Gender Gap Worries Educators

No, not that gender gap because women are closing the gap with boys in math and sciences. The new gender gap is about reading and writing.

Here is the fourth paragraph of the story in the Hartford Courant:

"It doesn't surprise me," said Andrew DeLucia, a sixth-grade teacher at Doolittle School in Cheshire. "I think girls are much more motivated to write, and there are a lot more topics they're interested in." With boys, he said, "If they're not writing about sports, they lose interest."

Can we be a little more stereotypically sexist in our approach? Maybe a little more? A little later on the story gets a somewhat more helpful in its treatment:

For years, educators worried about an achievement gap for women in science and mathematics, but that gap, at least in some cases, has begun to close. Women are still underrepresented in many engineering and technology fields, for example, but have made gains in areas such as biology and medicine.

On the latest Connecticut Mastery Test, girls matched boys in mathematics, with 58 percent of each group meeting the state goal.

"Boys have problems with reading and writing. Girls have had problems with math and science. We've done something for the girls. We can do the same for boys," said Judith Kleinfeld, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and director of a national consortium known as The Boys Project.

In writing, "Boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group are falling far behind girls of similar backgrounds," Kleinfeld wrote in a recent paper for the White House Conference on Helping America's Youth.

snip

In addition, Kleinfeld and others say, boys' reading habits are geared more toward non-fiction - subjects such as sports or adventure - while girls often prefer novels and short stories.

"I like mystery books. I read the Nancy Drew series," said 11-year-old Mary Margaret Stoll, who finished fifth grade at Thompson Brook School in Avon this year. She also said she likes books such as "Natalie's Secret," part of a series of books "that has, like, more girls' stuff on the front, and boys don't like to read that."

Many teachers, aware of this, are starting to seek more literature that appeals to boys, said Richard Sterling, executive director of the National Writing Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

"As little as seven or eight years ago in the average elementary school classroom, the majority of reading material was fiction," he said.

Barbara Snyder, a reading teacher at Buttonball Lane School in Glastonbury, said, "One thing that interests boys more than girls is reading informational texts.

"We've addressed that - teaching how to read non-fiction," she said. "Because boys don't want to read books from beginning to end, informational texts are ideal. They can read short sections."

It is true that most reading done by kids in school is in the area of fiction, but, as I have asked before, when did the teaching of reading--a skill, become the teaching of literature--a subject matter? If we know, for example that boys like informational reading, why then are reading classes not doing more of this. Looking back (way, way back) I don't remember having any reading classes that used, as a text, anything that was non-fiction? Looking at modern curricula, I don't see much non-fiction on the reading list, unless it is in the math, science or social science classes.

Girls and boys can benefit from many styles and formats of texts since such reading requires different skills. If it has been known that the geneders respond to different forms of texts for a while (at least we have know since 2000 in Connecticut that a reading/writing gender gap exists), why then have we not addressed the problem? When employer after employer urging education reform so that they can have a quality workforce, and most businesses don't have much use for people adept only at reading literature, it would seem as though a broad range of reading skills is necessary.

So, to our reading curricula, I suggest adding relebant, age appropriate non-fiction material for all schools. I suppose then, such a gender gap will decrease.

Oh, I also suggest that teachers like the one quoted in the article get their head out and stop taking the easy route of stereotypes, we pay teachers to think outside the box--not make the box.



hat Tip: The Instapundit