Boys & Girls Learn Differently in the Classroom

Here's an interesting link to a Washington Post article re: boys' and girls'learning differences in the classroom. Excerpt:

"First the good news: One year with a male English teacher would eliminate nearly a third of the gender gap in reading performance among 13-year-olds.

Now the bad: Having a male teacher improves the performance of boys while harming girls' reading skills. On the other hand, a year with a female teacher would close the gender gap in science achievement among 13-year-old girls by half and eliminate the smaller achievement gap in mathematics, says economist Thomas S. Dee of Swarthmore College, who examined data collected from more than 20,000 eighth-graders beginning in 1988."

A link to the original research can be found here.

In the figure below, see how having a woman teacher helped the girls, but hindered the boys...








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