DOE releases Part II of single-sex school study
Here’s a link to the second part of RMC Research Corp/Cornelius Riordon’s study on single-sex schools. It arrives too late to serve as guidance for the hundreds of experiments already launched after DOE gave the legal green light, but hey, still nice to have it. I haven’t gone through all 160 pages yet, but a quick scan failed to produce nitty gritty advice on the best way to structure single-sex classes. Some readers new to the topic may be surprised to see that girls may benefit more from this than boys (many of the new experiments in public schools are aimed at rescuing faltering boys).
Here are the key findings:
The results of the systematic review are mixed, though the findings suggest some support for the premise that single-sex schooling can be helpful. Among the concurrent academic accomplishment outcomes, 53 percent were null (favored neither single-sex nor coed schooling), 10 percent had mixed results across sex or grade levels, 35 percent favored single-sex schooling, and only 2 percent favored coed schooling. Among the concurrent socio-emotional outcomes, 39 percent were null, 6 percent were mixed, 45 percent favored single-sex schooling, and only 10 percent favored coed schooling.
– The site visit observers in the eight single-sex school sites found little evidence of substantive modifications to curricula to address the specific needs of either boys or girls, although some teachers who were interviewed provided examples of using support materials specific to the interests of girls.
– In the eight elementary and middle schools visited, site visitors observed more positive academic and behavioral interactions between teachers and students in the single-sex schools than in the comparison coed schools.
Both principals and teachers believed that the main benefits of single-sex schooling are decreasing distractions to learning, and improving student achievement.
– Teachers cited greater benefits of single-sex schooling for girls than for boys in 5 of the 10 benefit categories. That is, teachers believed that girls benefit more than boys from better peer interactions, a greater emphasis on academic behaviors, a greater degree of order and control, socio-emotional benefits, and safe behavior. Teachers believed that both sexes benefit equally from single-sex education in terms of a greater sensitivity to sex differences in learning and maturation.
– In separate focus groups, both parents and students cited essentially the same benefits as the teachers and implied that they chose the single-sex school for these reasons.
Teachers in single-sex high schools rated problems with student behavior as less serious than teachers in coed schools, but the opposite was true in middle schools. There were no statistically significant differences between single-sex and coed school teachers’ ratings of problems at the elementary school level.
– In the 10 case study schools the site visitors observed more positive student interactions for the single-sex schools than for the coed comparison schools. Compared to students in the coeducational schools, students in elementary and middle single sex schools exhibited a greater sense of community, interacted more positively with one another, showed greater respect for their teachers, were less likely to initiate class disruptions, and demonstrated more positive student role modeling than students in the coed comparison schools. (The site visits did not include a coeducational comparison high school.)
– The research team suggests that future research use prior empirical work (both qualitative and quantitative) to identify variables that should be measured and potentially used as statistical controls. Researchers should randomly assign students who wish to attend single-sex schools to single sex or coed schools and plan on following the study participants over a relatively long period of time. A longitudinal study will yield data that researchers can use to evaluate both the effects of any randomization failure and the relative effects of attending a single-sex school.
Tags: single sex
