How Boys & Girls Learn Differently
Comedians like Ray Romano make careers out of jokes about the communication gap between men and women. Authors like John Grey---of "Men Are from Mars, Women are From Venus" fame---have made millions of dollars on the topic. It comes as no surprise that boys and girls learning styles are very different---so different in fact, that some educators think they should be taught in separate classrooms.
Other People Are Reading
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Boys Like Trucks and Girls Like Dolls
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The National Institutes of Health found gender differences in the personalities of children all around the world. According to the NIH, these gender-specific traits affect the way boys and girls learn. Raising boys to play with dolls or girls to play with trucks does not change the way their brains work, according to Dr. Leonard Sax, executive director of the National Association of Single Sex Education.
Different Brains
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Female and male brains are structurally different, and not just in areas related to sex. According to research by Jill M. Goldstein at Harvard Medical School, the female brain is smaller than the male brain. At the same time, specific regions of the brain are larger in females, and vice versa. For example, the neurons of the temporal lobe cortex in the female brain---the region associated with language---are denser by 2:1 compared to the male brain, according to a study by Sandra Witelson and her colleagues at McMaster University. Scientists believe regions of the brain that are significantly larger in one sex versus the other coincide with increased use of the area.
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An Early Start
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The cognitive differences between girls and boys appear shortly after birth. Simon Baron-Cohen and his associates at Cambridge University put a hidden camera in a maternity ward and observed 1-day-old babies. In the experiment, the boys' gaze gravitated toward shiny mechanical objects, and the girls spent more time looking at faces. In another experiment, when Baron-Cohen shows 1-year--old children a film, boys like looking at the cars while the girls still prefer the faces.
Recall
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Memory and spatial awareness occurs in the hippocampus area of the brain. This region is larger in girls, and retaining information comes more easily as a result. This also explains why, on average, girls have better report cards than boys throughout the school years, according to Eve Pomerantz in the "Journal of Educational Psychology."
Sitting Still Versus Standing and Buzzing
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Girls learn best while sitting still, but boys need to be moving. "Some 6-year--old boys have to stand and make buzzing noises in order to learn," Sax says. "These differences become subtler as children get older" but remain throughout life. Sax advocates dividing classrooms by gender rather than age, citing "the sex differences in learning are larger than the age differences."
Context
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Telling a story about how and why something works makes learning easier for girls. The opposite is true for boys, according to GreatSchools.org---a non-profit organization encouraging parental involvement in education. Girls become interested when given context. Boys get distracted and lose interest when they receive too much extraneous information. You need to get to the point with boys if you want to hold their interest.
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References
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- Photo Credit little boys and girls image by AGphotographer from Fotolia.com
