In the 1940s the Belgian philosopher Albert Michotte identified our tendency to believe we could see causality. His book, The Perception of Causality, published in French in 1945 showed how certain very simple visual sequences carry the appearance of causal connectedness. Click this link for an example. This paper is a good recent update on how illusions of causality bias our judgement.
Human beings are natural pattern seekers. We see shapes in clouds, faces in wallpaper and meaning where there is just random noise. In particular, we believe we can see causes when all we can actually see are effects. In teaching, we look at what happens in a classroom and think we know why it happened. We may, occasionally be right, but usually we’ll miss the hopeless complexities of real life preferring to stick with a convenient narrative: Miss Crumb is an ineffective teacher; Gavin is a feckless, work shy toe rag; Parvinder always tries her best. This is much easier than actually doing the hard work of trying to find out what else might have caused the effects we’ve observed.
One of the most prevalent examples of the perception of causality in education surrounds the observation that girls outperform boys. There’s no end of data to support this assumption and it really does seem to be the case that, on average, girls do better at school and are 75% more likely to go to university than boys. The OECD have found that boys are 50% more likely than girls to fall short of basic standards in reading, maths and science. And of course, everyone knows why. As this Economist article explains, there are 3 clear reasons why girls are doing better than boys: girls read more, spend longer doing homework and boys are ‘too cool for school’. Simple.
Consequently many, if not most, schools have a gender policy. As Chris Curtis points out here, teachers are under pressure to create a ‘boy friendly’ curriculum to ensure that boys are more engaged in lesson content, thereby magically closing the attainment gap.
If only reality really were this simple. My suspicion is that what works well for girls will also work well for boys. Chris makes the following observations:
A boy who knows what they want from school succeeds.A girl who knows what they want from school succeeds.A student who knows what they want from schools succeeds.
To believe otherwise is to believe that we know the causes for the effects we observe. But it’s so tempting, isn’t it? In Chapter 1 of my book, What if everything you knew about education was wrong? I tell the story of ‘Mr Garvery’.
During a training session, Mr Garvery and his colleagues were presented with data showing a difference in the mean scores for average GCSE points – with girls achieving a higher mean than boys. The obvious conclusion drawn was that this difference mattered and something needed to be done. Urgently. No ‘proper’ statistics were used to quantify the significance of this difference. So Mr Garvery went back to the raw data and performed a factor analysis of the impact of the following variables:
- Gender
- Free school meals (FSM)
- Originating primary school
- Key Stage 2 English/maths/science results
- Key Stage 3 English/maths/science results
- Reading age
- Pupil attendance
- Teacher attendance
- Special educational needs (SEN)
- English as a foreign language (EAL)
All had an impact ‘on average’, but the most significant factors were:
- Teacher attendance
- Pupils’ attendance
- Key Stage 2 English results
Of those factors measured, gender and free school meals were the least significant. When Mr Garvery shared this finding with his head teacher, his was told to stop causing trouble and come up with a suitable gender policy.
Why has the story of boys’ underachievement become such a widely accepted and compelling narrative? The problem is that we see graphs with girls’ performance clearly ahead of boys’, so the cause must be due to gender. The way information is presented makes it appear that gender is the biggest factor underlying students’ achievement, but the data makes it clear that attendance and prior achievement correlate much more closely.
Mr Garvery had conclusive evidence that gender difference was among the least important factors impacting pupils’ performance. He continued his data exploration and surveyed all Key Stage 4 pupils for gender, as well as whether they lived in houses with an odd or even house number, whether they owned a games console and whether they were left-handed or right-handed.
When I tell school leaders that whether you’re left or right-handed might have more bearing on your educational attainment than your gender they sometimes start nodding and you can see a left-handed policy being born. After all, this findings still seems plausible. When I reveal that console ownership was even more statistically significant they look worried: are they going to have to blow the Pupil Premium budget on X Boxes? But when I tell them the most statistically significant factor correlated with outcomes was whether students live in an odd or even house, the relief is palpable. No one can believe that the number of the house you live in can in any way be causally linked with attainment. It’s a silly idea and we dismiss it immediately.
The ‘pattern’ of boys’ underachievement is compelling because of the way we think about gender: girls are quiet, hard-working and sensible; boys are immature, unruly and easily bored. But as any teacher and every parent could tell you, these are stereotypes – a shorthand that saves us from having to think about reality. As ever though, reality is always more complex. Recent research into achievement and gender differences has found that school behaviour is much more likely to be a decisive factor for achievement than gender. Hard-working pupils achieve good grades while badly behaved pupils perform more poorly and get worse grades. The distribution of boisterous pupils among the two genders is much the same – about 40 per cent are girls.
I’m not suggesting gender has nothing to do with attainment – it probably does have some bearing – but maybe a lot less than we’re inclined to believe. And the extent to which gender might be causal is more likely due to cultural rather than biological causes, as this article makes clear. Our best bet is probably to insist on high expectations for all students and not let boys get away with being ‘just boys’.
I really think this is an oversimplification. Unfortunately, in many (not all) classes which I teach, the amount of boys who achieve their target grade is lower than the amount of girls achieving their target grade. Teacher attendance (i.e. my attendance) is the same for both girls and boys in my class so I don’t see how that can be seen as a factor. While there are some boys and girls who for various reasons have an attendance rate of below the schools target of 95%, the majority of boys and girls have roughly equal attendance rate, yet girls still outperform boys. As for Key Stage 2 English results, firstly, data itself has shown that girls have higher results than boys here, so there’s a gender gap associated with these results in themselves. I don’t know what the solution to boys underachievement is, as it’s a hugely complex issue, but I don’t see how denying that the issue exists is going to solve anything.
Obviously teacher attendance effects cannot be meaningfully applied to single classes. My point is that when we look at data sets, this is what we can expect to see on average. Your class is too small a cohort for us to analyse. Anecdote isn’t all that useful in this context.
If you were to try a factor analysis on your whole school’s results looking for the effects I mentioned you might find something different – but you won’t know until you look. I’m not “denying that the issue exists” just suggesting it’s more than possible that gender isn’t causal. I don’t see how denying that the perception of causality exists is going to solve anything 🙂
The view that is growing on me is that we make too much of these small differences in attainment at school and that we should be concentrating on education not slight variations between groups. As you point out, there are other variables to consider and we really can’t make assumptions about what we should actually DO, if we don’t know what causes the difference. It’s not even easy to know what we should do IF gender is the factor, since we don’t know that there is anything we can do to mitigate this anyway. If boys do underperform compared to girls, how does that play out in terms of their life chances? I may be wrong, but isn’t it also true that men are over-represented in high paid, high powered positions of authority globally?
Yes, men may be over-represented in highly-paid positions, however these men aren’t generally the ones who underperformed as boys. Boys who underperform and leave school with fewer qualifications tend to be those who make up the much higher proportion of long-term unemployed/underemployed/homeless/incarcerated men, so it doesn’t play out very well in terms of their life chances.
Really interesting work, thanks for sharing it. I think the “previous achievement drives future achievement” predictor isn’t really very helpful in identifying underlying causes of a gap, but it can be helpful in identifying which students are more likely to need additional support as they progress through school, and especially at transition points. That’s not really bringing something new to the debate though: “you should direct support towards the most poorly performing students” is hardly revolutionary. However, if it’s not currently done systematically or with the funding to support it, then perhaps it could drive improvements.
I think one needs to be careful in assuming a causal direction between attendance and achievement : it could be the case that low achievement is driving lower attendance (perhaps because the child enjoys school less as a result of not being rewarded) not the reverse.
It would be interesting to see how this all intersects with current thinking in intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. If students who achieve results are rewarded, and students who don’t achieve results aren’t, but both sets of students working as hard, then it isn’t hard to see how and why the underperforming, but hard-working, students would feel less and less incentive to behave well and attend school. Reviewing how we reward behaviour/hard work in the early stages might be useful.
Also: the OECD does show a gender gap in the other direction in maths, and to a lesser degree science. The factors there might be very different than the gender gap in English (or they might not be): have you done any research in this area?
I think an area that needs much more investigation is the impact of stereotyping and stereotype threats on self-belief and confidence. Girls performing better in English and boys in Maths conforms to our stereotypes. How much are those stereotypes having an impact on teacher behaviour, parent behaviour, and students’ own motivation and behaviour? The OECD’s ABC report is quite clear about the underlying drivers of achievement: Aptitude, Behaviour, and Confidence. There also quite clear that self-belief is a factor in girls’ poorer performance in maths. To me the interesting question is how is it that girls end up with much self-belief than boys in maths? Where does it start? And is it mirrored by a lack of boys’ self belief in literacy?
I agree with you that all too often legislators and policy makers are jumping to solve the symptoms of a problem rather than the underlying cause. I think that asking more searching questions about why it’s harder for particular groups to achieve, and trying to find answers that are evidence-based, would allow policies to be formed that could actually address root cause. If you don’t understand why correlated factors impact achievement, then how can you possibly improve it?
Please excuse typos. I wrote this in a rush at lunchtime; my proof-reading could do with work.
If gender isn’t strongly related to the observed difference between outcomes (and this isn’t a result seen in one year or one study- its all over the place) then the confounding variable that is hiding behind gender would have to be one that effected boys more than girls. It’s hard to imagine what that might be. Class, wealth, home environment and so on can’t favour one gender more than another.
Your discussion of the peculiar correlations that can appear from data dredging exercises doesn’t really have anything to say about the huge evidence base on boys’ relative under performance in English. The evidence of an imaginary teacher (or is he a real person) who finds correlations within a very small sample (a year group or two in one secondary) is equally beside the point.
There may be some limited thinking focused on gender “causing” different levels of achievement. That is just as unhelpful as assuming poor people are thick because of correlations of poverty and poor educational outcomes (again overwhelming evidence base). I would be much more interested in understanding why this correlation is seen, and more to the point where effective work is done to unravel it.
The point is – why can only really understand why correlations are observed if they are causal. If they’re just correlations then they might be meaningless.
In answer to your last point, I refer you to my final paragraph:
Yes there is some gender gap between education. The percentage of girls in terms of seriousness towards studies is quote higher than that of boys. But what the exact cause of this is I thinking not yet clearly known. May the carelessness or less serious nature of boys is leading to the increase in this gap.
I read somewhere that in countries where formal reading and writing happen slightly later in primary school, boys and summer born children do not lag behind in the way some do here. As you imply, by secondary school, differences in KS2 English attainment are already there, so it is perhaps primary schools who need ‘policies’ ?
I don’t want to believe in biological gender differences in learning, I really don’t, but looking at my own children (one of each) and their classmates, there do seem to be horribly obvious gender differences in language and writing at the ages of 4 and 5, not so much as they age, but I can see that some boys and August born children might quickly become disheartened, give up trying early on and then stay ‘behind’.
Clearly there is a whole load of cultural stuff too, but I think this may partly explain the poor motivation of some male learners.
(By writing, I don’t mean presentation – my son’s handwriting is still distressingly awful, but *what* he writes is much improved, not quite as good as the average girl in his class yet but almost. He is in Y4; the difference in standard of the Y1 girls’ and boys’ work is astonishing: my daughter is very pleased with herself and thinks the boys are a bit thick. She is *very* keen on school because she thinks she is doing well. This makes me cringe a bit…))
The belief boys should be strong allows aggressive treatment from infancy to create more anger and fear so they will be tough. This is coupled with much less kind verbal interaction and less mental/emotional support knowledge for fear of coddling. It is this treatment which creates the extra layers of average stress. These layers remain in the mind and take away real mental energy from academics so those boys will have to work two or three times as hard to receive the same mental reward.
This aggressive less supportive treatment creates social/emotional distance/distrust of others parents and teachers. It creates lags in social vocabulary and other communication we as girls are given on a continuous basis. The higher average stress creates more activity for stress relief not genetics. The higher average stress creates higher muscle tension which hurts handwriting more pressure on pencil and tighter grip hurting handwriting motivation to write early fatigue.
The total effect including less care and support creates much more failure and a feeling of hopelessness especially with our false genetic models firmly in place. Also to make it even tougher for boys is the granting of love and honor feelings of self-worth only on some condition of achievement status or image. This was designed to keep Male esteem and feelings of self-worth low to keep them striving and even be willing to give their lives in time of war for small measures of love and honor from society. Males not achieving in school or other areas are given more ridicule and discipline to make them try harder. Support is not given boys for fear of coddling. Many boys as you would expect thus falling behind in school then turn their attention to sports and video games to gleam small measures of love and honor not received in the classroom. The belief boys should be strong and the false belief in genetics creates a blatant mental denial of the differential treatment which is creating the lower academics lower esteem and other problems many boys are facing today. So strong is the belief boys should be strong there is an almost emotional cannibalism allowed upon boys and men who appear weak in some way by society: parents teachers others even from many girls and women especially in the media.
Note this is not about showing feelings or openness from boys and men it is about support care and respect for boys even when appearing weak in some way. Remember aggressive treatment is increased for any sign of weakness and the much wariness boys feel for parent and teachers who feel it necessary and more freely allowed to use more aggressiveness for any sign of weakness or vulnerability. This is condoned by many in society today.
As girls we are treated much better and so enjoy more hope and care from society. Since we as girls are given by differential treatment much more continual positive – mental social/emotional support verbal interaction and care from an early age onward this creates quite the opposite outcome for girls when compared with the boys. We enjoy much more care and support and care from society from infancy through adulthood and receive love and honor simply for being girls. This creates all of the good things. We enjoy lower average stress for more ease of learning. We enjoy much more freedom of expression from much protection that makes us look more unstable at times. Of course we can also use that same freedom of expression to give verbal silent abuse and hollow kindness/patronization to our Male peers with impunity knowing we are protected. We enjoy much lower muscle tension for more ease and ability in handwriting and motivation to write. We enjoy much more positive trust/communication from parents teachers peers and more support for perceived weaknesses. We are reaping a bonanza in the information age. The lower the socioeconomic bracket the much more amplified the differential treatment from infancy and more differentiated over time through adulthood. Now with girls and women taking over many areas of society we are enjoying even more lavishing of love and honor from society while the boys and men are now failing more so and are now given even more ridicule and abuse by society. Mind you this is also now coming from many girls and women using our still protected freedoms of expression and more so with false feelings of superiority. My learning theory will go to all
[…] “I’m not suggesting gender has nothing to do with attainment – it probably does have some bearing – but maybe a lot less than we’re inclined to believe. And the extent to which gender might be causal is more likely due to cultural rather than biological causes, as this article makes clear. Our best bet is probably to insist on high expectations for all students and not let boys get away with being ‘just boys’.” David Didau, ‘What causes the gender gap in education?‘ […]
[…] practice is that no one can see causes – we only ever get see effects. As I explained here, we tend to believe that we can, in fact, see the reasons behind the events we see unfolding in […]