Gender and Education

Title IX is a law passed in 1972 that requires gender equity for boys and girls in every educational program that receives federal funding.

While exploring the web and what not, I came across a website(http://www.maec.org/beyond.html#intro) that had an article titled: Beyond Title IX: Gender Equity Issues in Schools. The article had tons of information about all different things that are evident in classrooms including: Girls at risk of dropping out of school, Gender bias in student/teacher interactions, The participation and achievement of girls in mathematics and science, Gender bias in standardized tests, Gender differences in learning styles, Sexual harassment of students by their peers etc. For the blog, I decided to focus on Gender bias in student/teacher interactions. I learned that studies show teachers do not treat their male students the same as their female. It has been noted that male students recieve more of the teachers attention, yet female students recieve a lesser punishment than the boys would for the same crime. The website also included questions that would help any teacher to see if this was going on in their classroom. One of the questions they asked was, "Are boys and girls given equal chances to answer both recall questions as well as questions requiring higher order thinking skills, e.g., expressing an opinion, comparing and contrasting, dicting consequences?" I thought that was one of the more interesting questions because in my SL classroom, I have noticed that my teacher doesn't discriminate by sex, but by who she knows is smarter. She will always give the hard questions to the student she knows will be able to give the right answer. The website then goes on to give possible steps in correcting the classroom to make it a better enviornment. Overall, this website was really helpful in teaching me about Title IX because I never knew it existed.

Other things I found exploring the web:
A website all about Title IX: http://www.titleix.info/