Girls Outperform Boys in Reading

Researchers studying gender differences in early reading skill development have demonstrated an advantage for females. Research suggests that relative to females, males have weaker reading skill development when they enter kindergarten, and these differences either remain constant or increase during elementary school.

Davenport et. al., 2002, compared reading scores for 367,188 eighth-grade students taking the Minnesota Basic Skills Test from 1996 through 2001. Gender differences in reading that favored females were found each year and remained relatively constant across grades.  

In 2006, Klecker analyzed 4th, 8th, and 12th grade students reading comprehension on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Scores from 1992 to 2003 demonstrated that females outperformed males every year at all three grade levels.

Chatterji (2006) conducted a study of 2,296 kindergarten and first grade students taken from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and found that males performed below females on tests of print familiarity, letter recognition, beginning and ending sounds, rhyming sounds, word recognition, receptive vocabulary, listening comprehension, and the comprehension of words in context.

In 2010 Below et. al. found that girls enter school with stronger literacy skills. The females scored significantly higher on all pre-literacy skills administered in kindergarten. However, their results did not support findings that these differences grow larger as students’ progress through school. Although a small but significant female advantage was found in the fourth grade sample, in fifth-grade the sample was not significant.

Physiological-maturational theories have examined processing differences related to early literacy skill development. Other researchers suggest that gender differences in reading skills are influenced by environmental or cultural/societal causes. This hypothesis suggests that teachers may hold higher expectations for females that turn into self-fulfilling prophecies (Bank, Biddle, & Good, 1980). Others hypothesize that interest and/or motivation may be a factor. Although males prefer reading nonfiction and informational material that provides facts over fictional materials (Coles & Hall, 2001; Herz & Gallo, 1996), fictional reading is typically used during elementary school instruction (Brozo, 2002; Paris & Turner, 1994).  

Research shows that if boys are able to improve their reading skills through subjects they like they will be more inclined to return to books and learn more. It may be that boys do not like to read what they are presented with. Boys like to read books that reflect what they aspire to be and to do; books that make them laugh; fiction that focus more on action than on emotions; science fiction or fantasy; magazines, comic books, baseball cards and instruction manuals.

“Guys Read” is the name of a website (http://www.guysread.com) developed by author Jon Scieszka to put young male readers in touch with appropriate reading materials and a community of like-minded readers. Scieszka asks, “So how do we start motivating our boys to read? One obvious solution is to get more men involved in teaching, more fathers actively reading with their boys, and adult men generally showing boys that reading is a male activity.”

References

Bank, B.J., Biddle, B.J., & Good, T.L. (1980). Sex roles, classroom in: Instruction, and reading achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 72, 119-132.

Below, J.L., Skinner, C.H., Fearrington, J.Y., Sorrell, C.A.  (2010). Gender Differences in Early Literacy: Analysis of Kindergarten through Fifth-Grade Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills Probes. School Psychology Review, 39, 240-257.

Brozo, W.G. (2002). To be a boy, to be a reader. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Chatterji, M. (2006). Reading achievement gaps, correlates, and moderators of early reading achievement: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) kindergarten to first grade sample. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98, 489-507.

Coles, M., & Hall, C. (2001). Gendered reading: Learning from children’s reading choices. Journal of Research in Reading, 25, 96-108.

Davenport, E.C., Davidson, M.L., Chan, C.K., Choi, J., Guven, K., Harring, J., et al. (2002). The Minnesota Basic Skills Test: Performance gaps for 1996 to 2001 on the reading and mathematics tests, by gender, ethnicity, limited English proficiency, individualized education plans, and socio-economic status. Minneapolis: Office of Educational Accountability, College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota.

Herz, S.K., & Gallo, D. (1996) From Hinton to Hamlet: Building bridges between young adult literature and the classics. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Klecker, B.M. (2006). The gender gap in NAEP fourth-, eigth-, and twelfth- grade reading scores across years. Reading Improvement, 43, 50-56.

Paris, S.G., & Turner, J.C. (1994). Situated motivation. In P.R. Pintrich, D. R. Brown, & C.E. Weinstein (Eds.), Student motivation, cobnition, and learning: Essays in honor of Wilbert J. McKeachie (pp 213-237). Hillsdale, NJ, England: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates.