Worse for boys

One result which has become increasingly clear with the regular testing of literacy skills in the UK and US is that girls tend to do better than boys. A study released by CEP in the US in March 2010 - "State Test Score Trends Through 2007-08: Are There Differences in Achievement Between Boys and Girls?" - concluded that ‘the lagging performance by boys in reading is the most pressing gender-gap issue facing our schools’. They found greater gender differences in some of the 50 US states than others, but in none did boys read better than girls.

In maths, by contrast, the number of states in which girls outperformed boys was roughly equal to the number of states in which boys outperformed girls. At the advanced level, 4th-grade boys outperformed girls in maths in most states.

The national SATs results for 11-year-olds in England in 2009 were similar: girls were way ahead of boys in reading (89 per cent of girls reached the expected standard as opposed to 82 per cent of boys) and in writing (75 per cent and 60 per cent respectively). Boys were slightly ahead of girls in maths (79 per cent compared to 78 per cent).

Why should boys be as good or better than girls in maths but worse in reading?

From my undergraduate study of child development in the late 1960’s, and close observation of my own children and grandchildren, I have learnt that, on the whole, the physical and verbal development of young boys is slightly slower than that of girls. By the start of formal schooling, which in the UK is now sometimes as early as age 4, most boys are therefore less school-ready than girls.

Verbal ability is a very important factor in learning to read English. So is internalising the grammatical structures of the language. They both help with part-guessing the many English words with tricky spellings which are not entirely decodable, such as ‘said, would, one’ in phrases like ‘One day he said that he would...’.

Because boys tend to be slightly behind girls in those things, their start to schooling is both harder and less successful, and probably less enjoyable too. Being able to do something that we are expected to do is much more fun than finding it difficult or impossible. The early start to schooling in Anglophone countries is therefore much harder for boys than girls, and it seems to keep them at a disadvantage for many years.

The fact that boys tend to outperform girls in maths, suggests that their minds are more logical. This probably makes the many irregularities of English spelling harder for them to cope with, not just at the start of schooling but throughout their school years.

Somewhat unusually for a female, I was very good in maths at school. And I was very upset by English spelling inconsistencies on first meeting them at the age of 14. My son who ended up studying science certainly found coping with them much harder than my daughter who loved and chose languages.