What are the effects of gender on educational attainment?

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What are the effects of gender on educational
attainment?
Primary school boys fail to close gap with girls
Boys are being failed by our schools
Many teenage boys fail test grade
Poor white boys 'most likely to fail school'
Almost half of all boys fail to meet targets for
writing
Why aren't boys doing as well at school?
Recent headlines taken from newspapers and
websites
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Are boys educational failures?

• Evaluating the effect of Gender on School
  achievement

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Sociological Targets

• To understand that gender can have an influence
  on school attainment.
• To recognise that traditional patterns of gender
  attainment are changing in favour of girls.
• To identify some of the effects that the growing
  confidence of girls is having on boys.

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Personal targets

• To think critically about social issues
• To undertake personal research
• To write a paragraph with both AO1 and AO2 skills
  in evidence.

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The problem for schools

• Until the mid 1980s, boys out-performed girls at
  all levels of the education system, with the
  exception of 11
• Most educational writers read this as being
  'proof' that girls were generally less
  intelligent than boys and that boys were 'late
  developers'.
• Since the mid-1980s both genders began to improve
  their school performance significantly. The
  improvement of girls was more rapid than that for
  boys.

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Is this a problem?

• Warrington and Younger (1999) note that the
  success of girls should be a cause for
  celebration and congratulation.
• Instead it is viewed as a 'problem' with concern
  expressed about how males are 'failing.
• Schools are now told to tackle the issue of the
  underachievement of boys.

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Discussion questions

• Why do you think male improvement in achievement
  has been at a lower rate to females?
• Why do you think female success is seen as a
  problem of boys 'failing'?

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Stimulus materials

• Look at the graphs that follow. They are taken
  from the ONS website.
• Summarise what you learn about gender attainment
  from each of them.

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Attainment of five A - C GCSEs
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Higher education
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Possible reasons for changes ranking exercise

• Girls and boys learn in different ways
• Schools are feminine environments
• Girls attitudes towards work are changing
• Young women are more personally confident
• Males are losing confidence and there is a crisis
  of masculinity
• Boys are rejecting school and developing
  laddish attitudes.

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Key researchers

• Wilkinson (1994) refers to the 'genderquake'
  whereby young females are increasingly striving
  for a fulfilling career
• Susan Faludi and Robert Bly suggest male
  underachievement is linked to a 'crisis of
  masculinity
• Murphy and Elwood (1998) argue that teachers are
  now more sensitive to gender issues facing
  females. Teaching has become a feminised
  profession

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Researchers 2

• Mitsos and Browne (1998) found that in
  coeducation schools girls worked harder and spent
  more time on homework, were better organised, and
  were more likely to meet deadlines than boys.
• Harris et al. (1993) found that boys were more
  easily distracted in the classroom
• Post modernists argue that performance by gender
  is affected by the social class and ethnic
  backgrounds of male and female students. Thus,
  not all female students do well and all male
  students do badly.
• For Mac an Ghaill, the underachievement of boys
  is particularly a working class problem.

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Summary of key points

• Until the mid 1980s, boys outperformed girls in
  schools.
• This was seen as natural, except by feminists.
• The impact of feminist research changed many
  attitudes in schools.
• By the mid 1980s, girls and boys were achieving
  equally well
• Girls are now consistently outperforming boys at
  all levels and in most subjects.
• This is seen as a cause for concern by many
  politicians.

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Assessment

• Outline and explain why boys are now seen by many
  as the gender of failure in Education.

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Independent study

• Add to your notes by using the textbooks in the
  LRC and in your Sociology department.
• Use the e-book on the NGFL-Cymru website for more
  detailed notes and explanations.