Sunday, November 1, 2009

Gender and Education



This news report explains an eighth-grade math teacher’s project for her master’s degree, for which she separates her classes into all girls and all boys. She utilizes different teaching tactics in each class, emphasizing group cooperation in the girls’ class and competition in the boys’ class. Overall, she speaks both positively and negatively of the results. This report also broadens to discuss the general topic of gender separation in classrooms and the controversies that arise.



Here is a similar situation from the same news station. Interviews for this report were done while this high school prepared for separation of English classes into boys’ and girls’ as part of an effort to improve boys’ test scores in English, language arts, and social studies.

This short story from a book called Failing at Fairness was eye-opening to me. It was used as part of a student publication at Stanford University called GREAT: Gender Relations in Educational Applications of Technology.

Here is a link to a particular publication of GREAT. I found it to be helpful in understanding where schools play a role in gender inequality.

This is a summary of a report done in 2005 by the National Center for Education Statistics titled Trends in Educational Equity for Girls and Women. The report itself is 116 pages, but this summary provides some quick facts about the status of gender inequality in classrooms as of 2005. Just click on the links along the left side of the page, and the facts are highlighted on each page.

After viewing these videos and reading the material on these web pages, I’ve learned that gender inequality in schools still exists, despite Title IX. In fact, No Child Left Behind has allowed us to go backwards by legalizing the segregation of classes based on gender.

Gender inequality in classrooms continues to cause controversies and leads to studies and experiments, such as separating classes by gender and examining student performance. Test-based assessment shows that females do better in social studies and language arts, while males do better in math and science. This is known to be caused by physical in brain anatomy between males and females. I think it is plausible and beneficial to strengthen language arts abilities in boys and math/science abilities in girls, but I don’t think that separating classes by gender is the way to do so. In the real world, males and females must work together. Also, separating males and females into separate classes opposes the goal of proving that males and females are equal in terms of capabilities.

2 comments:

Jessica Fagundes said...

I agree that No Child Left Behind is going backwards by allowing gender segregation in schools. I think that it is important for students to learn from one another in the classroom and having the different points of view of males and females is important.

Evan Lancia said...

i love the last sentence of your post ! proving that both genders are equally capable.

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