Gender and Achievement - Boy's underachievement Flashcards
List the key factors of boys underachievement
Literacy skills Lower expectations and disruptive behaviour Decline of traditional male jobs Feminisation of education Leisure pursuits Lack of male primary school teachers Laddish subcultures
Explain Poor literacy skills
Boys have poorer literacy and language skills than girls.
Studies show that most of the reading to children at home is done by mothers so the activity becomes associated with femininity. Thus boys reject it. Also, parents spend less time reading to their sons.
Explain Lower expectations of boys and how they are distruptive
Teachers are less strict with the boys, they more tolerant of their disruptive behaviour, expect less from them, etc.
At the same time, boys are more disruptive so get sent out of lessons and miss out on learning.
A polling company Kirkland Rowell carried out research in 500 secondary schools across the UK and found that 67% of parents wanted their daughters to go to university, for boys the figure was 62%. These parental expectations have been transferred to children – 80% of girls said they wanted to go to university compared to 75% of boys.
Myhill and Jones – carried out semi-structured interviews with 144 students (in Year 1 – 10) about their perceptions of whether teachers treat boys and girls differently. They found that boys are treated more negatively than girls.
Explain Leisure
Boys’ leisure pursuits such as football and console games do not contribute to developing literacy skills.
On the other hand, girls have a bedroom culture – staying in and talking to friends. This develops communication skills – listening and speaking.
Explain Laddish and Counter-school subcultures
Epstein – high achieving working class boys are labelled as ‘swots’ by their peers and tend to be harassed and subjected to homophobic abuse. Francis – boys try to avoid being labelled as ‘swots’ because educational achievement is seen as feminine so they do little or no schoolwork and mess about in lessons.
Explain Lack of male role models and state the criticism for this
There is a lack of positive male role models both at home – large numbers of boys are being brought up in the 1.5 million female-headed lone parent families in the UK.
At school, only 16% of primary school teachers are male.
Therefore, boys have no male role models to look up to and whose example they can follow.
Criticism – Read studied primary schools and the way in which both female and male teachers discipline both female and male students. She found that both female and male teachers use the masculine, disciplinarian discourse (explicit discipline, e.g. raised voice) to ensure students behave. This shows that schools have not become feminised. It also shows that both female and male teachers can be authority figures in relation to students.
Explain the feminisation of education
Sewell argues that schools do not encourage masculine characteristics such as competitiveness and leadership, instead they encourage traits associated with femininity such as methodical work and attentiveness.
He argues that coursework is a major reason for boys’ underachievement as they tend to lack organisational skills.
Explain the decline in traditional men’s jobs
Since the 1980s there has been a decline in industries which traditionally employed men such as iron and steel, ship building, mining, engineering.
Mitsos and Browne claim this has led to a crisis of masculinity – men are unsure of what it is to ‘be a man’.
Lack of traditional male jobs makes boys believe they will not be able to get a job which leads to a lack of motivation so they give up on trying to get qualifications.
