Boys and girls learn differently

Reply to Boys and girls learn differently on Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:20:43 GMT

Lance G.0723 King — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:20:43 GMT

It is really fascinating to see the rise of girls achievement against boys in most countries in the last 20 years. Some people put this down to a perceived "feminising" of the curriculum but I think it is much more to do with, as Dad-again-2 says, cultural changes leading to more educational opportunities for girls and women these days than in the past, in most countries anyway. And interestingly enough maybe because such opportunities are historically quite recent even in western countries, the average girl tends to value her opportunity to become better educated more than the average boy and in my experience teenage girls simply work harder than teenage boys.

Reply to Boys and girls learn differently on Wed, 11 Apr 2012 04:27:12 GMT

Dad-again-2 — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 04:27:12 GMT

I don’t think many experts make those sorts of distinctions anymore Dragonfly Sg, according to the statistics from most developed countries girls are out performing boys in just about every subject these days including the traditional male bastions of Math and Physics. It seems the barriers in the past were more to do with culture than learning styles or affinities for particular subjects.

Reply to Boys and girls learn differently on Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:14:06 GMT

Ichigokun — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:14:06 GMT

dragonflysg:
I heard about males being more math inclined while females being more language inclined. But guess I am more of an odd one out. I am ok for math but much better in language. I like artistic stuff and philo a lot more than math items.

Maybe I am raised a confused dude. :yikes:

Nope. I'm also better in language compared to math and science.

In fact, my math and science are my worst two subjects and my English and Chinese are the best two XD

Reply to Boys and girls learn differently on Mon, 20 Feb 2012 07:39:15 GMT

dragonflysg — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 07:39:15 GMT

I heard about males being more math inclined while females being more language inclined. But guess I am more of an odd one out. I am ok for math but much better in language. I like artistic stuff and philo a lot more than math items.

Maybe I am raised a confused dude. :yikes:

Reply to Boys and girls learn differently on Mon, 20 Feb 2012 06:04:04 GMT

Sara1212 — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 06:04:04 GMT

Well actually it depends on girl or boys skill on particular subject. Hence we can not say that something like this.

Reply to Boys and girls learn differently on Tue, 14 Feb 2012 02:22:56 GMT

Lance G.0723 King — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 02:22:56 GMT

Hi Lady Saber,

Yes I think the whole "phonetics" vs "whole language" debate over learning to read ultimately showed that every child learns best when they are exposed to a variety of learning methods preferably using all their senses rather than any one ‘sensory specific’ method. The research I was pointing to in my article was with boys who showed consistent difficulty learning to read right up to secondary schooling and for whom the usual ‘sounding out letters’ approach did not work.
All children will learn to read in the way that suits them it just seems that for those with the greatest difficulty, with boys visual methods oftem pay good dividends and more auditory methods with girls.
Interestingly enough I have also seen research showing that children who learn Chinese before they learn English, because of the more visual nature of written Chinese language are activating more visual parts of their brains when learning Chinese and then trying to do the same when learning English with less successful results.
Effective learning is usually multisensory

Reply to Boys and girls learn differently on Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:58:32 GMT

Dad-again-2 — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:58:32 GMT

Thanks for the link to http://www.taolearn.com Lance, I found some very interesting articles there. With one child just starting at secondary school I found his one particularly useful http://lancegking.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/beginning-a-new-school-year/

Reply to Boys and girls learn differently on Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:24:51 GMT

Lance G.0723 King — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:24:51 GMT

Here is part of an article I wrote a while ago about gender based differences in learning and thinking between boys and girls. If you would like to read the whole article go to http://www.taolearn.com/articles/article13.pdf

For many years we have had evidence of quantifiable behaviour differences between the sexes but now researchers are linking those differences to sex based differences in the development and use of the brain.
In 1979 Diane McGuiness and Karl Pribram reported that men
“have better daylight vision than women. They have faster reaction times from mid-childhood on; even as infants, they tend to be more interested in objects than in people, and are more skilled at gross motor movements. Men excel in a wide range of skills involving the perception of depth in space, an ability which gives them an edge in mechanical tasks.
and that women
“have more sensitive taste, are more sensitive to touch, have better hearing, are less tolerant of loud volumes or repetitive sounds and have better night vision than men. From infancy on, women excel in many verbal skills, are better in manual dexterity and fine co-ordination, and process information faster, particularly in tasks that require rapid choices. They are less distracted by sights while listening, more accurately perceive “subliminal” messages, and are better at remembering the names and faces of old high-school classmates.

More recent research by Diane McGuiness (Professor of Psychology - University of South Florida) has shown that
“..the average girl learns coherent speech as much as a year before the average boy and in reading and writing as well girls have a lifelong advantage in fluency. Girls have better hearing skills from birth than boys and tend to read and spell by sound, boys are more likely to rely on sight which seems to be a less successful strategy .”

Of course the use of visual strategies is not always a disadvantage and it appears to be the basis for the greater ability in maths found in boys. Camilla Benbow (Professor of Psychology - Iowa State University) reports: “What we have discovered by studying well over one million kids over twenty years is that there are many more maths talented boys than girls.” This difference is most pronounced at the highest level of ability where “in the top 1 in 10000 in mathematical reasoning ability there are 13 boys for every girl.”

A strong preference for either the internal verbal or visual mode of processing may well also be the basis of much learning disability in children and certainly contributes to the ease or difficulty of learning to read according to Dr Bob Zenhausern (Professor of Psychology - St Johns University, New York). He has confirmed the relationship of thinking strategies to reading difficulty. In the study of hundreds of American children classified as “learning disabled” he discovered the following:
•\tmost of these learning disabled children were in fact reading disabled
•\tmost of these children were boys
•\tand most of these children (85%) had a preference for the use of \t\t\tvisual strategies to learn to read.

These predominantly male, visual strategists with reading difficulties, he classified as “phonetically disabled”. He found that for them the use of a phonetic strategy (sounding out words, verbal word attack) actually caused a deterioration in their reading ability and the only way they could make progress was through a reading strategy which required no reading out loud at all.
This strategy he calls the DART method (Direct Access Reading Technique) for it uses direct connections between the look of a word and its meaning to build up the basis of reading and uses no verbalisation at all.
This technique has proved very successful with the reading disabled from young children up to adults and has been particularly successful with those children for whom no other technique seems to work.

Read the whole article at http://www.taolearn.com/articles/article13.pdf

Reply to Boys and girls learn differently on Sun, 29 Jan 2012 08:42:27 GMT

seekingangels — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 08:42:27 GMT

Thanks for sharing! enlightening but hope it emphasized more on how to teach them differently, specifically.

Reply to Boys and girls learn differently on Sat, 24 Dec 2011 12:33:54 GMT

warriortemujin — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 12:33:54 GMT

Thanks for sharing ur info KiasuNewbie. Really informative.

Reply to Boys and girls learn differently on Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:31:49 GMT

RoyalPurple.0794 — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:31:49 GMT

Girls tend to do Better in languages while boys do better in maths and science.

Read this?
http://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/how-boys-and-girls-learn-differently