SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

An Unusual Suspect

Boys used to do as well as (or better than) girls in school, but now they’re doing much worse. This is the message in this week’s series in The Globe and Mail (click here for Saturday’s kick-off feature article). Many theories are being advanced in the series, but I don’t find any of them particularly convincing - mainly because none of them is something that is true now but wasn’t the case in the old days. Take, for example, today’s theory that it’s because of a lack of male teachers. Personally, I didn’t have a male teacher until I was in high school, but the boys in my classes did as well as the girls.

A theory that isn’t being considered, however, is the change in the way kids are taught to read. In most fifties and sixties schools, teachers used a mixture of Look Say and phonics - not the best way to teach beginning reading, but better than the current Balanced Literacy, which typically contains even less phonics instruction. It probably sounds kind of crazy to say that such a seemingly tiny difference could have such huge ramifications - and I’m not claiming that the reduction in phonics is the only factor in boy’s decline - but it’s well accepted that students’ reading ability at the end of grade 1 is a powerful predictor of academic achievement in high school and beyond. To say the least, it would likely be a good idea to ensure that boys learn to read in grade 1.

Here is an excerpt from our newsletter archives that explains why a lack of phonics makes it a lot harder for the typical boy to learn to read. To read the whole article, click here.

“First, boys do mature at slower rates than girls. Australian research shows that young boys are eight months behind girls in their ability to remember some letters in a word. At the age of five, boys can remember on average only one letter in a word. Yet in England, boys of this age are expected to remember words such as ‘crocodile’ or ‘slippers’.

“In Scotland, where teaching focuses more on phonic-processing skills, boys are given the opportunity to process letters one at a time and to transfer visual information to auditory memory (an area where they are not at such a disadvantage). Thus their low visual memory skills become relatively unimportant.

“Second, boys and girls do appear to use different areas of the brain when reading. Areas predominantly in the left hemisphere are activated in boys, whereas areas in both hemispheres are activated in girls. Evidence suggests that methods that encourage the use of pictures, word shape and world length as reading strategies (largely activating right-brain processes) put boys - who have all their eggs in one basket, so to speak - more at risk of failing to use the appropriate left-hemisphere skills.”