The National Literacy Trust in Britain has come up with a report on boys’ reading. The outlook is not good.
An astonishing three-quarters of British schools say boys do not do as well in reading as girls. By age seven, there is already a gender gap of seven points in the proportion of pupils who read at or above grade level; by GCSE, the gap has doubled to fourteen points. Even when controlling for social class, a gap of ten points remains. The majority of boys say they enjoy reading only a little or not at all; only a quarter of oys read outside of class each day. Girls are performing equally to or outperforming boys at every GCSE subject except construction. While equal performance is awesome, girls’ outperformance of boys at everything is rather depressing. What’s worse is that Britain is one of the countries with the lowest gender gap in education.
The report proposes several reasons for the gap. The largely female teachers may create a lack of positive male role models for reading. Boys may respond to the curriculum differently: some people suggest that boys tend to prefer multiple-choice to essays and open-ended discussion to close questioning about texts. Teachers may be less aware of the kinds of books boys tend to prefer and less likely to teach them in the classroom. Boys may not be taught about the importance of reading for enjoyment.
Similarly, boys aren’t getting the necessary support at home to learn to love to read. Girls are more likely than boys to get books as gifts. Fathers who don’t read are less likely to have sons that read. At the same time, the culture tends to encourage girls to read and boys not to read. It’s cooler for girls to read, while for boys it’s considered nerdy and feminized. Boys are more likely than girls to believe that a reader is boring or a geek; girls are more likely to believe a reader is happy, clever, and likely to do well in life. Nineteen percent of boys would be embarrassed if their friends saw them reading. Boys are more likely than girls to say that they don’t go to the library because their friends don’t go. One boy in five says reading is more of a girl thing.
Boys and girls ahve very different media consumption. Boys are more likely than girls to prefer watching TV to reading. Boys are more likely to read comics, nonfiction, manuals, and newspapers; girls are more likely to read fiction, magazines, text communication with friends (such as IMs, social networking sites, text messages, etc.), and poems. Girls tend to prefer adventure, horror, romance, and animal books, while boys like sports, science fiction and fantasy, and war/spy books.
I’m not surprised by this, and it is sad. 🙁 I suspect that there might be more fun, light books written for girls right into their late teens than there are for boys. My younger brother used to read ‘young spy’ books aimed at 12-14 year olds, but when he was older than that there seemed to be nothing to fill the gap. I’m not talking serious fiction but something fun and enjoyable, which I think is the key to keeping kids interested in reading. Girls get all these fun books about friendships and romance (I should know, I still… Read more »
Possibly interesting note:
There’s a new Nancy Drew series starting early next year: http://www.amazon.com/Curse-Arctic-Star-Nancy-Diaries/dp/1416990720/ . It looks to be a return to YA and appears to lack the turns toward teen romance and/or Twilight piggybacking that have marked the Nancy Drew universe for 25-odd years.
At the moment the Hardy Boys series is on hiatus, apart from the younger-than-YA “Secret Files” series, after the latest attempt to spice things up with more violence failed.
It might be because the mandatory reading list of Juvenile “Lit Fic” is typically centered around complex interpersonal relationships that the average middle school boy has no hope of understanding. Think about all the “learn to read” posters depicting knights, spacemen, pirates and cowboys, then think of all the fifty-something English teachers who ban all genre and non-fiction in favor of flowery “coming of age” stories or obscure historical fan fiction that played loose with facts in favor of tawdry shipping. Seriously, the cover of your average young adult book looks like a celestial seasonings box.
I wonder if the research has controlled for different types of reading. That is, I wonder if boys’ attributions towards reading books are the same as attributions towards reading essays, articles, blogs, etc. This might be an important distinction since one might be able to get young boys to read simply by changing the setting. Instead of those GOD AWFUL classics (ugh, Wuthering Heights, My Antonia, bleh) during the summer, have an option to keep up with the news or several blogs. Most academic journals would be above even seniors in High School, but other science-based magazines might not be… Read more »
Also, there a huge effect from teachers expectations. I’ve worked in primary schools, I’ve heard the chatter in staff rooms. Boys are expected to be ill behaved and academically poor. Girls are expected to do well in school and behave well. (Unsurprising bizarre contradiction: Most of the students considered “gifted” by the teachers are boys. Girls are expected to be good but rarely exceptional. Boys are expected to be mostly a pain but with diamonds in the rough.)
/some people suggest that boys tend to prefer multiple-choice to essays and open-ended discussion to close questioning about texts./
And that gets to how those are treated in academics. A lot of people see ‘multiple choice’ and ‘discussion-based courses’ as the ‘easy’ way.