Single-sex education
Single-sex education, also known as single-gender education, same-sex education, same-gender education, selective-gender education, and gender-isolated education, is the practice of conducting education with male and female students attending separate classes, perhaps in separate buildings or schools. The practice of single-sex schooling was common before the 20th century, particularly in secondary and higher education.
Single-sex education is practiced in many parts of the world based on tradition and religion. Single-sex education is most popular in English-speaking countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, South Africa and Australia; also in Chile, Israel, South Korea and in many Muslim majority countries. In the Western world, single-sex education is primarily associated with the private sector, with the public sector being overwhelmingly mixed sex; while in the Muslim world public schools and private schools are sex-segregated.
Motivations for single-sex education range from religious ideas of sex segregation to beliefs that the sexes learn and behave differently. As such, they thrive in a single-sex environment. In the 19th century, in Western countries, single-sex girls' finishing schools, and women's colleges offered women a chance of education at a time when they were denied access to mainstream educational institutions. The former was especially common in Switzerland, the latter in the U.S. and the U.K., pioneers in women's education.
History
In Western Europe before the 19th century, the most common way for girls to access education was at home, through private tutoring, and not at school, due to the strong resistance to women's involvement in schools. This attitude began to change in the 17th and 18th centuries, when girls' schools were established in both Catholic Europe, where they were managed by nuns, as well as in Protestant Europe, where they were managed by governesses, philanthropists, and private entrepreneurs. The development was similar in the U.S., where early feminists also successfully established women's educational institutions. These were different from and considered inferior to men's institutions. However, they created some of the first opportunities to formalized higher education for women in the Western world. The Seven Sisters colleges offered unprecedented emancipation for women. The pioneer Salem College of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was founded in 1772, originally as a primary school, later becoming an academy and finally a college. The New England Female Medical College and the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania were the first medical institutions in the world established to train women in medicine and offer them the M.D. degree.During the 19th century, ideas about education started to change: modern ideas that defined education as a right, rather than as a privilege available only to a small elite, started to gain support in North America and Europe. Mass elementary education was introduced, and more and more coeducational schools opened. Together with mass education, coeducation became standard in many places. Increased secularization in the 20th century also contributed to the acceptance of mixed sex education. In 1917 coeducation was mandated in the Soviet Union. According to Cornelius Riordan, "By the end of the nineteenth century, coeducation was all but universal in American elementary and secondary public schools. Furthermore, by the end of the 20th century, this was largely true across the world. In the U.K., Australia, and Ireland, the tradition of single-sex education remained quite strong until the 1960s. The 1960s and 1970s were a period of intense social changes. Many anti-discrimination laws were passed during that era, such as the 1972 Title IX. Wiseman shows that by 2003, only a few countries globally have greater than one or two percent single-sex schools. But there are exceptions where the percent of single-sex schools exceeds 10 percent: Belgium, Chile, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Israel, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, and most Muslim nations. Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in single-sex schools in modern societies across the globe, both in the public and private sector."
Effects
The topic of single-sex education is controversial. Advocates argue that it aids student outcomes such as test scores, graduation rates, and solutions to behavioral difficulties. Opponents, however, argue that evidence for such effects is inflated or non-existent and instead argue that such segregation can increase sexism and impairs the development of interpersonal skills.Advocates of single-sex education believe that there are persistent sex differences in how males and females learn and behave in educational settings and that such differences merit educating them separately. One version of this argument holds that male-female brain differences favor implementing sex-specific teaching methods, but such claims have not held up to rigorous scrutiny. In addition, supporters of single-sex education argue that by segregating sexes, students do not become distracted by another sex's actions in the classrooms. Supporters of single-sex education also argue that the culture of coeducational settings causes some students to focus more on socialization, rather than prioritizing academics. Single-sex education supporters blame this focus on socialization for causing problems in student participation, attendance levels, and disciplinary problems.
US 2005 systematic review and 2008 study
A systematic review published in 2005 covering 2221 studies was commissioned by the United States Department of Education entitled Single-Sex Versus Coeducational Schooling: A Systematic Review. The review, which had statistical controls for socio-economic status of the students and resources of the schools, etc., found that in the study on the effects of single-sex schooling:In general, most studies reported positive effects for single-sex schools on all-subject achievement tests, and the preponderance of studies in areas such as academic accomplishment and adaptation or socioemotional development yields results lending support to single-sex schooling.
The quantitative data itself "finds positive results are three to four times more likely to be found for single-sex schools than for coeducational schools in the same study for both academic achievement and socio-emotional development," said Cornelius Riordan, one of the directors of the research.
In 2008, the U.S. government sponsored another study, Early Implementation of Public Single-Sex Schools: Perceptions and Characteristics, which listed the benefits of single-sex schools: Decreases distractions in learning, Reduces student behavior problems, Provides more leadership opportunities, Promotes a sense of community among students and staff, Improves student self-esteem, Addresses unique learning styles and interests of males or females, Decreases sex bias in teacher-student interactions, Improves student achievement, Decreases the academic problems of low achieving students, Reduces sexual harassment among students, Provides more positive student role models, Allows for more opportunities to provide social and moral guidance, Provides choice in public education.
Later studies
Australian researchers reported in September of 2008 that high school students' interpersonal relationships were positively associated with both academic and nonacademic achievement, although the interaction between boys and girls in a majority of cases resulted in less homework done, less enjoyment of school, and lower reading and mathematics scores.A UCLA report commissioned by the National Coalition of Girls' Schools used data from an extensive national survey of U.S. college freshmen and found stronger academic orientations among women who had attended all-girls, compared to coeducational high schools, but the effects were minor, and the authors concluded "that the marginal benefits do not justify the potential threats to gender equity brought on by academic sex segregation."
In September 2011, the journal Science published a study deeply critical of gender-segregated schooling, arguing that the movement towards single-sex education "is deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence." The study goes on to conclude that "there is no well-designed research showing that single-sex education improves students' academic performance, but there is evidence that sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism."
Leonard Sax, the President of National Association for Single-Sex Public Education or NASSPE, countered the Science article by saying that "ALL the studies cited in the SCIENCE article regarding 'negative impacts' were in fact studies involving a small number of PRE-SCHOOL students attending a COED pre-kindergarten". He further said that "these authors provide no evidence for their substantive claim that 'gender divisions are made even more salient in SS settings.' In fact, this conjecture has been tested, and proven false, in multiple studies." Sax cited a study which said that "girls in the all-girls classroom were less aware of 'being a girl' and less aware of gender stereotypes regarding science, compared to girls who were randomly assigned to the coed classroom."
In January 2012, a study of the University of Pennsylvania, involving a randomized experiment, considered the experiment with the highest level of scientific evidence. The data comes from schools in South Korea, where a law was passed randomly assigning students to schools in their district. The study by Park, Berhman, and Choi titled Causal Effects of Single-Sex Schools on College Entrance Exams and College Attendance: Random Assignment in Seoul High Schools concluded that "Attending all-boys schools or all-girls schools rather than attending coeducational schools is significantly associated with higher average scores."
In 2014, E. Pahlke, J. S. Hyde, and C. M. Allison published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin comparing achievement and attitudes in single-sex versus coeducational schools that included 1.6 million students in grades K-12. The study concluded that "there is little evidence of an advantage of SS schooling for girls or boys for any of the outcomes." In a 2015 review of this study, however Cornelius Riordan observed that the authors "employ a 0.2 effect-size threshold in drawing these conclusions about there being no advantage to single-sex schooling. Despite the above conclusion, the research found that, in a separate analysis of just the best studies conducted in America, the effect size in mathematics was 0.14 for both boys and girls. The verbal performance was 0.22 for girls and 0.13 for boys... Educational research has shown that a standard effect size of 0.10 on gains from sophomore to senior year of high school is equivalent to one full year of learning by the average public school student in the United States." Thus, he says, that "Applying this standard, a difference of 0.10 between students in single-sex and in coeducational schools would be substantially important." The analysis of the 21 other countries yielded much smaller effects, such as a 0.10 effect on mathematics for girls and a 0.06 effect for boys and science. Most of the international effects, then, would fall within Riordan's stricter criterion for statistical significance.
In 2017, Christian Dustmann, Hyejin Ku, Do Won Kwak explained that "While teenage boys may be more likely to be distracted than girls by a mixed-gender school environment, girls may suffer more because of, for instance, an increase in disruptive behaviour, or a diversion of the teacher's attention to weaker students.