Contradictions in single-sex education studies

Children do better at school when they are taught by same-sex teachers, US research suggests.

A study by Stanford University economist Thomas Dee concluded this week that children did four per cent better in tests when boys where taught by men and girls by women.

The results were based on a study conducted on 25,000 pupils and based on the US-wide National Education Longitudinal Survey.

Professor Dee said that schools should "keep an open mind about a variety of strategies that neither unequivocally endorse single-sex education nor rule it out of order together."

A teacher's gender had "large effects on student test performance... Simply put, girls have better educational opportunities when taught by women and boys are better off when taught by men," the report said. This is because boys were "more likely to be seen as disruptive" with a female teacher, girls "more likely to report that they did not look forward to a subject" when taught by a man.

The researcher emphasised that this did not necessarily imply that more single-sex classes should be introduced, as this could have other "drawbacks". Rather, teachers could learn more about the "different learning styles" of boys and girls.

On the other hand, an earlier study by the London Metropolitan and Newcastle universities found that primary school pupils cared less about a teacher's gender than their overall ability in the job.

Most of the 300 children interviewed - aged seven and eight and living in the north-east and south-east of England - said they did not care. Rather, boys said they wanted to be like their teachers because they wanted to have their authority or knowledge; girls said they wanted to behave like their teachers, such as being kind to others.

Professor Christine Skelton, who led the project, said: "What we found particularly interesting was that boys were just as likely to say they wanted to be like their women teachers as their male teachers and vice versa for the girls."

Meanwhile, after reviewing international research from Australia, North America, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK, Professors Alan Smithers and Pamela Robertson of Buckingham University have suggested that single-sex education does not make much difference to students' achievement.

The findings show that gender is not necessarily important because "the main determinants of a school's performance are the ability and social background of the pupils."

"While both single-sex and co-education have passionate advocates, half a century of research has so far revealed no striking or consistent differences one way or the other," they said.

So it seems that the gender mix is only one of the factors in a school's success and its effects, if any, are usually not strong enough to be detected by the methods of educational research.