New research has shown that boys are better at reading when they are in classrooms where more than 60 percent of students are girls.
Researchers from the Netherlands studied how the proportion of highly educated teachers, the proportion of girls in a classroom, socioeconomic composition of a school, and well-rounded assessments affected students’ reading abilities.
The School Effectiveness and School Improvement -published study focused on how these factors affected students’ reading skills because reading ability is a good indicator of future academic and occupational success. The team analysed the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data that documented assessment results from 281,095 students from 10,425 schools in 33 countries around the world.
Their analysis showed that the proportion of highly educated teachers and well-rounded assessments affected the success of boys and girls equally. However, the other two factors examined proved much more interesting.
Boys benefit greatly from having a high proportion of girls in the classroom, according to the study.
The researchers theorized that this was because of the learning opportunities presented by having more girls in the classroom and the overall learning environment within the school.
Previous research has shown that girls in a classroom indirectly encourage boys to do well academically ‘through their contribution to a successful school-wide learning climate’. However, the researchers also recommended more research be done to see how exactly girls exert such a positive influence on their male counterparts’ academic performance.
The research team also said this positive influence is so strong that vocational education tracks that separate students by vocational preference, and which often lead to a gender divide, prove detrimental to male students’ academic careers.
Past research has shown that partitioning students in this way hurts the success of girls, but this new study reveals that vocational tracks negatively affects the success of both genders. The team recommended that, because of this, classrooms should strive for a gender balance.
The studied also showed that girls were more affected by a school’s socioeconomic composition than boys. This defies earlier analyses of German schools that showed socioeconomic composition has no gendered effect. The researchers stated that perhaps the country has an effect on whether or not the socioeconomic composition of a school affects boys’ and girls’ performances differently.
What do you think of these results? Do they reflect what you see in your child’s school?
