EDUCATION

By the time her daughter started grade six, Sharon Hunter was hearing alarm bells. Lisa said she disliked math and science, and her marks were lower than her teachers felt they could be. Despite having lots of friends, the Winnipeg student seemed to be suffering from low self-esteem. Hunter saw a connection there and feared Lisa was entering a downward spiral. "Math and science are so important for jobs these days," she says. "But in class, Lisa was shutting right down."

On one level, Lisa's experience is typical. A recent study of grade- three students by Ontario's Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) showed that by a small margin, more boys than girls said they liked mathematics. By a much wider margin, girls downplayed their abilities. Only 46 percent of the girls said they thought they were good at mathematics, compared to 58 percent of the boys. But there' s a kicker. On average, the grade-three girls actually outscored their male classmates by four percentage points on a provincewide math test. "The perception is one thing, the reality another," says EQAO education officer Robert Gagne.

When it comes to the so-called gender gap in education, perception and reality are big issues - and often these days, the perception that boys do better than girls in school is turning out to be wrong. To prepare a comprehensive study on gender, researchers at the respected New Jersey-based Education Testing Service (ETS), which designs and administers the college-entrance Scholastic Aptitude Test, spent four years crunching the grades and test scores of 15 million American schoolchildren. They found that in most subjects, boys and girls now perform identically.

Study co-author Warren Willingham says public perception to the contrary was probably set by well-publicized studies done in 1960 that showed boys were significantly outperforming girls in math and science. "In the intervening years, there's been a great effort to improve educational opportunities and programs in math and science for females," says Willingham. "I think we've proven this pas paid off in terms of performance. A broad range of studies shows that the gap between male and female performance is now, for the most part, statistically insignificant."

The exceptions found by ETS researchers are technological and computer studies, in which boys do better than girls, and writing and language skills, in which girls do far better than boys. In Ontario, province wide test results echo the ETS findings on reading and writing. Grade-three reading tests, which were marked according to four achievement levels, showed that 85 percent of girls performed at level two and above, compared to 78 percent of boys. Fifty-eight percent of girls reached upper levels three and four, compared to only 45 percent of boys.

Willingham points out that this large gender gap in reading and writing skills has remained constant in numerous tests over 30 years. Yet ETS researchers reject the contention that girls have an inborn superiority in these areas. Instead, Willingham says that less attention has been paid to boys' performance in these subjects than to the lower scores girls were getting in math and science. "We're emphasizing nurture over nature in our results," he says. "The significant shift in female performance in math and science seems to indicate that, through concerted effort, the gender gap can be made to disappear."

Making it disappear for Lisa involved a hard decision for Sharon Hunter - sending her daughter to an all-girls program run for grade-seven and -eight students at the Winnipeg board's Earl Grey school. "For her it was an incredible choice, to leave our area and her friends," Hunter says. "Frankly, she wasn't thrilled at first. Already in grade four; the boy-girl thing had started, and she didn't want to lose that. But our rationale is that we'll give her this in junior high, and hopefully it will give her the skills to go on to perform well in a mixed high school."

Earl Grey is a south Winnipeg school with 266 students from kindergarten to grade eight. Principal Gall Singer says one of the teachers there first floated the idea of trying an all-girls program in 1993 when she was looking for a way to revitalize the school. After getting approval from the Winnipeg Board of Education in February 1995, Singer and her staff "prepared big time," and the program was implemented that fall on a voluntary basis.

Closing the '60s science gap involved the development of "female-friendly" programs, and Earl Grey has benefitted from the studies. Research shows that while most boys learn well in a teacher-directed environment, girls tend to benefit from greater experimentation, working in teams that draw on their co-operative ability, and often using their hands to make or study objects, taking in information in a tactile or artistic manner. Singer says this led the school to develop a more hands-on science and computer program rich in opportunities for teamwork.

Teachers also use research proving the value of building girls' self-esteem in boosting their performance, working to improve their body image, for instance, through a critical look at advertising. In addition, they've incorporated more information about female scientists and other role models in the curriculum.

But the most obvious technique Earl Grey uses is segregation, removing the gender comparisons and competition that Singer says traditionally favours boys. And while the other methods can be used in mixed classrooms, Singer admits this radical second step has troubled some Earl Grey parents - and not just the parents of boys. Yet she stands by the decision, saying that research shows boys tend to compare themselves favourably to girls in a classroom, and in effect, benefit from stereotyping girls in negative ways. "As a group, they've tended to function well in the traditional mixed classroom partly for this reason. We hope the segregated conditions will go a long way towards correcting this unfortunate imbalance."

And, says Singer, so far it has. Girls' marks generally go up after they've arrived at Earl Grey, and a board study shows that twice the number of students in Earl Grey's all-girl classes scored in the top ten percent of their grade level as girls from mixed classes. In fact, the program bas been so successful that last fall, for the first time, all grade-seven and -eight girls at Earl Grey opted for the segregated program, leaving Singer with an unanticipated side effect - all-boy classes.

As the mother of a son myself, I can't help having complicated feelings about boys being shunted aside, however unintentionally, especially when the latest test results show they're not doing as well as girls in some key areas. When I ask Singer whether the all-boy classes have an enriched language arts program, she replies, "That's a good idea." Yet, she adds, boys have benefitted from Earl Grey's across-the-board commitment to improving computer education -not to mention the $90, 000 worth of computers Hewlett-Packard donated to the school as part of its campaign to increase computer literacy among girls.

Parents can also boost reading and writing skills at home. Warren Willingham advises signing boys up for the type of extracurricular activities that are usually the domain of girls. U.S. studies show that girls are more likely than boys to take classes in the arts and languages outside school, as well as keep diaries and write letters. Parents concerned about their sons language abilities should make a point of having longer and more frequent conversations with them.

At the same time, UBC education professor Mary Bryson advises parents of girls to monitor computer use at home, ensuring that their daughters get equal time with the males in the household, who have been found to dominate home computer use. Bryson's insights come partly from her current research, an interactice project at an elementary school in B.C.'s Lower Mainland where she is simultaneously studying gender issues in computer use and testing ways to equalize access. When she first visited the school last year, Bryson asked students to draw pictures of both a computer whiz and a computer "whizn't" - someone with few technological smarts. When it came to the computer whiz, both boys and girls overwhelmingly drew a picture of a male typing hard. The computer whizn'ts were almost all passive girls whose hands didn't even touch the keyboard.

Bryson's solutions? When new computers arrived at the school, she suggested that female teachers and students be trained first in their use, allowing them to later act as mentors to learners of both sexes. She asked that new computers be placed in the library, run by a female librarian, instead of in the male-dominated computer lab. Each computer was bolted with a plaque naming it after a prominent Canadian female scientist. And the school instituted a pass system for computer use, 50 percent available only to boys, and 50 percent to girls, so use is evenly divided at any time - a technique that could be transferred to the home.

Lisa Hunter-Garrioch is now in grade eight at Earl Grey, and her mother says she's thriving. Both her marks and her self-esteem have improved, and she now sees a wide range of job options ahead of her - "palaeontologist to massage therapist to something to do with computers," Sharon Hunter says. "Before she just said she'd probably work with kids. There's nothing wrong with that, but if we can expand her options, so much the better."

June 1998