What kind of learners are girls

It is predominantly boys who drift off without completing assignments, who stop taking notes and fall asleep during a lecture, or who tap pencils or otherwise fidget in hopes of keeping themselves awake and learning. Females tend to recharge and reorient neural focus without rest states.

Thus, a girl can be bored with a lesson, but she will nonetheless keep her eyes open, take notes, and perform relatively well. This is especially true when the teacher uses more words to teach a lesson instead of being spatial and diagrammatic. The male brain is better suited for symbols, abstractions, diagrams, pictures, and objects moving through space than for the monotony of words Gurian, For a number of decades, most of our cultural sensitivity to issues of gender and learning came from advocacy groups that pointed out ways in which girls struggled in school.

In large part because of this advocacy, our culture is attending to the issues that girls face in education. At the same time, most teachers, parents, and other professionals involved in education know that it is mainly our boys who underperform in school. Since , when the U. Department of Education began keeping complete statistics, we have seen that boys lag behind girls in most categories. Girls are now only negligibly behind boys in math and science, areas in which boys have historically outperformed girls Conlin, Boys earn 70 percent of D s and F s and fewer than half of the A s.

Boys account for two-thirds of learning disability diagnoses. Boys represent 90 percent of discipline referrals. Males make up fewer than 40 percent of college students Gurian, These statistics hold true around the world. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD recently released its three-year study of knowledge and skills of males and females in 35 industrialized countries including the United States, Canada, the European countries, Australia, and Japan.

Girls outperformed boys in every country. We argued that to broadly base education and other social processes on anything other than human nature was to set up both girls and boys for unnecessary failure.

The institute became especially interested in nature-based approaches to education when PET scans and MRIs of boys and girls revealed brains that were trying to learn similar lessons but in widely different ways and with varying success depending on the teaching method used. It became apparent that if teachers were trained in the differences in learning styles between boys and girls, they could profoundly improve education for all students.

Between and , a pilot program at the University of Missouri—Kansas City involving gender training in six school districts elicited significant results. One school involved in the training, Edison Elementary, had previously tested at the bottom of 18 district elementary schools. Following gender training, it tested in the top five slots, sometimes coming in first or second. Statewide, Edison outscored schools in every subject area, sometimes doubling and tripling the number of students in top achievement levels.

Instead of the usual large number of students at the bottom end of achievement testing, Edison now had only two students requiring state-mandated retesting. The school also experienced a drastic reduction in discipline problems. Statewide training in Alabama has resulted in improved performance for boys in both academic and behavioral areas. After one year of this gender-specific experiment, girls' math and science scores and boys' Scholastic Reading Inventory SRI scores rose significantly.

In an elementary classroom designed to help boys learn, tables and chairs are arranged to provide ample space for each child to spread out and claim learning space. Boys tend to need more physical learning space than girls do. At a table, a boy's materials will be less organized and more widely dispersed.

Best practice would suggest having a variety of seating options—some desks, some tables, an easy chair, and a rug area for sitting or lying on the floor. Such a classroom would allow for more movement and noise than a traditional classroom would. Even small amounts of movement can help some boys stay focused.

The teacher can use the blocks area to help boys expand their verbal skills. As the boys are building, a teacher might ask them to describe their buildings. Their language will be richer in vocabulary and more expansive when they are engaged in a task.

An elementary classroom designed to help girls learn will provide lots of opportunities for girls to manipulate objects, build, design, and calculate, thus preparing them for the more rigorous spatial challenges that they will face in higher-level math and science courses. These classrooms will set up spatial lessons in groups that encourage discussion among learners. The assistant principal would chase him and get him back into the building.

The boy lacked the verbal-emotive abilities to help him cope with his feelings. The next time the boy bolted, she took a ball with her when she went after him. When she found the boy outside, she asked him to bounce the ball back and forth with her.

Reluctant at first, the boy started bouncing the ball. Before long, he was talking, then sharing the anger and frustration that he was experiencing at school and at home. He calmed down and went back to class. Because he was doing something spatial-mechanical, the boy was more able to access hidden feelings. The InterCept program in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is a female-specific teen mentor-training program that works with girls in grades 8—12 who have been identified as at risk for school failure, juvenile delinquency, and teen pregnancy.

InterCept staff members use their knowledge of female brain functioning to implement program curriculum. Brittany, 17, came to the InterCept program with a multitude of issues, many of them involving at-risk behavior and school failure. Brittany quite literally found a future: She is entering a career in computer technology.

As educators, we've been somewhat intimidated in recent years by the complex nature of gender. We now have the science to prove our intuition that tells us that boys and girls do indeed learn differently.

And, even more powerful, we have a number of years of successful data that can help us effectively teach both boys and girls. The task before us is to more deeply understand the gendered brains of our children.

Then comes the practical application, with its sense of purpose and productivity, as we help each child learn from within his or her own mind. For Elementary Boys. Use beadwork and other manipulatives to promote fine motor development.

Boys are behind girls in this area when they start school. Early Child Development and Care, 1 , 3— Espelage, D. Bullying in American schools: A socio-ecological perspective on prevention and intervention. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Delamont, S. Brookfield, MA: Avebury Publishers. Freeman, D. Trends in educational equity of girls and women.

Washington, D. Golombok, S. Gender development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hyde, J. The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60 6 , — Maccoby, E. Gender and social exchange: A developmental perspective. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Measor, L. Gender and schools. New York: Cassell. Messner, M. Silence, sports bras, and wrestling porn. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 27 1 , 38— Myaskovsky, L, Unikel, E.

Effects of gender diversity on performance and interpersonal behavior in small work groups. Sadker, D. Phi Delta Kappan, 84 3 , — Tannen, D. New York: Quill. Wilkinson, L. Gender influences in classroom interaction. Left to their own devices, children, over time, tend to settle into a preferred way of learning to the point of screening out less favored types of information. Whenever a child gets set in a particular way of learning and begins to screen out auditory, visual or tactile information, he or she is at risk of being labeled learning disabled.

Children do not "outgrow" their preferences for learning in a particular way. In fact, without help, as they progress through the grades, they tend to become more set in their learning style ways.

Children can, however, become more flexible in their approach to learning when adults encourage them as early as possible to welcome auditory, visual and tactile information. Learning Path Articles What's your child's learning style? What's your child's learning style? Is your child a looker, listener or mover? Researchers have observed that learning styles run in families and tend to differ between boys and girls.

Girl vs. Richard Restak in his now classic book, The Brain: The Last Frontier , reports that in contrast to boys, girl babies : are more sensitive to sounds, especially their mother's voice are more attentive to faces, speech patterns, and tones of voice; that is, to the social context of a situation speak sooner and possess larger vocabularies. Compared to girls, boy babies were found to: demonstrate early superiority in visual acuity perform better in gross motor body movements possess better spatial abilities in terms of dealing with three-dimensional space.

Inborn learning styles Dr. Listeners, lookers and movers Listeners, Lookers and Movers are the terms I use for Auditory, Visual and Tactile learners, respectively. Male vs. Learning and teaching strategies Left to their own devices, children, over time, tend to settle into a preferred way of learning to the point of screening out less favored types of information.

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