Struggling Male Readers Respond Better to Female Teachers

Boys with difficulty reading may respond better to female teachers, according to a new study from the University of Alberta.

The research shows that boys develop higher positive self-perceptions as readers when they worked with female research assistants compared to working with male research assistants, says U of A education professor Herb Katz.The study focused on 175 third- and fourth-grade boys who were identified as struggling readers by their teachers. The boys participated in a 10-week reading intervention to determine the effect of the reading teacher’s gender on boys’ reading performance, self-perception as readers, and view of reading as a masculine, feminine or gender-neutral activity.”As competent reading is the strongest predictor of school success, it’s crucial to find ways to engage boys to become stronger readers,” said Katz. “Although boys and girls enter kindergarten with similar performance in reading, by the spring of third grade, boys have lower reading scores, which makes this an opportune time for reading intervention.”Over the 10-week period, the research assistant visited children at school to conduct 30-minute reading sessions, reading books that hold high interest for boys. The process included paired readings sessions during which student and tutor read simultaneously, and solo reading in which the student read independently.”From this we can conclude that the drop in the number of male teachers, especially in elementary schools, is not the reason why boys are underachieving in reading,” said Katz. “Therefore, the strategic hiring of male teachers as a way to address boys’ poor reading scores may be naive.”However, Katz also noted that perhaps the most interesting conclusion from the study had nothing to do with gender.”The main effect, the most interesting finding was that the overall impact on all the students was that all the boys showed a very strong growth in their reading ability and motivation,” he said.The difference may simply lie in one-on-one time between teacher and student.”We don’t really think too much about it, but kids in school get very little one-on-one attention. They’re usually dealt with as a group,” said Katz. “For kids in the inner city who sometimes don’t have a place to sleep at night, don’t have much to eat, are in contact with violence, adults can be very unreliable. And then they come to school and are treated as a group. When you give them that attention and you give it consistently, that’s very powerful thing in the life of a child.””I think a good program and good teaching is what learning is all about, regardless of the sex of the teacher or the child.”This study appeared in the May 2007 journal Sex Roles.(Source: Sex Roles : Ileiren Poon : University of Alberta : November 2007)