The magazine for alumni and friends of Massey University.
Issue 14, April 2002

It’s generally known that boys aren’t as good as girls at language, but in compensation they are better at science and maths, right? Wrong.

On the gender report card the boys lag behind in every area of the school curriculum. More girls pass Bursary. More go on to university. Boys, on the other hand, dominate the special needs education programmes.

That things might continue like this worries Michael Irwin, a former school principal. It was while a teacher that he recognised that around 80 percent of the kids he was seeing in special needs programmes were boys.

Now as a lecturer in the Department of Learning and Teaching at the College of Education at the Albany campus, he believes he has a chance to change things, to find out just why boys are failing and what schools can do.

The evidence that boys are lagging is incontestable. Reports produced by the Education Review Office and the Ministry of Education have both concluded that boys are not achieving as well as girls. A Christchurch study by Professor David Ferguson, which has followed a group of boys and girls for the past 25 years, again shows the boys consistently achieving less well than girls. Boys perform more poorly than girls in standardised tests and are more likely to leave school without educational qualifications.

A number of schools have launched initiatives in response. It is these that Irwin has set out to investigate, his work assisted by Massey University research funding.

He will focus on four or five schools and their strategies, such as mentoring schemes, single sex classes and withdrawal programmes. He will evaluate the programmes and interview the boys about their perception of the programmes and their attitudes towards education.

There are two schools of thought about why boys fail. The first attributes the failure to achieve to a lack of male mentoring or positive role models. Boys often have less contact with males as role models these days. Many are brought up without a strong male role model in the family, and our primary schools have fewer male teachers – to the point that many children will go from pre-school to high school without having had a male teacher, Irwin says.

“ Boys have less contact with males in general, so how do they learn to become male?”

The role of organisations like Scouts or Boys’ Brigade has also diminished, leaving still more of a void, he says.

“ We can say to boys ‘hey, reading is fun’, but they never see a male reading, only mum or their [female] teacher. Boys need to see men doing the things we want them to do.”

Some schools have tackled this by setting up mentoring schemes that pair boys with men or older boys who act as role models.

The second school of thought has to do with boys being given mixed messages by the portrayal of males in the media. Irwin says the media presents either the tough guy ‘Rambo’ image, which starts as early as the indestructible cartoon character, or the ‘fool’ image. “You often see the TV male who is a fool, and whose wife is the bright partner who suffers the fool.

“ Boys are getting such mixed messages. They’re being told ‘we want you to be tough, but at the same time you should be sensitive and caring’.”

Peer pressure is another problem, Irwin says, contributing to boys’ poor performance in the classroom and even their early exit from the school system.

“ It’s seen as more cool to be a fool than to achieve. So some boys opt to muck around in class rather than stand out as a ‘nerd’ or ‘wuss’.”

Boys are very conscious of what their peers think of them, Irwin says. Their fear of failure curbs their classroom participation. “They don’t answer questions because they don’t want to risk being wrong, and having their peers laugh. And after puberty there are the hormones to deal with, too. They start to worry about what the girls will think of them.”

There’s no doubt that males and females think differently, Irwin says.

“ This was much publicised in the ‘Venus and Mars’ books. To a certain extent we use our brains differently. It starts in childhood and affects not just behaviour, but learning too.”

There’s plenty of overseas research to suggest that boys and girls learn differently, he says, and school programmes need to take this into account when presenting information and structuring lessons.

Boys learn better if they are given a set goal in a set time and the lesson is broken down into chunks of time, Irwin says. “This suits the way boys focus in on things.”

We need to look at teaching strategies and use ones that will benefit boys and girls. “As an example, if you asked a class to discuss the reasons why World War II started, the girls would answer the question better. But if you said ‘I want you in the next 20 minutes to write five reasons why World War II started’ the boys would cope with answering much better.”

Boys are competitive, Irwin says. They respond well to a challenge, so giving them certain tasks to do in a certain time suits them, getting them to compete with one another.

They also like rules. They need clear boundaries and to know the consequences if they break the rules, he says.

“ If a group of boys goes out to play, they’ll form two teams, establish the rules and play. If an argument breaks out it’ll be because someone’s broken the rules.”

Irwin has identified a number of elements that feature in successful teaching strategies for boys: clear, structured programmes; short chunks of intense work; set goals; plenty of positive praise; hands-on, active learning; use of fun and humour.

Irwin also thinks, paradoxically, that by better tailoring teaching to the boys, the girls will benefit. “Boys get more time from the teacher. They are more off-task, need more discipline and more time spent on remedial programmes. So if teachers use these strategies, they will have more time to spend with the girls.”

It’s about developing a range of teaching styles to suit both, Irwin says, and sometimes it’s better to split them up to let them tackle the same activity in a different way.

Girls talk more than boys, speaking 30 percent more words over a day than boys. And they talk more from an early age – to toys and dolls and playing schools – so it’s natural they are more adept with language.

“ So you might get the girls together in a discussion group, then collate their ideas, but get boys to come up with a certain number of ideas on their own in a given time.”

The only drawback, Irwin says, is that the boys will only come up with the number of ideas asked for, even if they know more. Boys need, then, to be encouraged to give more.

Some New Zealand schools are experimenting with splitting classes into single-sex groups for certain subjects, particularly at intermediate and secondary age. Generally language and maths are targeted, and Irwin says research so far indicates that these programmes have succeeded. He would hate to see all our schools become single-sex, though.

“ We need a balance of strategies, so we are working both for boys and girls. And it’s more about looking at what messages we’re giving to boys. Take the end-of-year prizegiving at most schools – the biggest trophies are for sports, while the person who wins the maths prize gets a calculator. What does that tell them? The emphasis is on being tough and sporty.”

Boys need good role models and clear messages about what it is to be male, he says.

“ Boys hide their feelings behind a mask. They need to know it’s okay to say they’re worried. They need to be encouraged to open up and they need lots of positive praise.”

Irwin advocates the use of more arts in schools. “Some schools are turning to drama to help boys learn to express themselves, and I think it works. It gets behind the mask they’re wearing and helps them learn to open up.

“ And if they can learn to do that we might find a solution to the distressing problem of young men in our society committing suicide because they’re having trouble sorting out their masculinity and where they fit into society.”