Gender and Learning Difficulties
There is growing debate in US and in the UK about the merits of single-sex education. In some trials it has been found that girls perform better in single-sex classes, especially in mathematics and the sciences. (Summary of research via National Association for Single Sex Public Education).
This debate is relevant to children with learning difficulties given the perceived wisdom that dyslexia, ADHD and autism are more prevalent in boys than girls. What is it in male brains or in how boys are educated that causes the problem? Some research on how children’s brains develop may shed some light on these gender differences. Gender Differences in the Development of EEG Coherence in Normal Children is a study published in Developmental Neuropsychology in 1999. Using EEG they examined 224 girls and 284 boys ranging in age from 2 months to 161/2 years. From this they could see how ‘average’ brains changed over time.
“Differences in gender … were statistically significant… From birth to age 6 years, girls exhibited … peaks in … concurrent discrimination, language processing, fine motor skills, and social cognition. During this same early period, boys exhibited … peaks [in] … spatial-visual discrimination and executive planning related to gross motor movement, visual targeting, and accessing stored information.“.
This indicates that in the first 6 years of life, boys and girls brains focus on different activities and because they are focused on them these skills improve. Interestingly the boys’ areas of focus are areas that are weak in dyslexic or ADHD children: memory, coordination and planning. So if dyslexia and ADHD are a failure for boys to develop key skills in the first 6 years of life, what do we call it when girls fail to develop language, social and fine motor skills?
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July 12th, 2005
ADD / ADHD, Dyslexia, Science
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