TeachGirls.org is part of an education movement that understands the growing concerns of the discrepancy in the education of the sexes, and that young girls have a learning and thinking style different than young boys.
In the classroom there are methods to engage young girls, especially in ways to get them to break out of gender role stereotypes and encouraging them to pursue "Boy" subjects.
As a worthy-of-examining-generalzation-many young girls do poorly in school on account for various reasons that differ from young boys.TeachGirls.org aims to understand the fundamental difference in how girls sometimes need to be taught compared with boys.
Visit our brother site www.teachboys.org
We need help engaging girls in STEM-Math, Science, Engineering and technology, please visit our special project at: The Adventures of Neutrina Li
Recent news on gender difference and education in the media:
-NY Times 2011|12|30 Should Toys Be Stripped of Gender?
>> Key Resources:
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>> Gender differences
• A girl's corpus callosum (the connecting bundle of tissues between hemispheres) is, on average, larger than a boy's—up to 25 percent larger by adolescence. This enables more "cross talk" between hemispheres in the female brain.
• Girls have, in general, stronger neural connectors in their temporal lobes than boys have. These connectors lead to more sensually detailed memory storage, better listening skills, and better discrimination among the various tones of voice. This leads, among other things, to greater use of detail in writing assignments.
• The hippocampus (another memory storage area in the brain) is larger in girls than in boys, increasing girls' learning advantage, especially in the language arts.
• Girls' prefrontal cortex is generally more active than boys' and develops at earlier ages. For this reason, girls tend to make fewer impulsive decisions than boys do. Further, girls have more serotonin in the bloodstream and the brain, which makes them biochemically less impulsive.
• Girls generally use more cortical areas of their brains for verbal and emotive functioning. Boys tend to use more cortical areas of the brain for spatial and mechanical functioning (Moir & Jessel, 1989; Rich, 2000).
>> Some (Generalized) Concerns:
- Girls typically need to be taught to be concerned with being intelligent, not sexy. They are after all, bombarded with images in the media telling them "sexy is everything."
- Girls often need to learn to be more assertive, and that they don't always "have to be nice".
- Girls are more likely to have self-esteem issues than young boys.
- Despite differences in gender regarding learning, it is super important that with either sex, that we don't push them in a biased direction we think they are supposed to go. Read this excellent article about gender bias in the classroom.
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