I'm sure I've read somewhere of a school that is trying teaching girls/boys separately as they believe the genders learn differently so both sexes benefit.
Cordelia Fine....
"Those who promote single-sex schools may certainly have good reasons for their cause that have nothing to do with the brain. But promoting that cause by projecting gender stereotypes onto brain data is worse than useless....."
".....Vicky Tuck, while president of the Girls' School Association, UK, recently argued that there are "neurological differences" between the sexes that are "pronounced in adolescence." The practical implication? "You have to teach girls differently to how you teach boys." Is she right? Remember how easily spurious findings of sex differences can lead to premature speculation. Remember what Celia Moore and Geert De Vries have pointed out-sex differences in the brain can be compensation, or a different path to the same destination. Bear in mind that neuroscientists are still quarreling over the appropriate statistical analysis of highly complex data. Recall that many sex differences in the brain may have more to do with brain size than sex per se. Remember that psychology and neuroscience — and the way their findings are reported — are geared toward finding difference, not similarity. Male and female brains are of course far more similar than they are different. Not only is there generally great overlap in "male" and "female" patterns, but also, the male brain is like nothing in the world so much as a female brain. Neuroscientists can't even tell them apart at the individual level. So why focus on difference? If we focused on similarity, we'd conclude that boys and girls should be taught the same way.
You're not convinced? You feel sure these brain differences must be educationally important? Okay, fine. Separate your boys and girls. Or, if you want to be really thorough, because there is overlap with these sex differences, strictly speaking one should provide separate streaming for, say, Large Amygdalas and Small Amygdalas, or Overactivated versus Underactivated Left Frontal Lobes. And now tell me how you tailor your teaching to the size of the amygdala, or to patterns of brain activity to a photo of a fearful face. There is no reliable way to translate these brain differences into educational strategies. It is, as philosopher John Bruer has poetically put it, "a bridge too far": "Currently, we do not know enough about brain development and neural function to link that understanding directly, in any meaningful, defensible way to instruction and educational practice. We may never know enough to be able to do that." And so, instead, we quickly find ourselves falling back on god-awful gender stereotypes."
