(5) John F. Corso, “Age and sex differences in thresholds”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 31:489-507, 1959.
(6) William Killgore, Mika Oki, and Deborah Yurgelun-Todd. Sex-specific developmental changes in amygdala responses to affective faces. NeuroReport, 2001, 12:427-433.
(7) Tracey J. Shores & George Miesegaes. Testosterone in utero and at birth dictates how stressful experience will affect learning in adulthood. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99:13955-13960, October 15, 2002.)
(8) “Boys and girls perform better at school in single-sex environments”. April 17, 2000.
(9) Spielhofer T, O’Donnell L, Benton T, Schagen S, Schagen I. “The Impact of School Size and Single-Sex Education on Performance”. National Foundation for Educational Research. 2002.
(10) Marlene Hamilton. Performance levels in science and other subjects for Jamaican adolescents attending single-sex and coeducational high schools, International Science Education, 69(4):535-547, 1985.
(11) Underwood, G., & Underwood, J. (1997). Children’s interactions and learning outcomes with interactive books. Paper presented at the CAL (Computer Assisted Learning) Conference, April 2 1997, at the University of Exeter.
(12) Cornelius Riordan. Girls and Boys in School: together or separate? New York: Teachers College Press, 1990.
(13) Steve Biddulph. “The Cotswold Experiment”. Certified Male. 1995.
(14) Neville Bruce and Katherine Sanders, “Incidence and duration of romantic attraction in students progressing from secondary to tertiary education,” Journal of Biosocial Sciences, volume 33, pages 173-184, 2002.
Written by Andrew Mullins
Comparing the benefits of single-sex education and coeducation.
Author Andrew Mullins is Headmaster of Redfield College, an independent Years 2-12 Boys’ school in the northwest of Sydney. His career has included over 25 years' teaching the humanities in Australian secondary schools, leading to his interest in presenting the wisdom of classic thinkers and philosophers. He has developed a strong policy of involving parents in the process of reflecting desirable values to young people. He is the author of Parenting for Character (Finch Publishing, 2005).
Current controversies The comparative benefits of single-sex and coeducational schooling have been much debated over the past 50 years. The proponents of single-sex education argue that boys and girls have differing needs and that their styles of learning are different. They point to data demonstrating the comparative under-performance of both boys and girls in co-ed classrooms.
Proponents of coeducation argue that mixed education is more in keeping with the mores of modern Western society, and that children from co-ed schools are better adjusted. Both contend that their own approach is truly holistic. The debate has a social component as well. Coeducation is sometimes regarded as a solution to the failure of the modern family to provide sufficiently for the effective socialization and moral development of children. The financial savings of using shared facilities have led governments to amalgamate formerly single-sex schools and open new co-ed schools, both public and private. In some countries governments have told independent schools to embrace coeducation or forfeit public funding. A new element in the debate is widespread agreement that somehow education is failing boys. Boys are generally outperformed by girls; statistics of self harm and depression amongst boys are alarming; there seems to be a growing alienation of boys from their parents and fathers in particular.
Psychologists write of the “father hunger” of boys who grow up without sufficient input from their natural father. As Western society strives for gender equality, everyone has become more alert to the unfairness of discrimination on the basis of sex. This argument is used by both sides. Proponents of single-sex education argue that only through single-sex education are the specific needs of boys and girls met. Proponents of coeducation argue that coeducation ensures equity of access to educational facilities and courses. Single-sex education supporters reply that equality of the sexes does not necessitate identical provision for males and females, and that the best way of attending to the needs of boys and girls is to offer them facilities and courses that satisfy their unique requirements.
The advantages of single-sex education Boys and girls are wired to learn in different ways It seems beyond dispute that boys and girls learn at different paces and in different ways. This is not a matter of gender bias, but of experience verified time and again by psychological research. The view from the 1970s that gender traits are mere cultural constructs has been discredited.
Cross-cultural studies over the past 30 years reveal that gender differences across the wide variety of cultures are remarkably constant (1). Here are some relevant differences. According to a 2001 study (2), women use the right and left hemispheres of the brain to process language; men use only the left hemisphere. In general men are more likely to use one area of the brain for a given activity; women are more likely to use more of the brain. Studies show that women respond to directions that include data about what they will see and hear; men prefer abstract directions (3) . Girls’ brains develop through adolescence so that girls are better able to discuss their feelings; boys’ brains do not. Research is revealing major physiological differences in the brains of even pre-adolescent boys and girls (4) . For example, seven-year-old girls hear better than boys (5). These physical differences lead to differences in the way boys and girls learn.
Teachers need to encourage girls, while boys need a reality check. Direct challenging works well with boys and they tend to respond to clear boundaries. Emotional activity is processed in a completely different part of the brain in older girls compared with older boys. It has been suggested that girls respond more innately to literature and that they more easily make links between ideas and emotions. In stories, girls tend to respond to nuances of character, boys to action 6. Role-playing exercises allowing a student to explore character work particularly well for girls. Inductive exercises allowing girls to act hypothetically also work well. There is evidence that boys respond more to structured lessons, finite tasks, and perhaps to the more abstract. Girls tend to respond more readily to group work and team work. One fascinating study suggests that under certain circumstances stress has a beneficial effect on male learning, but that it can impair the learning of a female, and that this characteristic is wired in the male brain from before birth 7.Most children learn better in a single-sex environment On average, children in single-sex education outperform children of comparative ability in co-ed contexts. In a 20-year Australian study of 270,000 students, Ken Rowe found that both boys and girls performed between 15 and 22 percentile points higher on standardised tests when they attended single-sex schools.(8)
The National Foundation for Educational Research in England (9) found that, even after controlling for student ability and other background factors, boys and girls performed significantly better academically in single-sex schools than in co-ed schools. Students in Jamaica attending single-sex schools outperformed students in co-ed schools in almost every subject tested.(10) A 1997 study by Jean and Geoffrey Underwood showed that girl-girl pairings performed best on tasks, and that girl-boy pairings tended to depress the achievement of the girls involved. (11) Boys and girls experience the benefits of schooling in different ways. British studies suggest that females more than males benefit academically from single-sex education: they participate more in class, develop higher self esteem, score higher in aptitude tests, are more likely to choose sciences and other male domains at tertiary level, and are more successful in careers.
Research suggests that boys dominate the classroom in a co-ed environment. Boys can behave more loudly. Some research has shown that girls receive fewer encouraging comments than boys in co-ed environments. Studies by Cornelius Riordan suggest that children from underprivileged backgrounds are the greatest beneficiaries of single-sex schooling.(12) The message of all this research is simple: there are no differences in what girls and boys can learn, but here are big differences in the best way to teach them.Single-sex education meets the needs of boys better Boys and girls have different needs and education which respects personal differences must take this into account. On a practical level, the intuitively directed and affectively oriented styles of learning which suit most girls are not always compatible with the more structured and practical approaches which appeal to boys. Single-sex schooling allows teachers to tailor their teaching style to the boys and facilitates a more rounded educational experience. In a co-ed school, boys can opt out of curriculum areas where they would be out-performed. Furthermore, there is evidence that mixed classrooms can discriminate against either boys and girls depending on the subject, the gender of the teacher, the teacher’s methodologies, and the prevailing culture in the school. Some schools have now started running single-sex classrooms in English and other humanities subjects to improve the performance of boys. The pilot study that demonstrated improved performance of boys in this context has been known as the Cotswold Experiment. (13) Single-sex education meets the needs of girls betterSingle-sex education has clear benefits for girls. In the first place, it often gives them expanded educational opportunities by allowing them to pursue non-traditional disciplines for girls such as mathematics or science.
Single-sex schooling also offers more opportunities to girls to exercise leadership. When girls and boys are in the same classroom, the boys tend to dominate and overshadow equally talented girls. On an emotional level, single-sex education puts less pressure on girls, especially in adolescence. At that age, girls are more prone than boys to suffer from low self esteem. It is difficult to manage this issue in a co-ed climate when boys dominate in the classroom and when they receive more recognition, allowance for misbehaviour and encouragement. Single-sex education makes greater provision for gender role modelingThe shortage of male teachers in the primary classroom is a concern in many countries. In the first six years of school, many boys in co-ed schools seldom encounter a male teacher. Because children imitate those they admire, it is common sense to ensure that boys and girls find in their teachers truly admirable role models. The example of professionalism, values and consistently positive behaviour is most important. But there are other aspects of example that are gender-specific. A boy learns what it means to be a man from his father, but this is reinforced if there are other admirable men in his life. This is also true for girls and their female teachers.Single-sex schooling allows boys and girls to mature at their own pace Girls mature earlier than boys: they are better behaved, more diligent and more sensible and they find it easier to relate to the adult world. For all these reasons, it is often argued that girls exert a civilising influence on boys. Whilst this may be true in some situation, the converse is also true: boys can uncivilise girls. When adolescent girls and boys study together, there is much evidence that a proportion will end up distracted from their work.
Single-sex schooling is often criticised for reinforcing negative images of masculinity. Unfortunately this can even happen in co-ed schools. The problem is not solved by bringing girls and boys together, but by vigilantly managing the culture in a school and sub-groups in the school. Single-sex schooling does not handicap children socially There is no evidence that children who have attended co-ed schools enter adult relationships that are more stable or fulfilling with the opposite sex. Assertions that children from co-ed backgrounds are better prepared for adult life seem to be flawed. There is a higher rate of unplanned pregnancies (and by implication, of terminated pregnancies) for girls in co-ed schools. One study has shown that students from single-sex schooling are not noticeably thwarted in the development of relationships with the opposite sex either at school or later at university.(14) Coeducation can allow socialising to complicate intellectual development. Of course a positive school culture and the superior training of teachers can work against this. But it is difficult to protect impressionable young people from the images of precocious intimacy that saturate the media. Since emotional attraction and physical attraction works first of all at the level of physical proximity, there seems a strong argument to separate a teenager’s academic world from his or her social world.
In a coeducational secondary classroom the lines between social life and school can become blurred. Single-sex education allows children to think about things “other than their hormones”. Single-sex schooling makes it easier to be a good parent Single-sex schools also provide parents with an opportunity to manage more effectively the social development of their children, particularly in the early years. It makes it easier for them to impart education about sexual matters in a way consistent with their values. Of course when parents choose to send their children to single-sex schools they will need to have much more initiative in providing for the social development of their children. They should set up many opportunities for boys to mix with girls in a family setting during childhood, well before they turn 14 or 15. It is very late to be starting to talk with a child about these issues once he or she has reached mid secondary school. An undeniable problem for all families is the gulf between home life and a teenager’s social world. Children must feel they can bring their friends home. Coeducational schooling does little to help because it creates a social environment which is totally beyond the parents’ knowledge and largely outside their control. Unhappily when youth culture becomes divorced from family life, a certain percentage of children are sure to end up badly damaged. Even if single-sex schooling is better for children, it demands more of their parents because they have to take responsibility for helping their children acquire mature social skills.
It is easier for parents who send their children to co-ed schools to shirk this responsibility, even though this is not a task which can be delegated to anyone else. Indeed, the notion that parents can wash their hands of the problems of teenage social life may account for some of the popularity of co-ed education. But although relinquishing their leadership role might make parents’ lives easier, the children often suffer from their neglect.
Quotes
• “You cannot tell from looking at a slice of someone’s brain if that person was Black or Asian, a Jew or a Christian, or a Hindu or a Muslim. But you can tell whether that person was male or female.” ~ National Association for Single Sex Public Education:
•“Girls’ schools provide an environment that not only is good in and of itself, but that in its redefinition of competitiveness and collaboration, of autonomy and connectedness, presents a model that other schools do well to emulate.” ~ Dr David Riesman, Harvard University
•“When girls go to single-sex schools, they stop being the audience and become the players.” ~ Professors Myra and David Sadker, American University
Internet links National Association for Single Sex Public EducationA site set up by Dr Leonard Sax. An excellent summary of the research. National Coalition of Girls’ Schools Useful quotes, references to research, lists of benefits of girls-only education. Do Girls and Boys Do Better in Separate Classrooms?4 Troubled Teens websiteThe New Gender Gap: From kindergarten to grad school, boys are becoming the second sex. BusinessWeek online. May 26, 2003. Boys just can’t be boys! Sid Sidebottom. Submission to Australian Parliamentary inquiry into education of boys. 2002.
References
(1) Paul Costa, Antonio Terracciano, & Robert McCrae, “Gender differences in personality traits across cultures: robust and surprising findings,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, volume 81, number 2, pp. 322-331, 2001.
(2) Michael Phillips, Mark Lowe, Joseph T. Lurito, Mario Dzemidzic, and Vincent Matthews. Temporal lobe activation demonstrates sex-based differences during passive listening. Radiology, 220:202-207, 2001.
(3) N. Sandstrom, J. Kaufman, S. A. Huettel. Males and females use different distal cues in a virtual environment navigation task. Brain Research: Cognitive Brain Research, 1998, 6:351-360.
(4) María Elena Cordero, Carlos Valenzuela, Rafael Torres, Angel Rodriguez, “Sexual dimorphism in number and proportion of neurons in the human median raphe nucleus,” Developmental Brain Research, 124:43-52, 2000.
(5) John F. Corso, “Age and sex differences in thresholds”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 31:489-507, 1959.
(6) William Killgore, Mika Oki, and Deborah Yurgelun-Todd. Sex-specific developmental changes in amygdala responses to affective faces. NeuroReport, 2001, 12:427-433.
(7) Tracey J. Shores & George Miesegaes. Testosterone in utero and at birth dictates how stressful experience will affect learning in adulthood. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99:13955-13960, October 15, 2002.)
(8) “Boys and girls perform better at school in single-sex environments”. April 17, 2000.
(9) Spielhofer T, O’Donnell L, Benton T, Schagen S, Schagen I. “The Impact of School Size and Single-Sex Education on Performance”. National Foundation for Educational Research. 2002.
(10) Marlene Hamilton. Performance levels in science and other subjects for Jamaican adolescents attending single-sex and coeducational high schools, International Science Education, 69(4):535-547, 1985.
(11) Underwood, G., & Underwood, J. (1997). Children’s interactions and learning outcomes with interactive books. Paper presented at the CAL (Computer Assisted Learning) Conference, April 2 1997, at the University of Exeter.
(12) Cornelius Riordan. Girls and Boys in School: together or separate? New York: Teachers College Press, 1990.
(13) Steve Biddulph. “The Cotswold Experiment”. Certified Male. 1995.
(14) Neville Bruce and Katherine Sanders, “Incidence and duration of romantic attraction in students progressing from secondary to tertiary education,” Journal of Biosocial Sciences, volume 33, pages 173-184, 2002.
Girls 'need a bigger breakfast to match boys at school'
The Independent, 30 September 2003
By Lyndsay Moss
Girls need a bigger breakfast than boys to make sure they perform as well in school, according to research from the University of Ulster. A study found that while boys did best in performance tests while they were slightly hungry, girls needed to feel fully fed to keep up.
Girls need a bigger breakfast than boys to make sure they perform as well in school, according to research from the University of Ulster. A study found that while boys did best in performance tests while they were slightly hungry, girls needed to feel fully fed to keep up.
Dr Barbara Stewart, of the Northern Ireland Centre for Diet and Health, said that while the link between breakfast and school performance was well known, the latest research suggested that girls needed a more satisfying first meal of the day than boys.
A total of 56 pupils aged 11 to 13 were studied over six weeks, with one group fed a breakfast of toast and another given toast and baked beans. Researchers found the boys performed better in attention and memory tests when they were a little hungry, while girls did best in the tests when they were not hungry.
As the tests became more complex, participants who ate beans on toast for breakfast also did better than those who had toast alone.
"There have been a number of studies into the relationship between high carbohydrate breakfast and the ability to concentrate, but the results have been equivocal," Dr Stewart said. "A reason for these conflicting findings could be that many studies have investigated attention and memory in relation to breakfast without consideration of mood. Mood and cognition appear to interact and this seems to influence the type of breakfast required for optimal performance.
"The beans breakfast produced better performance among the girls, especially when they were experiencing a negative mood." Dr Stewart said the study also showed that performance was determined by factors such as gender and mood and not just breakfast.
Results of the study, part-funded by Heinz, will be presented at the European Nutrition Conference in Rome this week.
The gender gap in education
University of Cambridge, February 2007
The gender gap in education began to attract the attention of the British government and media in the mid-1990s, when it became apparent that girls were out-performing boys at school, at least in terms of certain key academic measures. At the time there was something of a 'moral panic', with some sectors of the press suggesting that the situation had reached 'crisis point' and that there was a need to re-focus equal opportunities to redress the balance for boys.
Within the project, this debate has been situated, however, within the much broader context of a post-industrial economy, where those who leave school with few qualifications, whether male or female, have limited opportunities in today's labour market. The research began initially in 1994, with a concern to explore the parameters and reasons behind the apparent 'under-achievement' among boys in English schools. Funded by Homerton College, Cambridge, the first phase of the early research focused on one school, developing in the second phase to use questionnaires and focus group interviews in fifteen state secondary schools across East Anglia. Between 2001 and 2005 the Raising Boys' Achievement project was funded by the Department for Education and Skills, and involved an intensive period of fieldwork in around sixty English schools, both primary and secondary, across a range of socio-economic areas.
While a key aim of the project was to identify strategies which aimed to raise achievement in schools, it did so within a gender relational approach, recognising diverse constructions of masculinity and feminity and questioning taken-for-granted concepts such as 'under-achievement'. The findings of such a project have made a widely acknowledged contribution to educational research, made explicit, for example, in an invitation to present the outcomes to a specially-convened three-day conference at the University of Alaska in May 2005, and at the European Conference on Educational Research in Crete in 2004. The research has also contributed to Geography in two key areas. Firstly, it has been apparent that many of the issues associated with 'under-achievement' are related to tensions between the culture of the school and images of masculinity held in the local community and wider society, with boys' construction of masculinity as competitive, macho and 'laddish' resulting in their gradual alienation from school as they seek to position themselves as 'hard' and 'cool'. This was particularly the case among white working-class boys in schools, for example, in inner city Manchester and in inner London boroughs.
The second key contribution has been methodological, with a commitment to process as well as outcome: how the conclusions emerged was as important as the actual findings themselves. Closely allied to this was an emphasis on relationships - between representatives from groups of schools who worked together, between each group and its link researcher, between representatives across groups, between members of the research team and between researchers and the subjects of their research. The importance of time to establish trust and productive working relationships was crucial to the success of the project. Finally was the emphasis on the pupils themselves, which involved not just listening to them but engaging with them, being interested in them and helping to ensure that their perspectives were valued and taken into consideration in the schools' own evaluations of project initiatives.
This research project has led to keynote presentations at: the Commonwealth Education Ministers Conference, Edinburgh (2003); the Council of Europe Network on Gender Mainstreaming Conference, Strasbourg (2004); a specially convened 2-day conference, University of Alaska (2005); and, in 2006, international conferences organised by Vhto (National organisation of Women in Higher Technical Education) and Universum bij het Plaform Techniek (the Dutch Education Ministry) at the University of Utrecht; FoU i praksis, University of Trondheim, Norway; and the European Union Conference on Men's Contribution to Gender Equality, Dublin.
Publications
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 2006 Would Harry and Hermione Have Done Better in Single-Sex Classes? A Review of Single-Sex Teaching in Coeducational Secondary Schools in the United Kingdom, American Educational Research Journal 43.4: 579-620
Warrington, M. and Younger M. 2006 Raising Boys' Achievement in Primary Schools: an holistic approach, Maidenhead: Open University Press
Warrington, M. and Younger, M. 2006 Working on the inside: discourses, dilemmas and decisions, Gender and Education 18.3: 265-280
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 2005 Raising Boys' Achievement in Secondary Schools: Issues, Dilemmas and Opportunities, Maidenhead: Open University Press
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 2005 Raising Boys' Achievement, London; Department for Education and Skills, Research Report 636
Warrington, M. 2003 'We decided to give it a twirl': Single-Sex Teaching in English Comprehensive Schools, Gender and Education 15.4, 339-350
Warrington, M., Younger, M. and McLellan, R. 2003 Under-achieving boys in English primary schools? Curriculum Journal 14.2, 184-206
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 2002 'Single-sex teaching in a co-educational comprehensive school in England: an evaluation based upon students' performance and classroom interactions' British Educational Research Journal 28.3, 353-374
Younger, M., Warrington, M. and McLellan, R. 2002 The 'Problem' of 'Under-achieving Boys': some responses from English secondary schools, School Leadership and Management 22.4: 387-403
Warrington, M. and Younger, M. 2001 'Single-sex Classes and Equal Opportunities for Girls and Boys: Perspectives through time from a mixed comprehensive school in England', Oxford Review of Education 27.3, 339-356
Warrington, M., Younger M. and Williams, J. 2000 'Student Attitudes, Image and the Gender Gap', British Educational Research Journal 26.3, 393-407
Warrington, M. and Younger, M. 2000 'The Other Side of the Gender Gap' Gender and Education 12.4, 493-508
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 1999 'He's such a nice man, but he's so boring, you have to really make a conscious effort to learn': the views of Gemma, Daniel and their contemporaries on teacher quality and effectiveness, Educational Review 51.3, 231-241
Younger, M., Warrington, M. and Williams, J. 1999 'The Gender Gap and Classroom Interactions: Reality and Rhetoric?' British Journal of Sociology of Education 20.3, 325-341
Warrington, M. and Younger, M. 1999 'Perspectives on the Gender Gap in English Secondary Schools', Research Papers in Education 14.1, 51-77
Warrington, M. and Younger, M. 1996 'Goals, Expectations and Motivation: some observations on boys' underachievement at GCSE', Curriculum, 17.2, 80-93
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 1996 'Differential Achievement of Girls and Boys at GCSE', British Journal of Sociology of Education 17.3, 299-313
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 1996 'Gender and Achievement: the debate at GCSE', Education Review 10.1, 21-27
The gender gap in education began to attract the attention of the British government and media in the mid-1990s, when it became apparent that girls were out-performing boys at school, at least in terms of certain key academic measures. At the time there was something of a 'moral panic', with some sectors of the press suggesting that the situation had reached 'crisis point' and that there was a need to re-focus equal opportunities to redress the balance for boys.
Within the project, this debate has been situated, however, within the much broader context of a post-industrial economy, where those who leave school with few qualifications, whether male or female, have limited opportunities in today's labour market. The research began initially in 1994, with a concern to explore the parameters and reasons behind the apparent 'under-achievement' among boys in English schools. Funded by Homerton College, Cambridge, the first phase of the early research focused on one school, developing in the second phase to use questionnaires and focus group interviews in fifteen state secondary schools across East Anglia. Between 2001 and 2005 the Raising Boys' Achievement project was funded by the Department for Education and Skills, and involved an intensive period of fieldwork in around sixty English schools, both primary and secondary, across a range of socio-economic areas.
While a key aim of the project was to identify strategies which aimed to raise achievement in schools, it did so within a gender relational approach, recognising diverse constructions of masculinity and feminity and questioning taken-for-granted concepts such as 'under-achievement'. The findings of such a project have made a widely acknowledged contribution to educational research, made explicit, for example, in an invitation to present the outcomes to a specially-convened three-day conference at the University of Alaska in May 2005, and at the European Conference on Educational Research in Crete in 2004. The research has also contributed to Geography in two key areas. Firstly, it has been apparent that many of the issues associated with 'under-achievement' are related to tensions between the culture of the school and images of masculinity held in the local community and wider society, with boys' construction of masculinity as competitive, macho and 'laddish' resulting in their gradual alienation from school as they seek to position themselves as 'hard' and 'cool'. This was particularly the case among white working-class boys in schools, for example, in inner city Manchester and in inner London boroughs.
The second key contribution has been methodological, with a commitment to process as well as outcome: how the conclusions emerged was as important as the actual findings themselves. Closely allied to this was an emphasis on relationships - between representatives from groups of schools who worked together, between each group and its link researcher, between representatives across groups, between members of the research team and between researchers and the subjects of their research. The importance of time to establish trust and productive working relationships was crucial to the success of the project. Finally was the emphasis on the pupils themselves, which involved not just listening to them but engaging with them, being interested in them and helping to ensure that their perspectives were valued and taken into consideration in the schools' own evaluations of project initiatives.
This research project has led to keynote presentations at: the Commonwealth Education Ministers Conference, Edinburgh (2003); the Council of Europe Network on Gender Mainstreaming Conference, Strasbourg (2004); a specially convened 2-day conference, University of Alaska (2005); and, in 2006, international conferences organised by Vhto (National organisation of Women in Higher Technical Education) and Universum bij het Plaform Techniek (the Dutch Education Ministry) at the University of Utrecht; FoU i praksis, University of Trondheim, Norway; and the European Union Conference on Men's Contribution to Gender Equality, Dublin.
Publications
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 2006 Would Harry and Hermione Have Done Better in Single-Sex Classes? A Review of Single-Sex Teaching in Coeducational Secondary Schools in the United Kingdom, American Educational Research Journal 43.4: 579-620
Warrington, M. and Younger M. 2006 Raising Boys' Achievement in Primary Schools: an holistic approach, Maidenhead: Open University Press
Warrington, M. and Younger, M. 2006 Working on the inside: discourses, dilemmas and decisions, Gender and Education 18.3: 265-280
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 2005 Raising Boys' Achievement in Secondary Schools: Issues, Dilemmas and Opportunities, Maidenhead: Open University Press
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 2005 Raising Boys' Achievement, London; Department for Education and Skills, Research Report 636
Warrington, M. 2003 'We decided to give it a twirl': Single-Sex Teaching in English Comprehensive Schools, Gender and Education 15.4, 339-350
Warrington, M., Younger, M. and McLellan, R. 2003 Under-achieving boys in English primary schools? Curriculum Journal 14.2, 184-206
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 2002 'Single-sex teaching in a co-educational comprehensive school in England: an evaluation based upon students' performance and classroom interactions' British Educational Research Journal 28.3, 353-374
Younger, M., Warrington, M. and McLellan, R. 2002 The 'Problem' of 'Under-achieving Boys': some responses from English secondary schools, School Leadership and Management 22.4: 387-403
Warrington, M. and Younger, M. 2001 'Single-sex Classes and Equal Opportunities for Girls and Boys: Perspectives through time from a mixed comprehensive school in England', Oxford Review of Education 27.3, 339-356
Warrington, M., Younger M. and Williams, J. 2000 'Student Attitudes, Image and the Gender Gap', British Educational Research Journal 26.3, 393-407
Warrington, M. and Younger, M. 2000 'The Other Side of the Gender Gap' Gender and Education 12.4, 493-508
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 1999 'He's such a nice man, but he's so boring, you have to really make a conscious effort to learn': the views of Gemma, Daniel and their contemporaries on teacher quality and effectiveness, Educational Review 51.3, 231-241
Younger, M., Warrington, M. and Williams, J. 1999 'The Gender Gap and Classroom Interactions: Reality and Rhetoric?' British Journal of Sociology of Education 20.3, 325-341
Warrington, M. and Younger, M. 1999 'Perspectives on the Gender Gap in English Secondary Schools', Research Papers in Education 14.1, 51-77
Warrington, M. and Younger, M. 1996 'Goals, Expectations and Motivation: some observations on boys' underachievement at GCSE', Curriculum, 17.2, 80-93
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 1996 'Differential Achievement of Girls and Boys at GCSE', British Journal of Sociology of Education 17.3, 299-313
Younger, M. and Warrington, M. 1996 'Gender and Achievement: the debate at GCSE', Education Review 10.1, 21-27
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)