TeacherGenderAndLearning < Kitchen

14 Sep 2006 - 19:54

teacher gender and learning

One of the enduring mysteries of Irvington Middle School's Phase 4 math class is the fact that the girls in Ms. K's class apparently like her very much and think she's a terrific teacher. Other moms have told me this, and Christopher confirmed it just the other night.

"The girls like her," he said.

Meanwhile the boys are sitting around getting docked 20 points because they showed their work the wrong way. (Do the girls know the right way? And if they do, how did they find out?)

Now, just in time for back to school night, Ed Next has an article on teacher gender & learning.

the other achievement gap

Boys and girls start school with the same measured abilities. Then a gap opens up and wides over the years.

The evolution of the gender gaps in achievement as children mature suggests that what occurs in schools and classrooms may play an important role.According to the Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, when children enter kindergarten, the two genders perform similarly on tests of both reading and mathematics. But a few years later, by the spring of the 3rd grade, boys, on average, outperform girls in math and science, while the girls outperform the boys in reading. Disconcertingly, NAEP results show that for children between the ages of 9 and 13, the gender gaps in science and reading roughly double and the math gap increases by two-thirds. For children between the ages of 13 and 17, there is modest growth in the math and reading gender gaps but a substantial expansion of the gap in science
The gender gaps in achievement as students finish high school are far from trivial. In reading, 17-year-old boys score 31 percent of a standard deviation below 17-year-old girls, a deficit equal to about one grade level. This is nearly half the size of the black-white testscore gap in reading. In science and math, meanwhile, girls of that age score 22 percent and 10 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, also a difference worthy of concern.

This is extremely bad news.

I discovered this summer, through various sources I haven't mentioned yet, that reading is what counts. Period. Reading level predicts future success in everything, including, iirc, math-related fields.

For instance, the WordSmart bibliography of research on vocabulary reports Bowker finding that, “Vocabulary level is a useful predictor of academic ability, even for courses like Chemistry that do not emphasize language usage” (p. 16).

I haven't confirmed this independently, but it jibes with everything Hirsch says — and with everything Carolyn, Ed, and his brother Jerry say, too.

Jerry is the treasurer of Bryn Mawr. He said math scores predict nothing. Colleges look at verbal scores to decide what a student's potential is. Michelle Hernandez says the same; when she was an admissions director at Dartmouth she and her colleagues didn't bother with SAT math scores. High math scores were a dime a dozen; the verbal scores were what mattered.

And the book about high school kids with perfect SATs doesn't even mention math! The entire book is about these kids' incredible reading habits and vocabulary knowledge. The author seems to take it for granted that if you have an 800 on verbal it's easy to score an 800 on math.

I had reached the conclusion that math only matters if you don't know any math.

If you can't do math, that's a disaster.

But if you can do math you're not even halfway there. College students and adults learn acquire knew knowledge and comprehension via reading.

I asked Carolyn about this and she agreed. She said that when she's learning math her vocabulary has to be even more precise than it is when she's learning a social science or humanities subject.

I used to think fair was fair. Girls do better in reading; boys do better in math.

But that's wrong. Reading is (nearly) the whole game. A boy who's scoring pretty well on the (easy) NAEP math test and not so well on the (easy) NAEP reading test is in trouble.

middle schoolers

Studies have not focused on young adolescents, the time when students are particularly sensitive to gender differences and when gender gaps in achievement are pronounced. I investigated the effect of a teacher’s gender using the National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS),which contains data on a nationally representative sample of nearly 25,000 8th graders from 1988. In addition to examining the effect of teacher gender on students’ test-score performance, I examined teacher perceptions of a student’s performance and student perceptions of the subject taught by a particular teacher. I was especially interested in the influence of a teacher’s gender on students’ perceptions, because engagement with an academic subject may be an important precursor to subsequent achievement levels, course selection in high school and college, and also occupational choice. For example, the underrepresentation of women in fields like engineering and computer science may be due to levels of confidence and interest in related subjects in high school.
Indeed, my results confirm that a teacher’s gender does have large effects on student test performance, teacher perceptions of students, and students’ engagement with academic material. Simply put, girls have better educational outcomes when taught by women and boys are better off when taught by men.These findings persist, even after I account for a variety of other characteristics of students, teachers, and classrooms that may influence student learning. They are especially important for young men when one considers that the percentage of 6th-grade teachers who were female ranged from 58 to 91 percent across four core subjects (math, science, reading, and history).Although these percentages decline in later grades, 83 percent of the English teachers in 8th grade are female, as are more than half of 8th-grade math and science teachers (see Figure 2).

That's good news, seeing as how Christopher, now in 7th grade, has never had a male teacher for any grade or, in middle school, any of his core subjects.

Last year he had his first male teacher ever, for music. This year he has a male teacher in art.

And that's it.

teacher survey data

The teacher survey solicited a variety of information about the teacher’s background, including gender. It also included several questions about how the teacher viewed the behavior and performance of the specific students in the study. I was most interested in the effect of gender on three assessments that appear to be particularly good indicators of academic development.Teachers were asked to simply respond yes or no as to whether the student was frequently disruptive, consistently inattentive, or rarely completed homework.
[snip]
The survey also asked students questions about their engagement with the subject. In particular, students indicated whether they were afraid to ask questions in that subject, looked forward to their class, and saw the subject as useful for their future. NELS also solicited information about each student’s gender as well as a variety of other demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.
NELS is a goldmine of information for those interested in gender dynamics within the classroom. Especially noteworthy is the fact that data are available from the same student in two different subjects taken from two different teachers, which enables us to account for educationally relevant characteristics of students that cannot be ascertained by conventional background characteristics. In other words, these “matched-pairs” data allow us to see how the outcomes of the same student vary with two different teachers. When estimating the effect of a teacher’s gender, I use standard statistical techniques to adjust for the effect of several other teacher and classroom characteristics that may affect student outcomes. For example, I take into account whether the student shares the teacher’s race and ethnicity, because some of my own prior research suggests that the race of a teacher may influence student outcomes (see “The Race Connection,” Education Next, Spring 2004). I also consider the size of the class, the percentage of students in the classroom with limited English proficiency, the number of years a teacher has been working in the profession, and whether the teacher is state-certified in the subject he or she is teaching.What does this valuable set of data reveal about the connections between gender and learning?

the most important findings

For three subject areas—science, social studies, and English— the overall effect of having a woman teacher instead of a man raises the achievement of girls by 4 percent of a standard deviation and lowers the achievement of boys by roughly the same amount, producing an overall gender gap of 8 percent of a standard deviation, no small matter if it can be assumed that this happened over the course of a single year.
[snip]
When a class is headed by a woman, boys are more likely to be seen as disruptive, while girls are less likely to be seen as either disruptive or inattentive. Furthermore, when taught by a man, girls were more likely to report that they did not look forward to a subject, that it was not useful for their future, or that they were afraid to ask questions. This dynamic is strongest in science,where student reports indicate that female science teachers are far more effective in promoting girls’ engagement with this field of study. The estimated effects in the other two subjects pointed in the same direction but were statistically insignificant when examined separately.
Boys also had fewer positive reactions to their academic subject when taught by an opposite-gender teacher. In particular, when taught by a female teacher, boys were significantly more likely to report that they did not look forward to the subject. This effect appears to have been particularly pronounced when the female teacher was in history.

math results fuzzy

The author looked at math scores, too:

My initial analysis showed that both boys and girls suffered if they had a woman teacher.

This turned out to be due to the fact that women math teachers were teaching lower-ability — special ed and the regular track — math classes. So he has no direct data on gender of teacher & math learning.

the years add up

Adverse gender effects have an impact on both boys and girls, but that effect falls more heavily on the male half of the population in middle school, simply because most middleschool teachers are female.My estimates suggest that, if half of the English teachers in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades were male and their effects on learning were additive, the achievement gap in reading would fall by approximately a third by the end of middle school. Similarly, these results suggest that part of boys’ relative propensity to be seen as disruptive in these grades is due to the gender interactions resulting from the preponderance of female teachers.

The Why Chromosome
by Thomas S. Dee
Education Next
Fall 2006

Let's try that calculation making all of a middle school boy's teachers female, shall we?

While we're at it, let's make all of the middle school boy's teachers young, inexperienced, childless females.

Like the teachers in Christopher's middle school, say.

Michelle Hernandez on SAT verbal vs. math

I believe that if you can read and write well, the rest wil follow. Those who are gifted in math but who are weak readers and writers will ultimately stand a lesser chance of acceptance at top colleges (unless they apply to very technologically oriented colleges such as Cal Tech and MIT), since it is far more typical to see a strong math/science student than to see a standout humanities student.
[snip]
Only .9 percent [of test-takers prior to the 1995 recentering] scored between 700 and 750 on the old verbal, so in total, a paltry 1 percent of all test takers scored over 700 on the verbal, whereas a whopping 75 percent of test takeres scored below 500. In the math section, only 4.2 percent of the population scored over 700.
[snip]
The ability to read well will ultimately have a bigger impact on most college students than the ability to do SAT I math very well, especially since the level of SAT math is not particularly high.
source:
A is for Admission

from D-Ed Reckoning

Research shows that the leading predictor that a student will drop out of college is the need for remedial reading. While 58 percent of students who take no remedial education courses earn a BachelorÂ’s degree within eight years, only 17 percent of students who enroll in a remedial reading course receive a BA or BS within the same time period (NCES, 2004a).

today's factoid

David Boulton: We were interviewing Lesley Morrow, the Past-President of the International Reading Association, and she made a statement which flabbergasted me. She said this was a fact: that there are some states that determine how many prison cells to build based on reading scores.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes. Again, the predictability of reading for life success is so strong, that if you look at the proportion of middle schoolers who are not at the basic level, who are really behind in reading, it is a very strong predictor of problems with the law and the need for jails down the line.
Literacy for societies, literacy for states, literacy for individuals is a powerful determinate of success. The opposite of success is failure and clearly, being in jail is a sign of failure.
People who don’t read well have trouble earning a living. It becomes attractive to, in some cases the only alternative in terms of gaining funds, to violate the law and steal, to do things that get you in trouble. Few options in some cases other than to pursue that life. Of course reading opens doors.

Children of the Code
interview with Grover Whitehurst, Director of the Institude of Education Sciences.

Apparently really great math scores don't keep you out of jail.

-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Sep 2006

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I wonder if there's a difference in reaction to the gender of the teachers at a boys school or at a girls school. I went to a single-sex girls school and as it happened I had mostly male teachers in the subjects I enjoyed (maths, physics, chemistry, history, graphic design) and entirely female teachers in the subjects I hated (English, Social Studies). Though that was probably as much the subject as the teacher.

My hypothesis is that it is difficult to be biased against girls or boys when your job in life is teaching maths or physics to classes entirely full of girls (or English and Art History of classes entirely full of boys).

Though at my brothers single-sex boys school they did have problems with a female English teacher who assigned The Handmaiden's Tale for study (lovely book, but definitely not a work designed to appeal to 16 year old boys) and did various other things. When the boys eventually complained she accused them of sexually harassing her. So perhaps you can be biased at a single-sex school, but if so you probably won't last very long.

-- TracyW - 14 Sep 2006

The interesting thing with this subject is that no one really knows why gender should matter....and I don't, either, frankly.

I definitely see obnoxious female microfascism....but even that might not be the problem.

Do you know that great Heinlein line about every woman having a bit of the slaveholder inside?

That's what I'm talking about.

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

hmmmm

now I can't find it

This one's great: “Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.” (Heinlein)

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

That's exactly what I've been thinking!

Or....you could be biased, but it wouldn't matter.

The girls LOVE Ms. Kahl. It is simply extraordinary. A mom tonight looked at me like I was from Mars when I had an accidental anti-Kahl eruption in the hall, after our Phase 4 briefing. (message: POINTS OFF!)

Tonight's story: one of the boys came home and burst into tears because Ms. Kahl told him, in class, that he was "racist" — that is the word she used in front of the entire class. What he'd said, which she didn't understand, was "racist" and he was to see her after class.

I didn't get the whole story, but Ms. Kahl had been saying something or other, which he didn't understand, and in respond he said the word "Asian," and then Ms. Kahl said, "That is racist. See me after class."

So he came home in tears.

This has to stop.

But back to your point: Ms. Kahl is, clearly, no friend to boys.

But if she had no girls at all in the class, at least she wouldn't be constantly reminded of how much better (and less racist!) girls are.

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

Ms. Kahl: We're gonna see some quadratic equations and all kinds of crazy stuff.

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

That's a direct quote.

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

"I found some cool websites over the summer. Some fun math stuff for the kids to do."

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

POINTS OFF!

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

Mostly she talked about POINTS OFF.

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

Ms. Kahl: "They'll be doing most of the same stuff again this year, because we spiral."

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

I'm looking forward to doing the same stuff again this year.

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

POINTS OFF-OFF-OFF!

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

I need a drink.

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

Research shows that the leading predictor that a student will drop out of college is the need for remedial reading.

I'd like to know what a really good remedial reading course would even look like. B had one last year, mainly because that's where they felt they could deal best with his attention and behavior issues, and he fell further behind his agemates in reading comprehension than he started out. The reason? Much less actual practice at reading.

-- CarolynJohnston - 15 Sep 2006

When the boys eventually complained she accused them of sexually harassing her.

Talk about a career-limiting move.

-- CarolynJohnston - 15 Sep 2006

If it's the exact same stuff, it's not spiraling, it's CIRCLING.

-- RudbeckiaHirta - 15 Sep 2006

circling!!!!!

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

you just made my day!

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

Carolyn

If you have time, read THE KNOWLEDGE DEFICIT (I'll scout the reviews & see if there's one that gives a really good precis)

It's a life-altering book, maybe even more so than SCHOOLS WE NEED

In the new one he zeroes in on "formalist" reading programs, which are a horror

Remedial reading programs probably have the kids spend endless hours reading cr** and "inferencing," "questioning the author," etc.

It turns out that reading, like everything else, isn't a formalistic, content-free skill that can be transferred from one domain to another

Reading is about background knowledge

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

I've really had a paradigm shift, post Hirsch. (I read two in a row, SCHOOLS WE NEED & KNOWLEDGE DEFICIT. Saving CULTURAL LITERACY for later as a form of distributed practice.)

the simple rule:

Good reading is a function of good background knowledge.

Here's the fascinating thing.

What you need in order to be a good reader is not "critical thinking skills" or "deep conceptual understanding" etc.

What you need is broad superficial knowledge.

What you need to be a good reader is:

PBS knowledge

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

While we're at it, let's make all of the middle school boy's teachers young, inexperienced, childless females.

--who have no brothers.

We had a couple of teachers that were childless, but they had brothers. Both teachers (that come to mind) would mention fondly that my son reminded them of their siblings. They were firm, but much more understanding of typical boy stuff. It is much easier to discuss things with teachers who seem to genuinely like boys.

I definitely noticed a difference with teachers who had sons. They were much more empahthetic to typical boy behavior and often humored by it, even when it was a problem.

-- SusanS - 15 Sep 2006

Also unmarried.

That's Ms. Kahl.

young

unmarried

childless

She is a perfect storm of anti-boyness

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

I should find out if she had brothers

I would be stunned if she did

I'd be pretty stunned if she had sisters, actually

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

We were impressed by the social studies teacher, a career-changer who used to be a prosecutor. (Well, I was impressed except for the fact that she had all 3 classes spend an hour discussing whether kids should or should not say the Pledge of Allegiance. Apart from the blatant opening to tell-everyone-my-parents'-politics, opinionmongering amongst school kids should stop. Ed says he doesn't let his college students give opinions, though it's incredibly hard to stop them doing so. He tells them he wants to know what the book they read said and, eventually, to compare what that book said to what another book said.

College kids come to college with the expectation that they'll be giving their opinions all the livelong day.

oh, that's another thing

They also - and this is accomplished young college students - don't know the difference between an opinion and an argument. I don't know that they should know the difference, but they shouldn't have been led to believe that giving-my-opinion is what a person learning history should be doing.

NO KIDS today are taught how to gauge when they do or do not have enough information to support an opinion.

In this case I'm just grateful the kids in Christopher's class voted for the Pledge. The second period class had only 4 kids who thought it was a good thing to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Interestingly, one of the kids had lived by the Trade Centers on 9/11 & said that we need to say the Pledge to show our respect for our country.

The teacher was quite funny. She said that a lot of the kids brought up the God issue, saying "What if somebody doesn't believe in God?" and, in one case, "What if somebody believes in gods, not just God?"

The teacher said, "I don't know where they came up with gods. Probably from the ancient Greek and Rome unit last year. I don't think too many major religions belive in gods these days."

She has a son in 7th grade & a daughter in 10th and she said, several times, "I know what you're going through."

Then she said she was putting everything on edline so the kids didn't have to remember to grab paper handouts in her class every day. The paper handouts would be there, and the assignments would be written on the board, but if they managed to forget all that they could find out the assignment from edline at night.

She said that when her daughter was in middle school the administration refused to put anything online because the kids had to "develop the responsibility of remembering to get the handout and take it home."

She said to them, "When I got my Masters degree in education I didn't have to develop the responsibility of remembering to get the handout and take it home. Everything was online."

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

"If it's the exact same stuff, it's not spiraling, it's CIRCLING."

And what does one circle, children?

That's right: the drain.

(Well, except that's really sort of a spiral ... dang.)

-- DougSundseth - 15 Sep 2006

RE the girls liking Mrs. Kahl, I think that most girls have a much higher tolerance for jumping through pointless hoops. I know that I certainly did. I would figure out the teacher's wishes and conform to them, even if I thought they were dumb, because I cared more about pleasing the teacher and getting a good grade than avoiding pointless work. I actually ENJOYED writing out every minute step of my math homework because I liked the neat, organized, step-by-step look of it. My husband, however, DESPISED it. I think boys care much more about simplicity, streamlining, and finding the most efficient way to the end. They like to get things over with and move on to the next thing. They care more about this than ensuring that their female teacher is pleased with them, since they're likely to do something else within the next 30 min. (like fidget or be a boy) that will incur her displeasure anyway.

In my experience, you don't see male teachers setting up elaborate systems for organizing work, tracking discipline, spending hours planning how to best layout/decorate their classrooms, etc. I think they have a low tolerance for what they consider superfluous, whereas female teachers thrive on such things.

My husband's favorite word is "inane." He used to get in SO much trouble in elementary school for describing his teachers'worksheets/busy work this way. He laughs when he tells me that he got in more trouble than the boys who just called the assignments "stupid" because not only was he "stepping on their toes", he was doing it with an unusually mature vocubulary.

-- AndyJoy - 15 Sep 2006

What AndyJoy^? said. I couldn't agree more.

There are some math head girls who are like that (I know of one who complains bitterly about obnoxious busywork weekly even though she's a straight A honors/AP kid), but I think it tends to be the boys who can't take the busywork to the point of letting it show on their faces. I've had this battle with my boy for years and I haven't won it. I just tell him that there are times when you jump through the silly hoop and get your little A. You'll be grateful when something hard comes along and you don't get that A.

I do think that female teachers (or any male ones out there who do this) have to recognize and respect this or they are doing a disservice to these kinds of students.

-- SusanS - 15 Sep 2006

The number one reason my husband supports my homeschooling our future children is to "Stop the inanity!" We both look back on our school years with regret about all the time that was wasted with pointless exercises and trying to get 30 kids to conform in unimportant matters.

My boss' favorite saying is "Don't let school get in the way of your education." That really has been my life motto.

-- AndyJoy - 15 Sep 2006

There's got to be a study somewhere that says girls tolerate the inane better than boys. My son gets easily frustrated with pointless assignments. My daughters simply assume the point eludes them. I know I never thought to ask why are we bothering with this? I suppose part of the answer parallels the experience kids have with abuse. If abuse is all you know, you can't really imagine an abuse-free existence. Same with inanity.

BTW, have you seen the new post on What Works Clearinghouse? Everyday Math. D-ED Reckoninghas got a great post on it, It's Official, Everyday Math Sucks

-- LynnGuelzow - 16 Sep 2006

WebLogForm
Title:	teacher gender and learning
TopicType:	WebLog
SubjectArea:	EducationResearch, IrvingtonMath, IrvingtonSchools, LanguageArts, TeachersTeachingKids
LogDate:	200609141553

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teacher gender and learning

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