Math Class Is Tough By Erika Milligan

Mention separating students and putting them in same sex classrooms or even schools guarantees an uproar, however what most students don’t realize is that when making the great divide it actually creates a better learning environment and it unlocks opportunities for their future. Of course students will need time to adapt and most should take into consideration that just because they’re put into different classrooms doesn’t mean that their grades will automatically be golden. This approach is taken to understand the different learning styles of the male and female. With this, new lesson plans will be able to be assembled to suit their divergent needs.

Deborah Tannen, who is a professor of linguistics, says in her essay, "How Male And Female Students Use Language Differently", that after she made her book, “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation” that one of the unintended benefits was that she gets to reevaluate her teaching strategies and see how male and females act differently in class. As you read through her essay you can tell that Deborah Tannen wants her readers to think about why males tend to speak more in discussions than females and the reason for this difference in the classroom and also how we can improve the classroom for both men and women.Although Tannen tends to get off topic and doesn 't have much evidence to back up some of her claims, she states

I watched a TedEd of the famed psychologist Philip Zimbardo titled "The Demise of Guys?". This talk was about how boys are falling behind the learning curve and are experiencing increased social shyness when it comes to male-female interaction. It somewhat relates to my topic on education bias so it was interesting to see how Zimbardo's data compared to what I had researched on my own about girls in the classroom. Zimbardo reported that male students are being diagnosed with learning/attention disabilities at growing rates and that they are dropping out of school at disproportionate rates in comparison to female students. Research also indicated that there is a steady increase of social awkwardness that inhibits males from having intimate relationships.

There are multiple reasons why Kelley King, Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens are on the pro side. For one reason, they believe that the differences exist due to boys being more interactive with certain topics and methods that don’t usually interest girls or vice versa. For example, the Wamsley Elementary School in Rifle, Colorado has both boy and girl students. However, in the past, the girl students over accomplished the boy students due to the school staff being more experienced in understanding how to teach girls than understanding how to teach boys. So, the school focused on teaching the boys with their own learning styles that are also girl friendly such as online courses. The result of this was successful as boys became more accomplished than they were from before. (Pages 147 – 148).

It is no secret that, in general, boys and girls differ in their learning styles. Capitalizing on these differences could advance classroom performance. With on-going concerns about student success in school, any changes in the classroom that could increase student achievement should be considered. Recognizing the learning differences between boys and girls, one of the changes that could be instituted is single-gender classrooms.

Evidence suggests that girls are more likely to spend their leisure time in ways which compliment their education and contribute to educational achievements. Mitsos and Browne place considerable emphasis on reading. Women are more likely to read than men, and mothers are more likely than fathers to read to their children. Therefore girls are more likely to have same-sex role models to encourage them to read. Poor language and literacy skills are likely to affect boys' performance across a wide range of subjects.

An experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles proved interesting when a machine taught both boys and girls. The boys ended up scoring higher than when a woman taught them. I am wondering if girls scored higher than the boys did when male teachers teach them? I also wonder how the girls scored when taught by a machine; maybe they scored higher, too. At the secondary school level boys do perform better on technical or scientific subjects. Now this goes back to the first assumption that our brains work differently, or is it because more male teachers may teach these subjects? According to Mooney, teacher of the similar sex may have the "instinctive understanding that an adult will enjoy with a child who is going through a process which he or she went through too" (122). In other words, they can relate better with a child of the same sex. I am a female kindergarten teacher and also have a daughter who is six years old. I have no problem relating to the boys in my class. I think I can relate to any child who is five or six years old.

As soon as the suggested topics were revealed, it was obvious to me which topic caught my attention, ‘Equity in mathematics learning and teaching – addressing social issues related to gender, class and ethnicity’. Obviously this topic was too broad a subject for me to research into with any depth so I began researching into the area which would most interest me. The result was the issue of gender within learning. I came to this conclusion after finding an interesting article on same-sex classes, ‘Can Single-sex Classes in Co-educational Schools Enhance the Learning Experiences of Girls and/or Boys? An Exploration of Pupils’ Perceptions’ by Carolyn Jackson. She talks about an experiment with pupils within a year 7 class, where they are put into single-sex classes for mathematics and are assessed by their test results as well as being interviewed about their opinion and confidence. This idea instantly grabbed my attention. Therefore I have decided to start my assignment by discussing how gender affects the learning of mathematics, focussing on secondary school mathematics, and then continue to analyse whether using same-sex classes could be a useful adjustment in today’s secondary schools.

Gender is determined to be one of the predictor of student academic performance and in particular in science and mathematics subject. At an early age, children who work independently at high-level tasks tend to be successful academically in mathematics and science regardless of their gender (Fennema & Peterson, 1985), however girls through a set of rules are prone to excel in these subjects (Hopkins, McGillicuddy-DeLisi, & DeLisi, 1997). Fennema and Peterson suggested that females are more protected and offered more help than males, this extrinsic phenomenon lead female to be more dependent whereas boys are more independent. Additionally, female student are in dilemma whether to be popular or academically successful, as extrinsic factor

Did you know that single-sex classrooms are the worst classes ever? Over the past decade, single-gender classrooms have been opened in at least 230 schools in the rural, suburban, and the urban areas. Single-gender classrooms are classrooms where either young girls’ are in one class together, or young boys are in another class together. Single-sex classrooms were created because studies showed that boys and girls learn differently and they could benefit from being in a classroom with peers to whom they can relate. Since 2008, single-gender education has been the key to improved educational performance among boys and girls throughout the years. Today, gender differences among girls and boys are steadily rising in the classrooms they are in,

In the essay “When Brights Girls Decide that Math is a Waste of Time” by Susan Jacoby, Jacoby claims that girls develop deficiencies during their adolescent years by not taking math or science in their high school years. It can be argued that Jacoby’s thoughts on high school girls and math are incorrect due to the sexism that takes place in her essay, the amount of inaccurate and outdated information, and her argument that math and science is highly important.

Gender differences occur in many aspects of a person’s life whether it is culture, politics, occupation, family and relationships, or the economy (just to name a few). One major difference in gender occurs in learning and education in the elementary and secondary levels. Research has found that males and females learn differently in many aspects of education. First of all, female and male brains are constructed differently affecting the way they learn; this leads to basic differences in learning and also gives an introduction into why the way one learns differs according to gender and how males and females learn subjects and tasks differently. Second, males and females are treated differently, sometimes unconsciously, in educational

In the past, boys were at the top of their classes. However, in the 21st century, this is no longer the case. In recent years, girls do better in the school and achieved higher grades than boys, despite the stereotype which is males are better in science and math than female. There is a particular saying in Arabic that says, “girls have stolen the march from boys” when it comes to excelling in classrooms. This means females have gained a strong interest in studies, received higher grades, and had better attitude towards education. Literacy skills have mainly increased the gender gap between girls and boys in education, which has led to the difference in the performance for all the subjects in the school. However, the gender gap between girls and boys is negligible in Science and Math.

Nowadays, girls outperform boys in almost every academic subject. It is a very well-known fact that around the world today females out number males in graduating college. It is another evidence of research conclusions on how girls and boys are

Single-sex and co educators have different views on single-sex education; however, both agree that students can distract and influence each other. One way students influence each other is by competing for the opposite sex’ attention. For instance, girls will compete against each other to win a boys’ attention and vice versa. “Snow and others point out that in a single-gender environment they don’t see the competition for attention or showing off that can occur in coed classrooms” (Frazer-Harrison, 2014, p. 2). Similarly, both boys and girls have crushes, which affects their schoolwork; they act differently and often lose sight of what is important, such as academics, in order to impress their crush. Undoubtedly, boys are affected by girls, while girls are affected by boys. “Research shows that male students in a coed setting are affected by “a politeness factor” in the presence of female peers, according to Dona Matthews, a Toronto-based developmental psychologist and former instructor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education” (Kwong, 2013, p. 3). The presence of the opposite sex impacts how students focus in class, which can lead to a decline in academic achievements. Educators from both single-sex and coed agree that students focusing on academics can be affected by students of the opposite sex. Battle Creek has become one school that has embraced single-sex education. As a result of separating boys and girls, they act more mature and are not trying to catch a