Gender, Culture, Language, and Class

This is Unit Nine, on gender, culture, language and class: how groups of students differ, what those differences mean, and what they do not. Unit Eight closed on explanations that shape remedies. Unit Nine turns to differences between groups of students. Carry one idea through this unit: a group difference describes an average, not a destiny, and much of it reflects experience that teachers can influence. At the final entry, the unit weighs the explanations the evidence supports. By the end you will be able to distinguish sex, gender and gender identity. To state what research on gender similarities shows. To tell immersion from additive bilingual programs. To recognize a cultural difference in language use before judging it. And to explain group differences in achievement without predicting any one student.

Eight entries on gender: identity, average differences and similarities, and how teachers interact with boys and girls.

Sex, and gender.

EDP 0801 Sex and Gender

Sex refers to biological category, defined by physical differences in genetics and reproductive anatomy; gender refers to the cultural, social and psychological meanings associated with masculinity and femininity, including social roles. Being born female is sex; being expected to prefer quiet play is gender. The two terms differ in meaning.

Gender identity.

EDP 0802 Gender Identity

Gender identity is a person's psychological sense of their gender, distinct from sexual orientation, the direction of attraction. Most people are cisgender, identifying with the gender matching their biological sex; an estimated point six percent of U.S. adults identify as transgender, and others as nonbinary. The four do not always correspond.

How children come to understand gender.

EDP 0803 Gender Constancy and Stereotypes

Between ages three and six, children develop gender constancy, understanding that gender does not change with external features, and their stereotypes are strong and rigid, loosening at about eight or nine; a four-year-old insists only girls can be nurses. Adults' heavy focus on gender teaches children to treat it as key information.

Average differences in school.

EDP 0804 Average Differences in School

On average, boys are more physically active and physically aggressive, play in larger groups and speak up more in class, while girls form closer friendships and earn slightly higher grades; course choices diverge in high school, and motor skills diverge through sports. These are averages with wide individual exceptions.

How similar the genders are.

EDP 0805 Gender Similarities

The gender similarities hypothesis, supported by Janet Hyde's review, holds that most cognitive gender differences are small, shrinking and far smaller than the variation within each gender: boys do not outperform girls in math, and girls are not more talkative. Knowing a student's gender predicts little about that student's abilities.

A gap that practice closed.

EDP 0806 Practice Closes a Gap

Many gender differences reflect experience and socialization rather than innate differences: when girls practiced spatial skills, a presumed difference in spatial ability disappeared completely. Boys are considered more active, yet forty-two percent of girls are more active than the average boy. Overlap is the rule, even where averages differ.

How teachers interact with boys and girls.

EDP 0807 Teachers' Differential Interaction

Teachers tend to give boys more attention, by ten to thirty percent, and more public talk; boys are praised for correct knowledge and criticized for misbehavior, while girls are praised for compliance and criticized for incorrect answers. These are trends that teachers can choose to change.

Auditing one's own classroom.

EDP 0808 Auditing Gender Patterns

Because differential interaction is a pattern across many small exchanges, teachers find it by auditing their own classrooms with three questions. Who gets called on, and how often? Who receives extended public talk, such as follow-up questions? And what is each student praised or criticized for: knowledge, or compliance and neatness? A peer observer tallies one science class for a week: boys are called on sixty times and girls forty, and girls' praise is mostly for neat work. The teacher calls on students from a randomized list and praises the reasoning in girls' answers. The goal is equal access to attention, not identical treatment.

Seven entries on culture and language: bilingual learners, programs for English learners, and cultural patterns of talk and self.

Culture and ethnicity.

EDP 0809 Culture and Ethnicity

Culture is a people's way of life; ethnicity is a group's shared language, history and sense of a common future. A student's family customs, language at home and expectations of school all carry culture into the classroom, where it shows through language and patterns of interaction.

Bilingualism.

EDP 0810 Bilingualism

Most of the world's children are bilingual. Balanced bilinguals gain metalinguistic awareness, attention to language as an object of thought, and the more fully bilingual the child, the stronger it is. A broader bilingual advantage is contested; a large review found none after correcting for bias.

Two kinds of program for English learners.

EDP 0811 Immersion and Additive Programs

English language learners are often unbalanced bilinguals. Immersion programs, sometimes called sink or swim, teach only in English; additive bilingual programs develop the first language while adding English, as a newly arrived student learns science in her first language while building English. Evaluations favor additive approaches.

Language loss.

EDP 0812 Language Loss

Language loss, or subtractive bilingualism, happens when a child's first language fades as English grows; it harms English learning too, weakens communication with family and complicates speech-language services, as a child who can no longer talk easily with a grandparent loses more than vocabulary.

Cultural differences in how language is used.

EDP 0813 Cultural Differences in Language Use

Cultures differ in how language is used, and each difference can be misread between teacher and student. Some cultures value quiet listening over speaking up. Looking an adult in the eye is respectful in some cultures and defiant in others. Comfortable social distance varies, and so does wait time. And some children are unused to known-answer questions, asked by adults who already know the answer. A new student asked what color a block is stays silent, not from a language delay but because at home adults ask only when they need information; asked to tell about what she built, she talks at length. Ask whether a behavior is a language-use difference before judging it.

Two views of the self.

EDP 0814 Independent and Interdependent Self

People from individualist cultures tend to define themselves with an independent self, a unique individual whose stable traits drive behavior; people from collectivist cultures tend toward an interdependent self, defined by relationships and roles. One student says I'm smart; another says I'm my mother's daughter. These are tendencies, not predictions.

Cooperation, participation and time.

EDP 0815 Cooperation, Participation and Time

Students with interdependent selves may prefer cooperation over competition, avoid the public initiate-respond-evaluate exchange, in which a teacher asks, a student answers and the teacher judges, and treat time as interpersonal rather than by the clock. A student silent alone may answer eagerly after conferring with a group.

Eight entries on explaining achievement gaps: oppositional identity, multicultural education, socioeconomic status, and the word gap.

Ogbu's theory of oppositional identity.

EDP 0816 Ogbu's Oppositional Identity

John Ogbu's theory distinguishes voluntary minorities, who immigrated by choice, from involuntary minorities, whose ancestors did not choose to join the society, and argues that some involuntary-minority students form an oppositional cultural identity that rejects school success. This is one theory, attributed to Ogbu, and its evidence is contested.

The challenges to Ogbu's theory.

EDP 0817 Ogbu's Theory, Contested

Ogbu's claim that involuntary-minority students reject school success has been challenged by later researchers, including Tyson, Darity and Castellino, and remains contested rather than established. Assuming one student rejects achievement because of group membership misapplies a contested theory; it should never predict one student's behavior.

Banks's five dimensions.

EDP 0818 Banks's Five Dimensions

James Banks describes multicultural education in five dimensions. Content integration uses examples from many cultures. Knowledge construction shows how knowledge is shaped by the perspectives of those who create it. Equity pedagogy adapts teaching so students from diverse groups achieve. Prejudice reduction builds positive attitudes toward other groups. An empowering school culture reorganizes grouping, activities and climate so every group can succeed. A history teacher who adds Mexican American accounts to a unit on the Southwest practices content integration; comparing two textbooks' accounts of a war and asking who wrote each is knowledge construction. Adding diverse examples touches only the first dimension.

Socioeconomic status and achievement.

EDP 0819 SES and Achievement

Socioeconomic status, a family's income, education and occupation, has a medium to strong relation with school achievement, according to Selcuk Sirin's meta-analysis of more than one hundred thousand students, so schools serving mostly low-income families tend to post lower averages. The relation's strength depends on how SES is measured, school level and location.

A board game that raised number knowledge.

EDP 0820 A Board Game and Number Knowledge

Before kindergarten, low-income children's number knowledge lags behind that of more affluent children, but in Ramani and Siegler's study about an hour of a numerical board game over two weeks produced gains lasting months, as counting squares builds a sense of how large numbers are. A gap linked to experience can shrink with experience.

The contested word gap.

EDP 0821 The Word Gap, Contested

Hart and Risley claimed a large income-based gap in the words children hear. A later study found lower-SES children heard fewer adult words but with high variability within groups, and another does not support the claim: two low-income homes may differ more than the group averages do. The famous figure is not established.

Why group differences predict little about individuals.

EDP 0822 Tendencies, Not Predictions

Every group difference in this unit, by gender, culture or class, describes an average tendency; within each group individual variation is wide, so group membership predicts little about any one student. Knowing a student is a girl, bilingual or low-income tells a teacher little about what that student can do.

The payoff: explaining group differences.

EDP 0823 Explaining Group Differences

Here the unit's idea is decided. Group differences invite explanation, and the evidence supports some far more than others. Gender differences in cognitive abilities are mostly small and shrinking, and a presumed difference in spatial skill disappeared with practice. Teachers' interactions differ by gender in ways they can change. Cultural differences in language use and in independent or interdependent selves are real tendencies, easily misread as deficits. Ogbu's theory is one explanation, and it is contested. Socioeconomic status has a medium to strong relation with achievement, yet some of the gap reflects experience that can be supplied, as the board game showed, and the word-gap claim is contested. A school whose low-income students and English learners score lower checks its own interaction, its questioning and students' early experience with numbers, adds number games and an additive bilingual program, and never treats a student's group as a limit. A group average is a fact about a group, not a destiny.

Look at what you can now do. You can distinguish sex, the biological category, from gender, its social meanings, and from gender identity, a person's own sense of their gender. You can state what gender similarities research shows: small, shrinking differences, far smaller than the variation within each gender. You can tell immersion, English only, from additive programs that keep the first language, which evaluations favor. You can recognize a cultural difference in language use before reading it as a deficit. And you can explain group differences in achievement without predicting any one student's future. Unit Ten turns to instruction.