Gender and Achievement: Introduction and key issues

Teaching and learning

To what extent do patterns of curriculum, teaching and learning contribute to the disparity of achievement between boys and girls?

• Contributions from boys are prominent both physically and verbally during classroom interaction. Boys have more experience than girls of having their contributions evaluated during classroom interaction.

• However, patterns of classroom interaction may have fewer implications for pupils' performance than the development of attitudes and strategies - in order to make a real difference to the issue it must be acknowledged that the most intervention takes place at a classroom level.

• Girls do better than boys on sustained tasks that are open-ended, process based, related to realistic situations, and that require pupils to think for themselves.

• Boys show greater adaptability to more traditional approaches to learning which require memorising abstract, unambiguous facts and rules that have to be acquired quickly. They appear willing to sacrifice deep understanding requiring sustained effort, for solutions achieved at speed.