Putting the "Boy Crisis" in Context

Boys in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, at both grades 4 and 8, reached each of the three 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading achievement levels (basic, proficient, and advanced) at lower rates than girls with only two exceptions and in those cases, boys and girls were essentially tied. Finding solutions to boys' reading problems may require looking beyond gender.

Girls have been posting higher reading scores than boys for decades, but other trends suggest they may also have surpassed boys in overall academic performance. On standardized mathematics tests, results vary: Girls are not decisively ahead of boys, but they're not significantly behind either. Girls have higher high school grade-point averages, are more widely represented as school valedictorians, and attend and graduate from college in greater numbers than boys. All this has educators, researchers, and journalists debating: Are the boys in U.S. schools in crisis, and, if so, what should educators be doing differently to help them succeed?

The most recent concerns about boys focus largely on literacy skills. Journalist Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail, argues that many boys' literacy deficits put them at a disadvantage not just in English language arts but across the curriculum. "Many state math assessments contain nothing but word problems, as do the SAT and ACT college admissions tests," notes Whitmire. "What has gone unnoticed is that many boys can't wade through the puzzling words and sentences to get to the actual math calculation."

One reason gender gaps in reading have captured so much attention is that they seem universal. On the most recent (2006) Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, which measured performance on fourth-grade reading tests and other literacy indicators in 40 countries around the world, girls outscored boys in all educational systems from which sufficient data were available.

In the United States, the gaps also seem to hold across differences in race, ethnicity, and family income. A 2006 report on NAEP scores by researchers at the Urban Institute found that girls' advantage over boys in reading holds for every U.S. racial and ethnic group studied. Moreover, research by Judith Kleinfeld of the University of Alaska found that, even among white twelfth-graders with college-educated parents (a group expected to have relatively high reading scores), three times the percentage of boys as girls scored "below basic" on the NAEP reading test.

Beyond differences in geography or demographic factors that vary from community to community, gender gaps in reading may be attributable to a different mix of factors in different contexts, says Catherine Snow, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "Start by determining whether these are gaps in ability or gaps in interest," Snow says. "To the extent that they are gaps in ability, find the appropriate intervention program; to the extent that they are gaps in interest without gaps in ability, then you address it from a totally different point of view, through motivation and different activities and approaches to teaching."

Most researchers agree that on average, boys develop the skills associated with reading and writing 12 to 24 months later than girls. Attending to the possible difficulties some boys (and girls) may have with reading early on is crucial, Snow says, to avoid what psychologist Keith Stanovich has called the "Matthew Effect," in which strong readers move further and further ahead, while early deficits accumulate and lead to greater and greater difficulties later on.

Nontraditional materials such as comic books and sports-themed materials can provide an important "hook" to get boys more involved in reading, Pollack says, and serve as a helpful bridge to more advanced types of reading later on. Snow, whose research focuses on language and literacy development, suggests that helping boys build this bridge is crucial for their learning trajectories, since the ability to read and interact with high-level materials is central to just about every subject children encounter in the upper grades and beyond.

"If there are kids out there who are, for whatever reason, really reluctant readers or low-level readers, then anything that gets them hooked into spending time on reading is a good thing," Snow says. "But the problem is that whereas those can be great places to start, they don't get you where you need to be to succeed academically. You've got to be able to access serious academic texts."

Evidence points toward a few more steps educators can take to help all struggling readers:

• Provide support across the grades: Increasing students' access to reading support at all levels of schooling can prevent reading challenges from multiplying as students struggle with reading demands in all subjects.
• Think (and act) locally: Boy-girl reading gaps can vary widely by location. Rather than basing decisions on national or even state-level data, district officials may wish to investigate possible reading gaps in their own schools first.
• Focus on the big picture first: Even if state or local data suggest wide reading gaps by gender, these may be accompanied by even wider gaps along racial and ethnic lines. As Chudowsky notes, addressing gaps between different subgroups is ultimately about improving the achievement of all students.

Source: Harvard Education Letter, Michael Sadowski, 7/1/10