Sunday, July 8, 2012

Single Sex education Vs. CoEd, which is good?

In my attempt to master the art of parenting..err... well, I agree, in order to be able to do a better job of my "mission: best father" goal, I have started preparing myself better by reading various articles to learn father and daughter psychologies. Here I have attempted to capture my thoughts on the same through this "Parent"anandha series. Suggestions to improve this series is welcome.
With this brief introduction, here is the Parentananda series : Episode-1: Single Sex education Vs. CoEd, which is good?
Organization for Gender Equality and Education
Organization for Gender Equality and Education (Photo credit: my_new_wintercoat)
As the title of the post suggests, I have come across an article which sweetly surprised me with the a truth. See if you already know this : oh.. before I get to that, for the uninitiated like on what is single-sex education, it is also popularly known as Single-Gender Education in a more polished term.

Here is the surprise results from the wikipedia article I read:


 (Credit: Wikipedia)
In January 2012, a study of the University of Pennsylvania was published, involving a randomized experiment, considered the experiment with the highest level of scientific evidence. The data comes from schools in Korea, where a law was passed randomly assigning students to schools in their district. The study by Park, Berhman and Choi titled Causal Effects of Single-Sex Schools on College Entrance Exams and College Attendance: Random Assignment in Seoul High Schools concluded that “Attending all-boys schools or all-girls schools rather than attending coeducational schools is significantly associated with higher average scores.“
 Let us dwell much more detailed analysis from the same article:
In 2008, the US government sponsored another study, Early Implementation of Public Single-Sex Schools: Perceptions and Characteristics, which listed the benefits of single-sex schools :
(1) Decreases distractions in learning, 
(2) Reduces student behavior problems,
(3) Provides more leadership opportunities, 
(4) Promotes a sense of community among students and staff,
(5) Improves student self-esteem,
(6) Addresses unique learning styles and interests of boys or girls,
(7) Decreases sex bias in teacher-student interactions, 
(8) Improves student achievement,
(9) Decreases the academic problems of low achieving students, 
(10) Reduces sexual harassment among students, 
(11) Provides more positive student role models, 
(12) Allows for more opportunities to provide social and moral guidance, 
(13) Provides choice in public education

Most of the points make more sense to me, especially when the point involved with UNIQUE LEARNING STYLES as another curious search on that fetched the following results: 
According to an article published by National Association for Single Sex Public Education or NASSPE as otherwise called, here are the learning styles put across:

Boy friendly classroom : 
1) Most boys will perk up and show some interest if you talk about things that "dangerous", "immense" or "yucky".

2) The boy who is bored of biology in coed will be interested in some black garden snakes.

Girl friendly classroom:
1) Most Girls like to in "a safe, comfortable, welcoming" place. The girls like sofa rather than hard plastic chairs. 
2) The teacher according to them should never yell or shout at a girl. 
3)Another point is the Girls naturally break up in groups of three or four to work on problems.

These above points are couple of them I picked up from a laundry research list on their style of learning. you can find more at the NASSPE research site:


Did you find these points make more sense??!!!

However, the opponents of this theory lists another laundry list.. Let us see them in our next episode..

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Please let me know your inputs/feedback on this blog post: