Two weeks have gone by?

Time is going by way too fast for my taste this semester! But, I have at least begun my initial research into the issue of minority gendered students in the classroom. In regards to phase one of my plan which involves me monitoring participation in the classes I observe in Holt Jr. High, I've collected some good data from both the first hour (14 boys, 11 girls) and the sixth hour (20 girls, 9 boys). My results from first hour were initially incredibly supportive of my hyp0thesis that being in the minority gender causes a decrease in participation in the classroom. Over three class periods, the boys consistently out-participated the girls by more than a 2 to 1 ratio, far larger, in other words than the actual ratio of boys to girls. I should mention that all participation in our teacher's class is voluntary, and students are expected to raise their hands and answer questions to earn "participation points" for everyday, which are factored into their final grades. This makes counting who gets called on to answer questions somewhat useful as a tool to show who is motivated and, in fact, learning.

However, the last class period I observed threw my hypothesis into question. During that session, Sancho (not his real name), who is by far the alpha male in the class, by which I mean to say the loudest, most talkative, and the one who most often is waving his hand in the air to answer questions, was put out of the room for five minutes for being disruptive. In this time, Sara (also a pseudonym), the alpha female, started answering as many questions as Sancho normally would, and the girls in general answered just as many questions as the boys that period. So, while there might be some correlation between gender and participation in first hour, this observation seems to point to personality being a more causal factor in participation. Although, the fact that it took putting the dominant male out into the hallway for the females to start participating at the same rate as the males might be saying something... I don't know. It's interesting either way you look at it.

Sixth hour I have only gotten a chance to see once, and obtained the also intriguing result of having exactly 9 instances of male participation and 20 of female participation, or in other words, exactly what you would expect from a class of 9 males and 20 females if you thought gender did not matter in classrooms. I hope to go in to observe them at least once a week until the end of my research, and hopefully will get to more often.

As for phase two (I love how diabolical I sound by phrasing my research in terms of phases, by the way), that being the macro part of my research, I've checked out several promising books from the library, and am starting to mine websites for information. The two books I'm most excited about are Issues In Focus: The Gender Gap In Schools (Girls Losing Out) a book by Trudy J. Hanmer that was published in 1996, and Michael Thompson's Raising Cain, a book about how boys are being left behind in public education, which was published a decade later. I figure the opposing arguments of these books will give me a fair understanding of the gender issues in classrooms from both male and female perspectives. I have also subscribed to the RSS feeds from the New York Times and NPR, and am filtering them to try and get articles on gender and education, which so far has been largely fruitless, but I'm sure it will turn up something.

That's all for this update!