Durban - Enrolling children at boys or girls only schools does not mean they are being better taught than co-ed pupils, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
While advocates of single-sex schools argue that separating boys and girls improves their education, researchers say the evidence shows that the advantages are “trivial” and in many cases “non-existent”.
The authors, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Whitman College in the US, analysed 184 studies comparing single sex education with co-ed schooling, dating back to 1968.
The studies covered 1.6 million children and spanned 21 countries including Kenya, Nigeria, Australia and Korea.
The factors looked at were the pupils’ performance in maths and science, and their attitudes toward school, gender stereotyping, aggression, victimisation and body image.
In none of the studies was there sufficient evidence to show any difference in performance or attitude between boys and girls in single-sex or co-ed classrooms.
Theories that single-sex education may be better for pupils argue that:
* Without boys in the classroom, girls would be able to thrive in traditionally male-dominated subjects such as maths and science.
* Boys and girls do better when they are taught in a manner specific to their gender differences.
“The theoretical approach termed ‘girl power’ argues that girls lag behind boys in some subjects in co-ed classrooms. This is not supported by our analysis and, moreover, girls’ educational aspirations were not higher in single-sex classrooms,” co-author of the research Erin Pahlke said.
Shane Cuthbertson, the executive principal of Thomas More College in Kloof, a co-ed school, said past research had shown that there was no overwhelming evidence which supported the view that attending a single-sex school was to the academic advantage of children.
However, there was an abundance of research which suggested that children who attended co-ed schools were better off socially.
Cuthbertson explained that schools needed to prepare pupils for life, and as such, shouldn’t isolate them from the other sex.
He believed that many of the top single-sex schools performed well not because they were all girls or all boys, but because the pupils who attended these schools were from a certain socio-economic bracket.
Simon Weaver, the headmaster of Cordwalles Preparatory School in Pietermaritzburg, said that his school’s primary mission was to build the self-esteem of its boys, and felt that this was best achieved in a single-sex classroom.
He said proponents of co-ed schooling argued that it was better for social integration. However, his argument was that self-esteem was paramount for social integration – boys who had healthy self-esteem would be able to interact with those older, younger and otherwise different from them.
Weaver suggested that there was a developmental lag between boys and girls of up to six months at age six, with girls having better literacy rates and language acquisition.
Looking at IQ tests, the norm was that the boys’ scores were lower.
In general, girls seemed to adapt better to the rules of the classroom, whereas boys were kinesthetic learners (learning through physical activity, rather than through just listening or watching).
As a result, in the co-ed classroom, the boys were usually the ones reprimanded or criticised – negatively affecting their self-esteem.
Weaver said that because boys and girls learned differently and were wired a little differently, it was easier to build the boys’ self-esteem in an all-boys school.
The Mercury