On 11/23/06, Puppy puppy@killerchihuahua.com wrote:
Are trends changing? Or are we looking at two different issues? The articles I linked focused specifically on how female students were treated as compared to how male students were treated - the self-esteem issue was only "suggested by some researchers" and would not affect the amount of attention given, questions, etc. The ratio of female to male in science and math was also examined, and the studies found fewer females. Computer use in one study was 3:1. From what you are linking here, it appears that overall however males are having difficulties. Is this a pendulum swing, or something else?
I think that both are true. Boys do get a raw deal in a lot of ways - boys have two options - either internalise the idea of how horrible they are and be left with no positive ideas about their gender, or they can embrace how horrible men are, and live up the stereotype. Neither leaves much self-esteem, which hurts them in school.
If
males are having more trouble due to information being presented in a fashion calculated to appeal to, and be more easily comprehended, by females, this may be a factor. All of the studies I linked spoke of the importance of presenting material in a fashion which was more directed towards female learning patterns. This may be merely coincidence, and given the limited data there is no way to know - but it is an interesting possibility. If that is the case, then perhaps our male:female ratio of editors is not without benefit - articles will be more likely to be organized to appeal to the male pattern of learning and thinking. It would be helpful to know the causes of the behavior disorders. And once again, while interesting, I cannot see a way to directly correlate this to anything we do on WP. -kc-
I don't think that the decline in male performance has been due to shifts in teaching styles. At the university level there has been a movement away from top-down lecturing (which works better with male students than with female students) to more interactive, "cooperative learning"-based ideas, which resonate better with female students. But male students do well with that as well - rather than favouring female learning over male learning, what I have seen is a shift from something that favours male learning to something that is less biased toward one gender or the other. Now that eliminates a large virtual advantage for males, but it doesn't explain the decline in male performance academically in absolute terms.
As an undergrad I had an older, very male-biased professor, who used to lament the decline in young men. Of course, in a class of 25 majors there were only 3 male students. But his main complaint was that his daughterss female friends were intelligent people who you could carry out a conversation with, while their male friends were only capable of one-word communications.