Boys don't learn better with male teachers, says study
A major Australian study has countered the belief that having more male teachers in secondary schools improves boys' academic achievement. Almost 1000 students in Years 8 and 10 at high schools in New South Wales (NSW) and the Australian Capital Territory were surveyed by Andrew Martin and Herbert Marsh from the University of Western Sydney.

In their report, Motivating boys and motivating girls: Does teaching gender really make a difference?, the academics concluded: "Contrary to popular argument that boys fare better under male teachers, it was found that there existed no such significant interaction between student gender and teacher gender. The only significant interaction that emerged was that girls reported a better relationship with female teachers than with male teachers, while boys reported fairly similar relationships.

Dr Martin said the most important factor in boosting boys' results was the quality of the teaching. "It would be great to have more men in schools, but I'm opposed to the prescriptive 50-50 model," he said. However, Richard Fletcher, an education academic at NSW's Newcastle University, said: "Boys need to see that men care about education and children. We should be aiming for as close to 50:50 male/female ration as possible."

Professor Marsh and Dr Martin conceded that their findings did not necessarily apply to the emotional and personal dimensions of students' lives".

(TES, 25 November 2005)

Men are not the answer for boys

Male teachers do not bring out the best in boys, a study of 9,000 11-year-olds has revealed.

A teacher's gender has no impact on the attainment of children or their attitudes to specific lessons, the first research of its kind using British data shows.

But children taught by a woman had more positive attitudes to school generally. Policy-makers advocating recruiting more men to the classroom should take note, researchers say.

The study, by Durham University's curriculum evaluation and management (CEM) centre and Newcastle University, was unveiled at the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction conference in Cyprus.

Professor Peter Tymms, director of the CEM centre, said it challenged claims that matching teachers and pupils by gender improved children's attitudes.

"There has been a view that we are in a crisis with boys' performance because we have not got men teaching them," he told The TES. "We're not saying that we couldn't do with more male teachers - but we're saying that it's not going to impact on boys' performance and attitude."

The study used the 1997/8 Performance Indicators in Primary Schools (PIPS) project which gave 413 classes of 10 and 11 year-olds tests in reading, maths and science and issued questionnaires measuring attitude to school.

Only 15 per cent of primary teachers are male and men made up just 13 per cent of those beginning primary training last year.

(TES, 9 September 2005)

Research shows men are more intelligent than women

Half the population will dismiss this story, but a study claims that the cleverest people are much more likely to be men than women. Men are more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, making them better suited for "tasks of high complexity", according to the authors of a paper published in the British Journal of Psychology.

Genetic differences in intelligence between the sexes helped to explain why many more men than women won Nobel Prizes or became chess grandmasters, the study by Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn concluded.
They showed that men outnumbered women in increasing numbers as intelligence levels rise. There were twice as many with IQ scores of 125, a level typical for people with first-class degrees.

When scores rose to 155, a level associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman. Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, said that he was uncomfortable with the findings. But he added that the evidence was clear despite the insistence of many academics that there were "no meaningful sex differences" in levels of intelligence.

"For personal reasons I would like to believe that men and women are equal, and broadly that's true. But over a period of time the evidence in favour of biological factors has become stronger and stronger," he said.

(Times, 25 August 2005)

Fathers play greater role in childcare

There was a time when it was unheard of for a man to change a nappy or bathe his baby, but modern fathers are more involved in parenting than ever before and are now responsible for a third of all the childcare in the home.

Fathers in Britain now spend an average of 129 minutes a day with children aged under three, and 75 minutes entertaining them, finds a survey. Mothers are still spending much more time with children than their partners, on average four hours and 25 minutes a day. But the research shows childcare is becoming more of a joint responsibility.

In the 1960s, men's share of parenting was around 19%, but that has now increased to 32%, finds the survey commissioned by Baby Einstein, a company that promotes "discovery through play" in the under threes.
Analysis of the findings showed that while women sacrificed work, sleep and social life when they had children, men also gave up time spent watching television and going out with friends.

Almost three-quarters of men under 35 felt they were just as capable of bringing up children as women, while less than half of men over 65 agreed about that statement.

For the survey, men were asked where they found information and advice on how to be a good father. Only 17.7% said they had spoken to their own father or father-in-law, fewer than the number who felt they had learned about parenthood from television programmes (19.5%) and books (42.7%). The most common source of parenting advice was still from mothers (61%).

Experts have welcomed the statistics as previous research has shown that a father's influence on his family leads to long-term benefits for the offspring. Children without fathers are more likely to go off the rails, and daughters with a good relationship with their father find it easier as adults to maintain long-term relationships with men.

(Guardian, 17 August 2005)

The lad culture which makes boys think it is uncool to learn can be tackled by targeting popular pupils, Government-funded research suggests. Researchers at Cambridge University have spent four years examining a range of approaches used at schools, which have successfully raised boys' results. One of the most effective methods involves teachers spotting pupil leaders or image-makers "whose physical presence, manner and behaviour exerted considerable power and influence within the peer group. Key leaders are not always hostile, challenging and continually set on conflict, but are seen by the school as needing encouragement and support to remain on track," the report said.

These leaders were divided into three categories: Rebels, who broke the rules but were intelligent; Clowns, immature boys who incited poor behaviour, and Stars who were successful, yet not seen as swots.

A secondary school in the north-west of England, which was not named, has been running a scheme where teachers meet to identify up to a dozen pupil leaders in each year group. The leasers are then each assigned a "key befriender", a teacher who regularly meets them for informal chats.

The scheme differs from standard mentoring schemes because it aims to have a knock-on effect of improving the behaviour of the pupil's classmates. The leaders are not told why they receive the extra attention.

Exam grades from the school have soared since 1998 when it began piloting the approach, with the proportion gaining at least five A* to C grades at GCSE rising from 48% to 85%.

The befriender scheme is one of several "socio-cultural" approaches to raising boys' achievement which the researchers said helped tackle the notion that it is not masculine to work. Other methods included paired reading projects where Year 3 and Year 5 boys worked together. The researchers said there was some evidence that single-sex classes made boys and girls feel more at ease in lessons and improved their attainment. However, they added, "Single-sex classes are not a panacea. In some schools, boys-only classes have become very challenging to teach, or stereotyping of expectation has established a macho regime which has alienated some boys."

Raising boys' achievement is at www.dfes.gov.uk

(TES, 3 June 2005)

Reading proves harder for boys

Boys really do find it harder to learn to read than girls according to a study involving more than 10,000 pupils. They are twice as likely to be poor readers, says a paper from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, Christchurch School of Medicine, New Zealand, and Warwick university, although the paper said more research was needed into the possible cause of the gender gap.

The research refutes the myth that teachers are more likely to identify boys as poor readers than girls. A 1990 study in the United States led by Professor Sally Shaywitz of Yale university, said that although research identified no significant differences in reading ability between 400 seven or eight-year-old boys and girls, schools were referring between two and four times as many boys as girls - suggesting teachers were biased against boys.

The latest research cites four large-scale studies. It also analyses data previously colleted on children in New Zealand and the UK. It points out that a Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) study - which compares the achievements of 15-year-olds in 32 countries - found that in all countries girls are more literate than boys, although the size of the gender gap varies.

Professor Robert Goodman of the Institute of Psychiatry and co-author of the research, said: "The Shaywitz study has been very influential in making people feel that it is due to gender bias that teachers, schools r clinics find more boys than girls with reading difficulties. Our study has found teachers have been right all along and that there are more boys with difficulties."

Co-author Dr Julia Carroll of Warwick university said: "As reading disability in childhood is associated with adjustment problems in later life, there is a definite need to recognise sex differences."

Sex differences in developmental reading disability: new findings from four epidemiological studies, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 291, no. 16.

(TES, 21 May 2004)

Are chimpanzees the explanation of gender learning differences?

A study of young chimpanzees living in the wild might explain the biological reason why infant girls tend to learn faster than infant boys. Primatologists have discovered distinct sex differences in the ability of young male and female chimps to acquire new skills "taught" by their mothers.

The scientists believe these gender differences in man's closest relative could have a common evolutionary root with the difference seen in the speed of intellectual development of infant boys and girls. Educationalists researching how young children learn complex skills should study the findings and take gender differences into account, said Professor Elizabeth Lonsdorf, head of field conservation at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.

Their four-year study, published in the journal Nature, involved involved filming 14 young chimps living in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania to observe how they learnt complex skills such as "fishing" for termites using a thin stick as a tool.

It had already been established that young chimps learn by watching adult females who lick the stick clean of termites each time they pull it from the termite nest. But the new study has demonstrated there is a distinct difference between how quickly females and males pick up this cultural trait. Even though mothers showed no preference in teaching, it was their daughters who closely copied their mothers while the sons would quickly lose patience and play games.

On average, females learnt to extract termites using a fishing stick at the age of 31 months, whereas it took males 58 months to reach the same standard.

(Independent, 15 April 2004)

Gender gap widens in teenage years

The gap between boys' and girls' achievement at school grows as they get older, research revealed in February 2003.
A study of 500,000 pupils' results, the first to offer a value-added analysis of an entire cohort of students in England by sex, shows a growing gender gap in the teenage years.

The results provide ammunition to both sides of the debate over selection at 11. Comprehensives achieved better value-added results for girls between 14 and 16 than either grammar schools or secondary moderns, the analysis shows. But for boys, grammar schools did better on the same measure.

Adele Atkinson and Deborah Wilson, of the Leverhulme Centre for Market and Public Organisation at Bristol University, compared the results of pupils across England in key stage 3 tests in 1997 with their achievements two years later at GCSE.

They found that at key stage 3, boys outperformed girls in maths and science, with girls well ahead in English. By the age of 16, girls achieved higher results in all three subjects and had a bigger overall lead than at KS3. The 2002 provisional KS3 results for 14-year-olds reveal girls were ahead of boys in all three subjects.

"The widening gap in English schools" is available at www.bris.ac.uk/cmpo/mpoissue8.pdf

(TES, 7 February 2003)

What have the researchers found works with boys? 
Good teaching rather than any particular approach seems to be winning

As a result of concern over boys' underachievement, the DfES in 2000 commissioned research by Homerton College Cambridge to look at the small minority of schools that have managed to help boys without disadvantaging girls. After six terms of analysis, the preliminary findings are now emerging.

The researchers have been hugely impressed with the work that individual schools are doing, and in some cases innovative tactics appear to play a part. Some have altered their teaching styles, for example, breaking up lessons into smaller chunks and incorporating five-minute "breathers" for boys. Some have picked out the ones most likely to fail and given them extra help from an early age. Single sex lessons have been favoured by some and seem to have caused improvement in exam results. A concentration on a wider variety of teaching styles has brought about all-round improvements in a Wolverhampton secondary school. Greater collaboration and a decision to tone down the competitive atmosphere (boys who are struggling would rather not compete than compete and lose) have seen both boys and girls improve from an A*-C grades of 14 and 18.9% respectively to 29% over five years.

The Cambridge researchers are now embarking on the second phase of their work, to identify which of these tactics can be applied more generally. And this is where the problems start. Because for every school where teaching boys and girls separately has been an apparent success, there is one where it has made no difference or made matters worse.

Dr Molly Warrington and Michael Younger, the academics conducting the study, say there is a great deal to learn from the successful schools. But the key elements come down to plain good teaching rather than novel systems of classroom management. Success appears to hinge, not on mentoring or single sex classrooms, but on a culture of high expectations and good relationships between pupils and staff. 

It does not help, they say, that some schools still treat boys and girls unequally with boys exposed to the brunt of cheap put-downs and reprimands, while girls, despite demanding less attention, actually get more constructive help with their work. 

"Where it's really working," says Younger, "is where the pastoral system in the school has as its main aim the fulfilment of academic objectives."

Significantly the same view is taken by David Hopkins, the new director of the DfES Standards and Effectiveness Unit, which is overseeing the project. Some tactics can undoubtedly be helpful, he says. The unit is pleased, for example, that modifications to the National Literacy Strategy have helped boys close the gap in writing. The department has altered both the primary and secondary strategies for literacy and numeracy to help the boys, introducing more active, orally-based teaching styles and clearer objectives. But they do not work on their own.

"The solution seems to involve two things. There have to be tactics and broad strategies," he says. "But there also has to be this culture of high expectations, this culture of learning: something about the fabric of the school. You can go into certain schools and you can really feel it."

The gender gap statistics are startling In 1988, 32% of girls got five A-C GCSEs with boys on 28%. But by 1999 the gap had increased by 9.1% with 60.2% of girls scoring at least five top grades compared with only 51.1% of boys.

But the figures are also misleading. Boys' performance has improved considerably over the past five years. Moreover the GCSE gap, wide as it is has scarcely altered since 1998. "We don't acknowledge that it's about underachievement," says Younger. "It's about differential achievement rates. We're also paying quite close attention to girls' performance in view of evidence that girls are still being disadvantaged in certain schools in terms of subject choice."

If single-sex schools is the wrong answer, "why do boys fail?" is probably the wrong question. Gender is only the fifth most important determinant of a child's academic performance, coming way below prior attainment and social background. However badly middle-class boys are doing compared with their sisters, they still do better than working class girls. And of the 40,000 16-year-olds who leave school every year with nothing, a third are female and the majority are almost certainly from depressed economic circumstances. On this evidence, the biggest obstacle to ministers' hitting their targets is not boys' love of computer games or bad role models, but poverty and to some extent racial background.

Moreover, there is cause for optimism because research from the OECD, based on an analysis of Scandanavian schooling, is for the first time suggesting that the right cocktail of lessons can begin to address poverty and social class as determinants of educational performance.

(Independent, 12 September 2002)

Study defies the "boys need male teachers" belief

Research published in March 2002 challenges the belief that male teachers make a difference in primary schools. It says there is no link between the number of male teachers  in a school and the performance of its pupils in key stage 2 tests. 

This calls into question Government policy that more male teachers are needed to boost the academic performance of boys. Just over 13% of primary teachers are men. Applications from men for postgraduate teachers training in England are up 356 on last year. The Teacher Training Agency's target is for men to make up 15% of primary trainees in 2002/03.

Mary Thornton and Pat Bricheno, from Hertfordshire University, suggest the proportion of pupils with special needs is more significant than the sex of their teacher when it comes to test results. The researchers looked at key stage test results for pupils and special needs data from a random sample of 846 primaries. This was compared with the number of women and men teachers, and the gender of the headteacher. The study also took into account the type of school and its location.

It found that schools with more men did not get better test results than the rest. If the head was a man, however, schools were more likely to have more male teachers. There were also more men in larger schools.

(TES, 8 March 2002)

The introduction of teaching strategies designed to raise boys achievement may have an adverse effect on girls, a research study suggests. Staff in the secondaries taking part were especially concerned about boys' immaturity and the anti-swat culture.

Teachers often tried to address problems by structuring lessons more tightly, focusing on well-defined targets and giving pupils greater support.

"Some people would say this is just very good teaching, but others would say this is going to become very highly structured and perhaps too competitive and organised for girls, who may start to react against it," said Madeleine Arnot, reader in sociology of education at Cambridge University, who carried out the study with Jennifer Gubb, research fellow at the University of Plymouth.

Commissioned by West Sussex County Council, the study identified seven secondaries where boys were making greater progress in value-added terms than girls. The schools were very different in social composition, structure, ethos and GCSE performance levels. Their responses were equally diverse.

Adding value to boys' and girls' education, by Madeleine Arnot and Jennifer Gubb, is available from the INSET Office, West Sussex County Council, County Hall, Chichester, PO 19 1RF. Tel. 01243 777100. Price £15.

(TES, 18 January 2002)

Boys face an "achievement ceiling" and daren't go further, according to more than half of the pupils in a Scottish Executive-backed study into the growing gap in performance between girls and boys.

The most extensive research yet in Scotland, carried out by the Centre for Educational Sociology at Edinburgh University, shows girls have been outperforming boys for more than 25 years but that social class remains a stronger factor.

71% of pupils whose fathers are in a profession attained five or more Credit awards at Standard Grade, compared with 28% of peers whose fathers were in unskilled manual jobs. The gap between girls and boys in terms of Credit passes is only 11%.

The researchers, Linda Croxford and Teresa Tinklin, argue that focusing on boys could be too simplistic and suggest that thinking about which girls and which boys are underachieving is a more fruitful approach.

The researchers also found that boy-girl seating seemed to reduce disruption in the classroom but girls generally felt uncomfortable about it. There seemed little evidence that boys and girls were influencing each other's styles of working or gaining a richer educational experience because of it.

Gender and Pupil Performance in Scotland's Schools is available at www.ed.ac.uk/CES

(TESS, 21 September 2001)

Glasgow has launched an action research in five secondaries, two primaries and four nurseries to narrow the gender achievement gap. 

Research in recent years has shown that on average a 16-year-old-boy's concentration span was six minutes against 16 minutes for girls. Research into how the brain works has shown that girls tended to be auditory learners and better communicators, with boys being more visual-kinaesthetic learners.

Patrick McDaid, English adviser for Glasgow, said: "Evidence indicates that 70% of experiences in schools are auditory experiences." Research has found that listening led to a 5% retention rate, reading 10%, audio-visual approaches 20%, demonstrations 30%, discussion groups 50%, practice by doing 75% and explaining to others 90%.

The following are seen as boosting boys' achievement:

• Purpose has to be made clear
• Outcomes have to be clearly stated
• Plans have to be structured and build on prior knowledge
• Tasks have to be broken down
• Reviews should take place at the end of lessons.

Gender only 'small factor' in boys' failure

According to a new study by Birmingham's education authority, some boys are almost two-and-a-half-years behind their brightest female classmates by the age of seven. But gender differences make only a small contribution to the yawning developmental gap. Poverty, ethnicity and season of birth can have a far greater impact on a child's educational progress.

The statistical analysis has revealed that the most disadvantaged pupils are boys from a poor, ethnic-minority background who were born in the summer, never went to nursery and spent their primary school years moving from school to school.

Education officers examined the cumulative effects of gender, poverty and race by comparing the 1996 baseline assessments of 11,250 four-year-olds with their performance in key stage 1 tests in 1999. They found that on average boys were two months behind girls at the age of four, and that this gap seemed to have widened to four months by the time they were seven.

The other disadvantages that put some seven-year-olds much further behind were summer-born (an extra seven months); poor enough to qualify for free school meals (six months); and a Bengali or Pushtu-speaking background (six months).

(TES, 1 September 2000)

A longitudinal study of the attitudes of schools children at Year 2 and then at Year 6 reveals that while overall pupils are generally positive about their school experiences, they are significantly more negative in Year 6 than they were in Year 2.

The curricular are of greatest dislike among all ages is story writing, although girls manage to overcome this enough to out perform boys in writing tests. Where they diverge most is in their attitudes to authority. Girls at Year 6 still regard their teachers a respected authority figure while boys report they are less bothered bout breaking rules, getting told off and getting into fights and arguments.
The study concludes that there needs to as much attention placed on encouraging boys to be positive towards the hidden curriculum of discipline and respecting authority as there is to raising academic achievement.

The Closing Gap in Attitudes between Boys and Girls: A five year longitudinal study by Julia Davies and Ivy Brember, School of Education, University of Manchester.

(TES Primary magazine April 2001)

Boys do well at clear-cut questions which do not require them to explain themselves, an analysis of the 1999 junior reading test results has revealed. They struggle with open-ended questions that require them to write at length or interpret information. Girls demonstrated a better understanding of language features and underlying themes. 

The study, by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, found that pupils' performance clearly split along gender lines and adds weight to accusations that the 1999 test was boy friendly (boys' reading scores leapt by 14% between 1998 and 1999. They out-performed girls in a quarter of questions, cutting girls' lead to six points. 

There is still a huge discrepancy between boys' and girls' ability to spell, particularly among the youngest children. In a 30-word test for seven-year-olds, boys, on average, misspelled six more words than girls. By 11 the gap had narrowed to two words per 100 before widening to 2.6 words for 14-year-olds. 

(TES 14 January, 2000) 

Researchers at Southampton university's centre for language and education reported on a two-year project focused on nine seven year olds at four schools. She found that boys, when faced with the knowledge that they were poor readers, were less likely to want to improve. Boys who were slow in reading avoided fiction that was 'proficiency graded' and tended to go for non-fiction texts with plenty of pictures. The weaker boy readers chose this type of material when given a choice. 

"Non-fiction texts allow weaker boy readers to escape others' judgements about how well they read or how competent they are. They enable them to maintain self-esteem in...their peer group," said Gemma Moss, author of the report. She suggested that boys be encouraged to read fiction texts as opposed to "pandering more to boys' interests". 

(Guardian, 7 July 1999)

See article in Literacy Today
Boys and non-fiction: cause or effect? A two-year study looked into whether boys' underachievement in reading might be linked to their preference for non-fiction texts. Dr Gemma Moss, Centre for Language in Education, University of Southampton. 

Teachers' attitudes have a significant effect on boys' achievement according to the NFER's report 'Boys' Achievement, Progress, Motivation and Participation'. 

It adds that too many strategies are put in place based on untested assumptions with little regard for what boys really think, do and feel. No firm evidence exists that the gap between boys' and girls' English performance reflects a difference in innate linguistic ability.Teachers are in a position to contradict or reinforce negative stereotyping that can label some pupils, particularly boys, low achievers from an early age. Staff should have high expectations of all pupils and stereotypes must be challenged. "The role of the teacher is particularly highlighted in influencing boys' propensity to read as well as their choice of reading." 

(TES, 7 May 1999)

Boy friendly books, including science fiction and horror stories are to be included in the new national curriculum which will appear in 2000. A new introduction to the English curriculum is to encourage teachers to adopt strategies to raise the achievement of all five to 16 year old boys. 

However, researchers are concerned that encouraging boys to read science fiction and horror stories will only serve to enhance their macho image. Dr Debbie Epstein, co-author of Failing Boys said that,"Boys think they have to be rough, tough and dangerous to know, but in reality that is not a comfortable place to be. For many boys being Superman doesn't also mean being Clark Kent. We need to help them find ways of being both." New research from the University of Greenwich reveals that pupils of both sexes are held back by macho attitudes. 

(TES, 23 April 1999 and 4 June 1999) 

Research says that boys were on a par with girls in reading and were significantly better at maths. The boys also had much greater self esteem than girls, according to the researchers, Julie Davies and Ivy Brember, who monitored the children's performance between 1989 and 1996. "Our results do, however, reflect other findings which show the boys scoring more at the extremes of the range in maths and English and the girls are more clustered towards the middle." The study involved 737 boys and 751 girls in one local authority. The tests chosen were different from the national English and maths tests and reflected the boys' higher self esteem. 
'Boys Out Performing Girls: an eight-year cross sectional study of attainment and self esteem in Year 6' by Julie Davies and Ivy Brember, School of Education, University of Manchester. 

(TES, 18 September 1998)