Gender and Achievement:

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DcSF The Gender Agenda 9th July
Gender and Achievement Issues for Research Dr
Gemma Moss Institute of Education, University of
London
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Gender and Achievement Issues for Research

• Gender and the policy context how attention to
  boys underachievement has emerged as a policy
  problem
• Performance data and the policy context - gains
  and losses for research
• Gender and literacy as a telling case

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Gender and achievement in context

• Policy-driven educational reform in England runs
  with and in response to performance data
• The gap between girls and boys achievement is
  one of a repertoire of policy problems that
  emerge from analysis of that data

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Establishing priorities from a policy
perspective

• Gender is not the strongest predictor of
  attainment
• The social class attainment gap at Key Stage 4
  (as measured by percentage point difference in
  attainment between those eligible and not
  eligible for free school meals) is three times as
  wide as the gender gap.
• White British FSM boys are a group with
  particularly low attainment_ Only 24 percent
  gain 5 A-C GCSEs (33 percentage points less
  well than average attainment at GCSE).
• _ However, Black Caribbean FSM boys and White
  British FSM girls are also doing significantly
  less well than the national average
  (respectively, 30 and 26 percentage points less
  well than average attainment at GCSE).

Source DfES (2007) Gender and Education The
evidence on pupils in England
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Gender and achievement in context

• In policy contexts, fixing gender is primarily
  about fixing educational product.
• The preferred solution is uniformity of outcome
• Performance data are not transparent they do
  not provide an explanation for the different
  patterns they reveal

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Date Organisation Publication 93 Ofsted Boys
and English. 98 QCA Can Do Better - Raising
boys' achievement in English 03 Ofsted Yes
he can - schools where boys write
well 03 Ofsted Literature search on
improving boys writing 03 Ofsted English
Improving boys writing at Key
Stages 2 and 3 03 DfES/DoH Using the National
Healthy School Standard to Raise Boys
Achievement.
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Date Organisation Publication 03 DfES Gender
and Achievement - The Standards
Website 04 PNS/UKLA Raising boys' achievements
in writing 05 PNS Boys' writing
flyers 05 DfES Raising Boys
Achievement 07 DfES Gender and Education The
evidence on pupils in England 08 SLA
Riveting Reads Boys into   Books 11-14
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Gender, literacy and achievement the policy way
gains and losses

• Gains
• Little support for boy-friendly pedagogies
• The debate over boys performance is contained by
  the call for good pedagogy for all
• In some quarters, this has led to greater clarity
  over the need to expand rather than constrict
  definitions of what counts as literacy in school
  (Ofsted, 2003)

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Gender, literacy and achievement the policy way
gains and losses

• Losses
• Solutions are driven by the need to fix
  performance outcomes
• There is
• A loss of space in which to test competing
  explanations or their necessary scope
• A confusing welter of different advice, in which
  being seen to act fast counts most
• A muting of gender politics the social
  construction of gender is not centre stage

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What can research say to policy in this context?
Refocus on gender politics?

• Francis, B. Perspectives on Gender and
  Achievement.
• Key explanations for the gender gap
• Boys and girls are naturally different and this
  explains discrepancies in achievement
• Feminisation of schooling and bias towards girls
  disadvantages boys
• Pupils constructions of gender produce
  different behaviours which impact on achievement
• http//www.kenttrustweb.org.uk/docs/eot_becky_fran
  cis.pdf

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What can research say to policy in this context?
New forms of data analysis?

• Machin, S and McNally, S. Gender and
  Educational Attainment in Schools
• At what stage in education is the gender gap
  most important?
• How is gender gap related to changes at
  school/exam system or wider social and economic
  changes, e.g. higher education and labour market
  participation of women decline in male teachers
  cultural changes
• Can policy make a difference?
• How does gap in school attainment affect
  differences in post-compulsory schooling, labour
  market outcomes?
• http//www.iza.org/essle/essle2003/papers/mcnally
  .ppt.

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What can research say to policy in this context?
The search for best practice?

• Younger, Warrington et al, 2005, Raising Boys
  Achievement
• The schools we initially worked with did not
  always know .. why their gender gap had closed.
  Certainly all schools had put into effect certain
  measures to raise improvement, but these were not
  necessarily gender specific, nor indeed boy
  specific. Thus, although there was often an
  intuitive grasp of why the gap was narrowing,
  there was little analysis of the process of
  impact which would enable the strategy to be
  transferred, with confidence, to other schools.
• http//www.dfes.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/R
  R636.pdf

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New narratives about gender, literacy and
schooling Slow thinking in fast times

• Research projects
• Fact and Fiction Boys development as readers in
  the 7-9 age range. 1996-8.
• Mixed Methods in the Study of Pattern and
  Variation in Childrens Reading Habits. 2001
• Building a New Literacy Practice through the
  Adoption of the NLS. 2002-3
• Researchers
• Gemma Moss, Dena Attar, John McDonald.
• Funder ESRC

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Gender, literacy and achievement turning
explanations into questions

• Starting from the quantitative data
• Boys do less well than girls at reading and
  writing
• Boys read less
• Boys prefer non-fiction (Barrs, 1993)
• What do these correlations in the data suggest?

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Gender, literacy and achievement turning
explanations into questions

• Hypothesis Boys preference for non-fiction
  takes them to texts which are linguistically more
  complex and therefore more difficult for
  beginning readers to read. This increases the
  gap between failure and success.
• Question Why do boys prefer non-fiction?
• Research question Where and how is boys
  preference for non-fiction formed? Inside and/ or
  outside of school?

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Looking at reading as a social practice what do
you see?

• Childrens perceived proficiency as readers is
  made highly visible in classrooms
• Proficiency judgements about reading structure
  access to most areas of the curriculum, not just
  literacy.
• Fiction texts reflect their readers designated
  level of proficiency through their design
  characteristics.
• Many non-fiction texts do not.

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Looking at reading as a social practice what do
you see?

• Readers divide into these three categories
• Can/ do Can/ dont Cant yet/ dont
• Gender differences emerge within rather than
  ahead of these categories.
• More girls fall into the can/do category
• More boys fall into can/dont or cant
  yet/dont categories
• Boys in the cant yet category are most likely
  to chose to read non-fiction in class

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Differences between underachieving boys and
underachieving girls

• Girls and boys designated weak readers adopt
  different strategies in class
• Girls strategies keep them on task, even if
  others underestimate what they can do and seldom
  challenge them they coast along
• Boys strategies increasingly take them off task
  as they struggle to disguise their relatively
  poor standing and seek status and recognition
  with peers in other ways

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Girls and boys who pass the proficiency
threshold Can, do?

• Children who read read fiction
• Girls network more round their reading than boys
• Avid boy readers often seem to get considerable
  support from home to keep them reading
• Performance-driven classrooms create few spaces
  for supporting wider reading or sustaining
  networks of readers
• Yet wide reading enhances writing (Barrs and
  Cork, 2001)

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Conclusions

• This explanation can be tested
• It puts schooling as well as gender into the
  frame
• It provides a means of reviewing the literacy
  curriculum and what it offers to whom, as it
  changes over time
• What happens to those at the bottom of the
  reading hierarchy? (Cant yet/ dont)
• How are those who have acquired basic competence
  supported or stretched? (Can/dont)

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Gender and the Literacy Curriculum Principles
for future action

• We need to find ways to
• build an inclusive learning culture which can
  address the social standing of those at the
  bottom of the literacy hierarchy, whether girls
  or boys
• build a self-sustaining reading culture which
  encourages and significantly expands the choices
  children make
• provide more opportunities for childrens reading
  to feed their writing in unexpected ways

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Researching texts, contexts and readers
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References

• Barrs, M and Pidgeon, S. (1993) Reading the
  difference, CLPE
• Barrs, M and Cork, V. (2001) The Reader in the
  Writer
• DfES (2007) Gender and Education The evidence on
  pupils in England.
• Francis, B. Perspectives on Gender and
  Achievement
• Machin, S and McNally, S. Gender and Educational
  Attainment in Schools
• Moss, G. (2007) Literacy and Gender
  Researching texts, contexts and readers.
  Routledge
• Younger, M. Warrington, M. et al, (2005) Raising
  Boys Achievement. DfES