Can Boys Beat Girls at Reading?
It's the biggest and most consistent gender gap in educational attainment, so prevalent across time, culture, and place, that the prevailing explanation for it so far has been, "what do you expect?" Most studies and stats find that boys under-perform compared to girls in reading across the board, true, but girls are smarter than boys anyway, so no big deal, right? Not so. A new study at least challenges the notion that girls are naturally better readers than boys just because they test better at it. We already know that boys can be victims of stereotype threat in reading, like girls can be in maths and science, but that only helps explain why "girls rule and boys drool" at reading, not whether their scores can be improved. Reading is an essential skill for most other forms of learning to take place, and early delay in reading and writing ability can affect a student's ability to go to college. Butthis new study, described below, perhaps shows a way to improve boys' performance in reading, and challenges the notion that girls are naturally better readers.
So how to improve the performance of boys in reading (that doesn't just involve inserting more fart jokes)? The Wall Street Journalreports: make reading out to be a game. "The research, in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, showed that boys outscored girls on reading tests if they were told the tests were a game. But boys scored significantly lower than girls when told the tests were assessments of their reading skills."
The latest study, in France, involved 80 children, 48 boys and 30 girls age 9 years old on average, from four third-grade classes at three schools. All classes received a silent reading test that required students to underline as many animal names as possible in three minutes from a list of 486 words (animal names comprised half the list). Two classes were told the test was an evaluation of their reading abilities, and two were told it was a new animal fishing game designed for a fun magazine.
Boys thrive on competitive play, learning while doing, and by trying to achieve a clearly set goal, all elements of what we would consider "game play." Telling them that something is an "evaluation of their abilities" makes them think the "goal" is more about unraveling what they already possess. Telling them it's part of a game makes the goal something they need to actively pursue in order to obtain. This is more in line with how boys are made to function. It should be no surprise then that boys do better at reading when presented with it this way than they would the other way around.
In classes given reading evaluations, boys made an average of 33.3 correct answers compared with 43.3 by the girls. But when the tests were framed as animal games, boys’ average scores were significantly higher: 44.7 compared with 38.3 for the girls.
What is surprising is that structuring the reading task this way actually improved the boys' average score significantly more than it did the girls' score. In fact, the girls' score dropped in the presence of the game task. This may be because girls have greater long term memory and self-insight into their own abilities, therefore, structuring the task like a test may actually give them greater ability to pause and reflect on the abilities they are being tested on. One reason they may do better than boys is because most learning expects this kind of applied approach, rather than the more "learn as you go" goal-oriented style that benefited the boys.
In general though, the study was done on a small sample of boys and girls and the kids were still learning how to read.
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