Single-Sex Education Is Ineffective, Report Says – NYTimes.com
October 12, 2011 at 11:08 am 2 comments
Recently I blogged on an article by president of Bryn Mawr College, arguing for the value of single-sex college education. Now, here comes a meta-review published in Science saying that there’s no evident value. This is a significant issue for us, because we do need to find mechanisms to draw more women into CS. Single-sex programs are a potential avenue to consider — but maybe not?
The report, “The Pseudoscience of Single Sex Schooling,” to be published in Science magazine by eight social scientists who are founders of the nonprofit American Council for CoEducational Schooling, is likely to ignite a new round of debate and legal wrangling about the effects of single-sex education.
It asserts that “sex-segregated education is deeply misguided and often justified by weak, cherry-picked or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence.”
But the strongest argument against single-sex education, the article said, is that it reduces boys’ and girls’ opportunities to work together, and reinforces sex stereotypes. “Boys who spend more time with other boys become increasingly aggressive,” the article said. “Similarly, girls who spend more time with other girls become more sex-typed.”
via Single-Sex Education Is Ineffective, Report Says – NYTimes.com.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: BPC, NCWIT.
Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
1.
Alfred Thompson | October 13, 2011 at 7:55 am
I can’t help but wonder about the bias in the people who did this meta-study given the organization they work for. But more broadly I think the failing is in assumeing that school is binary – either all mixed gender or all single gender. I think that looking at specific grade levels would be more likely to show useful results than assuming that boys and girls are the same no matter what age they are at. Anyone who has watched both boys and girls grow up knows that they mature at different rates and that some times the gap between them is greater than at others. That is something worth taking into account.
2.
vatsalanand0077 | October 14, 2011 at 4:30 am
there are always some negativity about some good thing and in my view single sex ed is a positive aspect of uniting masculine and feminine world.