Gender and Learning Styles
Most teachers have taught articulate and assertive female students. But men and women tend to have different styles. Even though both are equally valid, the male style usually dominates in the classroom. As a result, women may not get as much out of their discussion sections as men do. (Romano 1994)
The standard approach to the role of gender in the classroom involves a discussion of overt and covert forms of sexism: inappropriate sexual advances, gender-based recognition or neglect, and last but not least, the all-too-common social misconceptions that discourage a particular gender from choosing a certain major — and thereby halve a department’s potential recruitment of talent. All of these factors negatively impact both student performance and retention rates (See Hall and Sandler 1982). Not to mention, they also postpone the dawn of a new era.
However, with the growing attention to different learning styles, we might occasionally encounter a different line of questioning: Do men and women learn differently? This question is potentially dangerous because it too readily invites some of the common stereotypes that ultimately inhibit student performance and retention: men are more attuned to reason, women to emotions, etc.
And yet, ongoing scholarship would suggest that the question is relevant.
According to a Harvard study, a rigorous admissions process does not standardize the learning process for men and women in such a way that women can compete in the classroom (Krupnick 1985). Drawing from the sociological and anthropological research of Janet Lever, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, and Donna Eder, Deborah Tannen proposes one possible reason. Tannen argues that because most girls learn to use language in small groups centered on private, intimate conversations, and because most boys develop their language skills in larger, far less intimate and more competitive groups, classroom discussion ultimately favors male students. Why? Because classroom discussion “entails putting oneself forward in front of a large group of people, many of whom are strangers and at least one of whom is sure to judge speakers’ knowledge and intelligence by their verbal display.” Tannen believes that — whereas a classroom discussion might suit most male students since they have learned their language skills in structurally similar environments — smaller, more intimate group settings might better suit most female students (Tannen 1991).
Tannen agrees with Walter J. Ong’s characterization (see Ong 1981) of the debate model that teachers traditionally have used for classroom activities. Both critics see the debate format as unfairly benefiting the male gender. In fact, Tannen calls attention to the way instructors question and challenge their students. In her estimation, while most male students might learn from direct intellectual confrontation, female students likely learn more from personal anecdotes.
Yet, Tannen’s analysis is over fifteen-years old, and both the Harvard study and Ong’s characterization are over twenty. Is it not possible that their descriptions of difference encourage outdated generalizations about gender differences? Would it not be disadvantageous for both genders if a professor were to direct intellectual confrontations only to male students and personal anecdotes only to female students?
Tannen’s argument draws from research on, yes, gender discrepancies, but more specifically on the role of gender in games. The longstanding generalization is that whereas girls play in small, fairly intimate groups indoors, boys play outdoors in larger more competitive groups that are more conducive to engagements with strangers. To what extent do our genders inform the games we play, and to what extent do the games we play inform our genders? These different play settings at very least affect each gender’s relationship with language and learning skills.
However, the growing popularity of video games and other digital technologies might both shrink those gender differences and radically pluralize individual learning styles. How younger generations develop language and learning skills is increasingly less reliant on gender and more dependent on each individual’s social-networking strategies. Does a student prefer structured games in which a single person or team can win? Or does he or she socially interact through games or in virtual worlds that lack uniform rules, objectives, winners, or losers? Will the student text-message friends and family only privately, or through social-networking sites such as Facebook or microblogging services like Twitter that often extend communication to strangers? Likely these communication decisions will affect learning styles more than gender will.
Nevertheless, as you run searches on “learning styles” in order to improve your own teaching practices, you may encounter statistical or other studies that researchers have stratified along gender lines. For example, a 2007 study of 86 students enrolled in an upper-division physiology lab at Michigan State University revealed that whereas 87.5% of the male students preferred multiple learning modes (visual, auditory, reading and writing, and kinesthetic), 54.2% of the female students favored learning from a single mode of presentation. And the differences did not end there (See Wehrwein, Lujan, and DiCarlo 2007). Although a sample of 86 students is not large enough to draw broader conclusions about even MSU students, let alone physiology majors in higher education or cross-the-board gender differences, such studies are informative. What they reveal is the broad range of different learning styles that sometimes fall along gender lines. Problems arise only when we use that data to make generalized gender distinctions that in turn affect the way we organize gender in the classroom.
One website cites a study of kindergarten games to support the hypothesis that “girls prefer to relate to people, whereas boys ‘relate’ to objects.” But if we are looking to avoid the generalizations that lead to our policing gender norms and thereby disenfranchising difference in the classroom, perhaps a more productive statement might be, “some students prefer to relate to people, whereas others ‘relate’ better to objects.” Why? The latter statement encourages us to cater our classroom activities to different learning styles without enforcing a gender separation to accomplish that objective.
There is nothing more disenfranchising in a classroom than a professor’s using generalizations to enforce differences among students. Student-centered teaching does not mean socially divisive classroom activities: girls on one side of the room, boys on the other. On the contrary, student-centered teaching unites the social body by drawing from and appealing to the learning styles of everyone. We have an opportunity to recast our classrooms in the dawn of a pedagogically new era.
The following teaching tips come from Renee Romano’s “Gender Issues in Teaching”:
1. Keep a log of which students speak and for how long. Watch for patterns over several weeks. Try to identify the dominant and subordinate groups in your classroom.
2. Have an outside observer come to your class and ask them to pay particular attention to patterns of participation and interruption.
3. Ask your students how they feel about the classroom atmosphere, or have someone from CETL do a small group evaluation in your class.
REFERENCES
Renee Romano. “Gender Issues in Teaching: Does Nurturing Academic Success in Women Mean Rethinking Some of What We Do in the Classroom?” Speaking of Teaching; Stanford University Newsletter on Teaching. FALL 1994, Vol. 6, No. 1.: http://ctl.stanford.edu/Newsletter/gender.pdf (found on 7/13/09).
Hall, Roberta and Bernice R. Sandler. “The Classroom Climate: A Chilly One for Women?” Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges, 1982.
Krupnick, Catherine. “Women and Men in the Classroom: Inequality and Its Remedies.” On Teaching and Learning: The Journal of the Harvard-Danforth Center. (May, 1985): 19-25.
Tannen, Deborah. “Teachers’ Classroom Strategies Should Recognize that Men and Women Use Language Differently.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. XXXVII, no. 40. (June 19, 1991); http://www.iub.edu/~tchsotl/part2/TannenTeachers%27%20classroom%20strategies (found on 7/13/09).
Ong, Walter J. Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Wehrwein, Erica A., Heidi L. Lujan, and Stephen E. DiCarlo. “Gender Differences in Learning Style Preferences among Undergraduate Physiology Students.” Advances in Physiology Education; 31: 153-157, 2007.
