Co Ed Can Be No Ed

Coed Can be No Ed

“Children who attend single-sex schools score higher on tests, stay out of trouble, and are more willing to study a wider range of subjects than pupils in coeducational schools,” researchers stated in the article, “Pupils at Single-Sex Schools Excel” (Corso 2). Another researcher claims, “Most people will view single-sex schools as academically tougher, more rigorous, probably more effective, but perhaps less enjoyable than coed schools” (Salamone 1).

Within the last few years there has been a surprising increase of interest in single-sex education. Researchers have found that boys and girls learn differently. This contributes to why the idea of single-sex education is being brought up. Studies have found that it’s not sufficient to just put boys and girls into separate classrooms and continue teaching the same way as before. Instead, educators must recognize these learning differences in order to improve the academic performance of their students.

Boys and girls learning styles differ mostly within their physiological senses, such as differences in the ability to hear, as well as differences in higher-level cortical functions (Sather 1).

When researching these differences, scientists have found that girls can hear up to two to four times better than boys. This was proved when researchers placed a seven-year old female and a seven-year old male in a sound proof booth, both hearing the same noises at various frequencies (Madigan 2). With this information being provided, teachers must realize the following. If you have a classroom with a female teacher who is speaking in a tone of voice which seems normal to the teacher, there’s a good chance that the boys at the back of the classroom aren't paying much attention, partly because they can barely hear what she's saying. On the other hand, if you have a male teacher speaking in a tone of voice which seems normal to him, a girl in the front row may feel that the teacher is practically yelling at her.

The next difference between males and females deals with gender-specific personality traits. Educational psychologists have found that girls tend to have higher standards in the classroom, and evaluate their own performance more critically. Girls also outperform boys in school, as measured by students' grades in all subjects and in all age groups. Since it has been proved that girls do better in school, by looking at their report card, one might think that girls would be more self-confident about their academic abilities. However, that is not the case. Ironically, girls are more likely to be very critical when evaluating their own academic performance. On the other hand, boys tend to have unrealistically high estimates of their own academic abilities and accomplishments. With this being said, we arrive at one of the toughest contradictions teachers face. The girl who gets straight A's, but thinks she's not smart enough and feels discouraged, and the boy who's barely getting B's, yet thinks he's brilliant. Educators must understand that you want to encourage the girls and build them up, while you give the boys a reality check and make them realize they're not as brilliant as they think they are, and challenge them to do better (Wright 2).

When teachers are figuring out which approach they want to use when teaching the material, they must realize that girls understand information better when given context. However, this is certainly not true for boys, who have a tendency to get bored when hearing background information. The choir director of the National Cathedral School for Girls, and the St. Alban's School for Boys, told us that when he's teaching the high school girls a new song, he'll start by sharing a story about why the composer wrote this piece, who it was written for, or maybe how the choir director himself felt 20 years ago when he goofed the solo part. As stated above, giving the girls some context, telling them a story about the piece, gets them interested. The boys are just the opposite. Their choir director said, "If you start talking like that with the boys, they'll start looking at their watches and get restless. Then one of them will ask to just get on with it and begin singing (Sax 4).

Although this technique is hardly ever taught in today's schools, when dealing with discipline, confrontation works well with boys. Teachers must have a loud, firm tone and get right up to the student, and ask them how they figure they are right and to prove it. This kind of direct challenge will motivate boys to work harder and to be prepared (O’Reilly 2). One must keep in mind that boys' hearing is only about half as sharp as girls' hearing. A well-run boys' classroom is loud compared with a girls' classroom. The teacher should be moving at all times. A class in which the teacher sits at the front of the class and talks in a soft voice is a class in which most of the boys will have tuned out.

Besides physiological differences, there are also differences within the brain of males and females. These differences in the brain begin in the womb. About halfway through pregnancy, the testicles of a developing baby boy start churning out testosterone in large quantities, achieving serum testosterone concentrations comparable to those seen in young adult men. These sex hormones, transformed by aromatase enzymes within the brain, bind to brain tissue and begin to transform it. Between 18 and 26 weeks gestation, the developing brain is permanently and irreversibly transformed (Rabinowicz 50).

These researchers used computerized cytological techniques, using computer algorithms to measure the volume of individual nerve cells and the number of connections made by individual nerve cells, in specific areas of the brain. In conclusion, they have found that the fundamental gender differences exist in the structure of the human cerebral cortex (Rabinowicz 52). This finding alone allows one to realize that sex differences are real, as opposed to, say, racial or religious differences. You can't tell by looking at a piece of someone's brain whether that person was Black or White. You can't tell whether that person was a Jew or a Christian. However, you can tell whether that person was female or male.

Since the beginning of functional MRI scans in the late 1980's, scientists have been able to study what areas of the brain are active when people engage in particular activities. These studies have shown that women and men process information, listen, read, and experience emotion in very different ways. Two prime examples include language and navigation (Philips 207).

When testing for language,