[Education Next 2006 No. 4 cover]
2006 No. 4
RESEARCH:
The Why Chromosome
Thomas S. Dee
How a teachers gender affects boys and girls
Gender gaps in educational outcomes are a matter of real and growing
concern. Weve known for a long time, since the 1970s, that girls outscore
boys in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading
tests, while boys tend to outperform girls in math and science.
Boys are increasingly less likely than girls to attend college and to
receive a bachelors degree. Meanwhile, female college students continue to
be underrepresented in such technical fields as engineering and computer
science.
One popular, if controversial, response to these patterns has been a
renewed push for single-sex educationan effort that has drawn support from
across political divides. An amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act
authorizing the creation of single-sex public schools was sponsored by
Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas, but the measure passed
in large part due to the support of Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, a
Wellesley College graduate grateful for her opportunity to attend one of
the countrys premier womens colleges. (Wellesley nurtured, challenged,
and guided me, she declared in her 1992 Commencement Day speech.) The
National Association for Single-Sex Public Education reports that, as of
April 2006, at least 223 public schools in the United States were offering
gender-separate educational opportunities, up from just 4 in 1998. Although
most were coeducational schools with single-sex classrooms, 44 were wholly
single-sex.
The majority of arguments for single-sex schools and classrooms focus on
the effects on interactions among students, but they also present the
possibility of greatly increasing the number of students with teachers of
the same gender. Is there any convincing evidence that doing so could make
a difference in educationfor boys and girls alike? So far the jury has
been out, but my analysis of national survey and test-score data collected
by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) allows me to offer new and
convincing evidence of the differential impact of a teachers gender on
student learning.
The Gender Gap
The evolution of the gender gaps in achievement as children mature suggests
that what occurs in schools and classrooms may play an important role.
According to the Department of Educations Early Childhood Longitudinal
Study, when children enter kindergarten, the two genders perform similarly
on tests of both reading and mathematics. But a few years later, by the
spring of the 3rd grade, boys, on average, outperform girls in math and
science, while the girls outperform the boys in reading. Disconcertingly,
NAEP results show that for children between the ages of 9 and 13, the
gender gaps in science and reading roughly double and the math gap
increases by two-thirds. For children between the ages of 13 and 17, there
is modest growth in the math and reading gender gaps but a substantial
expansion of the gap in science (see Figure 1).
The gender gaps in achievement as students finish high school are far from
trivial. In reading, 17-year-old boys score 31 percent of a standard
deviation below 17-year-old girls, a deficit equal to about one grade
level. This is nearly half the size of the black-white test-score gap in
reading. In science and math, meanwhile, girls of that age score 22 percent
and 10 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, also a
difference worthy of concern.
Drowned out by the din of public argument over the role of nature vs.
nurture is a debate, far from settled, over exactly how the experience of
going to school shapes learning among boys and girls. One school of thought
contends that teachers, both men and women, treat boys and girls
differently in the classroom. For example, some controversial evidence,
based on classroom observations, suggests that both are likely to offer
praise and remediation in response to comments by boys but mere
acknowledgment to comments by girls. Some cognitive scientists suggest that
teachers may subtly communicate different academic expectations of boys and
girls and these biased expectations may become self-fulfilling.
Teacher Gender Matters
Other theories, of special interest here, suggest that much depends on the
gender of the teacher. One theory asserts that the teachers gender shapes
communications between teacher and pupil, while another says the teacher
acts as a gender-specific role model, regardless of what he or she says or
does. According to this second theory, students are more engaged, behave
more appropriately, and perform at a higher level when taught by one who
shares their gender.
Tests of these theories have relied primarily on information about teachers
and students in college and graduate school. Findings have been mixed, so
the issue remains unresolved. Studies have not focused on young
adolescents, the time when students are particularly sensitive to gender
differences and when gender gaps in achievement are pronounced.
I investigated the effect of a teachers gender using the National
Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS), which contains data on a nationally
representative sample of nearly 25,000 8th graders from 1988. In addition
to examining the effect of teacher gender on students test-score
performance, I examined teacher perceptions of a students performance and
student perceptions of the subject taught by a particular teacher. I was
especially interested in the influence of a teachers gender on students
perceptions, because engagement with an academic subject may be an
important precursor to subsequent achievement levels, course selection in
high school and college, and also occupational choice. For example, the
underrepresentation of women in fields like engineering and computer
science may be due to levels of confidence and interest in related subjects
in high school.
Indeed, my results confirm that a teachers gender does have large effects
on student test performance, teacher perceptions of students, and students
engagement with academic material. Simply put, girls have better
educational outcomes when taught by women and boys are better off when
taught by men. These findings persist, even after I account for a variety
of other characteristics of students, teachers, and classrooms that may
influence student learning. They are especially important for young men
when one considers that the percentage of 6th-grade teachers who were
female ranged from 58 to 91 percent across four core subjects (math,
science, reading, and history). Although these percentages decline in later
grades, 83 percent of the English teachers in 8th grade are female, as are
more than half of 8th-grade math and science teachers (see Figure 2).
A Mother Lode of Gender Data
Key to my findings is the National Education Longitudinal Survey, initiated
in 1988 as a survey of a nationally representative sample of 8th-grade
students from 1,052 public and private schools. The DOE resurveyed a sample
of these students during four follow-up reviews, in 1990, 1992, 1994, and
2000. For my study I rely only on the NELS data from 1988, which is based
on surveys of 24,599 students and two of each students teachers.
In particular, I exploit a unique feature of the teacher surveys. For each
sampled student, NELS administered questionnaires to teachers from two
academic subjects: mathematics and English; mathematics and history;
science and English; and science and history. Two completed teacher surveys
are available for 21,324 of the 8th-grade studentsa bit smaller than the
full sample of NELS students because some teachers did not complete their
questionnaires and some students did not have a class in one or both of the
academic subjects randomly assigned to their school for which teacher
surveys were administered.
The teacher survey solicited a variety of information about the teachers
background, including gender. It also included several questions about how
the teacher viewed the behavior and performance of the specific students in
the study. I was most interested in the effect of gender on three
assessments that appear to be particularly good indicators of academic
development. Teachers were asked to simply respond yes or no as to whether
the student was frequently disruptive, consistently inattentive, or rarely
completed homework.
The student component of NELS includes additional outcome data for the
subjects taught by each sampled teacher, including the results from
multiple-choice achievement tests. The survey also asked students questions
about their engagement with the subject. In particular, students indicated
whether they were afraid to ask questions in that subject, looked forward
to their class, and saw the subject as useful for their future. NELS also
solicited information about each students gender as well as a variety of
other demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.
NELS is a goldmine of information for those interested in gender dynamics
within the classroom. Especially noteworthy is the fact that data are
available from the same student in two different subjects taken from two
different teachers, which enables us to account for educationally relevant
characteristics of students that cannot be ascertained by conventional
background characteristics. In other words, these matched-pairs data
allow us to see how the outcomes of the same student vary with two
different teachers.
When estimating the effect of a teachers gender, I use standard
statistical techniques to adjust for the effect of several other teacher
and classroom characteristics that may affect student outcomes. For
example, I take into account whether the student shares the teachers race
and ethnicity, because some of my own prior research suggests that the race
of a teacher may influence student outcomes (see The Race Connection,
Education Next, Spring 2004). I also consider the size of the class, the
percentage of students in the classroom with limited English proficiency,
the number of years a teacher has been working in the profession, and
whether the teacher is state-certified in the subject he or she is
teaching. What does this valuable set of data reveal about the connections
between gender and learning?
The Most Important Findings
For three subject areasscience, social studies, and Englishthe overall
effect of having a woman teacher instead of a man raises the achievement of
girls by 4 percent of a standard deviation and lowers the achievement of
boys by roughly the same amount, producing an overall gender gap of 8
percent of a standard deviation, no small matter if it can be assumed that
this happened over the course of a single year. In fact, these estimates
suggest that the effects of a year with a teacher of a particular gender
are quite large relative to the gender gaps in achievement in the national
datasets mentioned above. But I am hesitant to draw that conclusion in the
absence of information about the gender of the teacher the student had in
preceding years. Some of what I attribute to the 8th grade might have
occurred in previous years, if the student had had multiple years of
schooling from a teacher of the same gender.
While these results summarize the overall impact of teachers gender on
test scores, the effects vary somewhat from one subject to the next.
Test-score benefits for girls of having a female teacher are concentrated
in social studies. I estimate that a female social-studies teacher
increases a girls performance by 9 percent of a standard deviation. In
contrast, the impact in English is not statistically significant. For boys,
the largest effect appears in science. Their scores drop by 5 percent of a
standard deviation if they have a female teacher. In English and social
studies, the drops appear to be almost as large but are not statistically
significant.
It does not seem likely that one can explain these results by the quality
of the students teacher, because almost all teachers, whether men or
women, are teaching boys and girls together. Yet the effect differs,
depending on whether the genders of teacher and student match.
Still, to double-check this possibility, I isolate those situations where
students of different genders had the same teacher. For the typical teacher
who was surveyed by the NELS, there were three to four students included in
the study. Given this information, I was able to re-estimate the effect of
a teacher on students of the opposite gender, while adjusting for the
overall effect of any individual teacher on student learning. In other
words, because the same teacher is sometimes observed with sampled boys and
girls, we can assess whether gender interactions matter after adjusting for
the teachers unobserved traits. The overall resultsthe average for the
three subject areasindicate an average positive impact on student
achievement of 4 percent of a standard deviation whenever the
teacher-student gender was the same (see Figure 3).
Classroom Dynamics
Exactly why gender makes so much of a difference in student learning is
difficult to ascertain. But the NELS data offer some suggestive evidence
that the opinions of teachers about their studentsand of students about
their teachersis shaped in part by gender characteristics.
Regardless of the academic subject, boys are two to three times more likely
than girls to be seen as disruptive, inattentive, and unlikely to complete
their homework. However, how boys and girls view academic subjects varies
across subjects in ways that parallel the gender gaps in subject test
scores. For example, girls are more likely than boys to report that they
are afraid to ask questions in math, science, and social studies. They are
also less likely to look forward to these classes or to see them as useful
for their future. Meanwhile, boys, as compared to girls, register more
negative perceptions of English classes.
But while boys and girls may exhibit different behaviors and prefer
different subjects, that is not quite the same thing as having a different
experience because of the gender of the teacher. So is there any evidence
that teachers relate better to students whose gender they shareor vice
versa? Significant patterns can be detected within the NELS data. When a
class is headed by a woman, boys are more likely to be seen as disruptive,
while girls are less likely to be seen as either disruptive or inattentive.
Furthermore, when taught by a man, girls were more likely to report that
they did not look forward to a subject, that it was not useful for their
future, or that they were afraid to ask questions. This dynamic is
strongest in science, where student reports indicate that female science
teachers are far more effective in promoting girls engagement with this
field of study. The estimated effects in the other two subjects pointed in
the same direction but were statistically insignificant when examined
separately.
Boys also had fewer positive reactions to their academic subject when
taught by an opposite-gender teacher. In particular, when taught by a
female teacher, boys were significantly more likely to report that they did
not look forward to the subject. This effect appears to have been
particularly pronounced when the female teacher was in history. The
patterns for boys in other subjects are quite consistent with those
observed in history, though I should again be cautious in drawing strong
conclusions because many of the results fall short of conventional levels
of statistical significance.
Math Results Unclear
Results in math differ strikingly from those in the other subject areas,
but I place little weight on the findings in this area for reasons that
require explanation. My initial analysis showed that both boys and girls
suffered if they had a woman teacher. Both girls and boys scored 7 percent
and 8 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, than if they had
a man. But before rushing to the conclusion that math is a subject uniquely
suited for male instruction, one needs to take into account other possible
explanations.
I can rule out some obvious candidates. There is no evidence, for example,
that female math teachers were given larger classes or were less likely to
hold the proper subject-specific qualifications, such as proper state
certification or a subject-specific degree at either the undergraduate or
graduate level.
But I was concerned about the likelihood that women teachers are assigned
the less-promising math students. Administrators may think that women are
better equipped to handle more difficult students or that men are better
able to challenge the bright ones. If so, then it could appear that
students benefit less from women teachers simply because they are given the
lower-achieving ones in the first place.
To check this out, I estimated the effect of having a female math teacher
on students science scores. This can be ascertained because students were
tested in all four subjects, although only two of their teachers were
surveyed. The reasoning behind this admittedly indirect test is that the
gender of a students math teacher should have relatively small effects on
performance in science class taught by another teacher, especially in 8th
grade, when science instruction usually does not have a significant
mathematical component. If a student with a female math teacher also scores
poorly in science, that would be a sign of a lower-performing student
overall, not evidence that the gender of the teacher in the math class is
having a negative impact.
And that is precisely what I found. The apparent impact of having a female
math teacher on a girls performance in science was a negative 4 percent of
a standard deviation, a fairly large effect (though one that was only
weakly significant from a statistical point of view). In fact, the apparent
impact on science performance was two-thirds the size of the effect on math
performance. That suggests that any estimates of the effect of teacher
gender on girls math achievement may well be biased by the fact that women
are more likely to be assigned to lower-performing math students.
For that reason, and because I found no similar connections in other
subject areas when I did the same kind of analysis, I excluded the math
results from the main analysis reported above. Nor should it be
particularly surprising that women are assigned lower-performing students
in math, though that was not the case in other subjects.
In most middle schools, for most subjects, separating students by ability
levels is the exception rather than the rule. But the one subject where it
is most likely to happen is in fact math, where administrators may think
that a certain level of accomplishment is necessary before algebra or some
other advanced math material can be introduced. And when math classes are
tracked, one can easily imagine that male teachers are more likely to be
assigned to the advanced class. Thus, I place little weight on the math
results that were observed.
If Not Single-Sex Schooling, Then What?
My results indicate that learning from a teacher of the opposite gender has
a detrimental effect on students academic progress and their engagement in
school. My best estimate is that it lowers test scores for both boys and
girls by approximately 4 percent of a standard deviation and has even
larger effects on various measures of student engagement.
Adverse gender effects have an impact on both boys and girls, but that
effect falls more heavily on the male half of the population in middle
school, simply because most middle-school teachers are female. My estimates
suggest that, if half of the English teachers in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades
were male and their effects on learning were additive, the achievement gap
in reading would fall by approximately a third by the end of middle school.
Similarly, these results suggest that part of boys relative propensity to
be seen as disruptive in these grades is due to the gender interactions
resulting from the preponderance of female teachers.
Unfortunately, in a coeducational setting, some of this gap closing would
take place at the expense of the opposite gender, an outcome few would
embrace. No one wants to see girls do worse in reading, or boys fare worse
in science.
Some may therefore find in these results a strong case for a particular
form of single-sex education, where teachers and students share the same
gender. However, one should hesitate before drawing such policy conclusions
from these findings. They may not be perfectly transferable to single-sex
classrooms, where gender dynamics may differ from coeducational learning
environments. Moreover, single-sex education may have other drawbacks,
regardless of its potential impact on the outcomes examined in this study.
Would more limited interventions prove effective? Much depends on whether
the gender impacts are due primarily to interactions within the classroom
or more subtle role-model effects. If teachers had gender-specific
training based on evidence about the different learning styles of boys and
girls, could gender effects be limited? What if this training were aimed at
combating gender biases in teacher behavior and expectations? My study
suggests that gender interactions in the classroom matter, but it is still
far from clear exactly why this is so. Perhaps the best policy solution is
to keep an open mind about a variety of strategies that neither
unequivocally endorse single-sex education nor rule it out of order
altogether.
Thomas S. Dee is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at
Swarthmore College and a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of
Economic Research (NBER).
Copyright © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University
Phone: 6507231754
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