Boys and Learning
December 7th, 2005 by Christopher HarrisThe topic of boys and reading is one that I have brought up before, and will continue to write about as we move forward with our regional initiatives. So I was very happy to see that TeleRead has a new look at the gender gap in standardized test performance for the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL). They are once again proposing the use of e-books as a way to help bridge the gender gap for reading in general.
In Washington (state) the performance gap is about six percentage points: “Last year, 60% of boys in Washington State failed the test, compared to 54% of girls (TeleRead).” This seems to match what I saw when I looked at our regional scores on the New York State ELA Test for 4th and 8th grade. Our region has also averaged about a six percentage point difference. For the most recent cohort (4th in 2000-2001 to 8th in 2004-2005) the gap increased from four points in 4th grade to over eight points in 8th grade.
I don’t know if e-books really are the answer, but isn’t it worth a try?
December 16th, 2005 at 12:01 pm
I’ve found this interesting – for the statistics given in the number of children who are failing to reach the targets. In the UK, we’ve had a lot of publicity about the numbers of children failing to reach the required targets … though in our case it’s “almost half of all boys not reaching level 4 in writing by the time they left primary school.” ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4524934.stm ) – Level 4 is the expected for age 11.
Clearly, without knowing what the standard is, you can’t compare the two results, but it was the actual numbers that I found interesting.
December 16th, 2005 at 12:05 pm
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