6 ms·

Single-Sex vs. Coed: The Evidence

43 points by dsego 13y ago

kken 13y ago
An article comparing single-sex vs. coed on a domain called singlesexschools.org? Without even looking into the background of this: Can we really expect the article not to be biased?
- spindritf 13y ago
  All humans and all of their work is biased in some way. You can never expect anything to be unbiased. Without even looking into the background of this The fact that someone made up their mind on an issue doesn't by itself mean they're wrong though.
  - ronaldx 13y ago
    Unreliable witnesses can be right, indeed, but being correct doesn't make evidence a reliable source - you can be right for the wrong reasons. Having a stated belief upfront puts your work in obvious danger of confirmation bias[0]. It can and should be assumed that you will promote results which support your belief and ignore results that don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
    - thaumasiotes 13y ago
      Consider the following scenario: 1. I wonder about the effectiveness of single-sex vs. coed schooling. 2. I do a bunch of research. 3. I conclude that single-sex education is significantly more effective, and that students are being harmed by the dominant paradigm of coed schooling. 4. I establish a website to promote my views, and I call it "singlesexschools.org". 5. I display, on my website promoting single-sex schools, the arguments and papers that convinced me single-sex schools were a good idea. Pretty much anyone who possesses knowledge will be able to give you a "stated belief up front" if you ask them about it. That doesn't mean they started with the belief. Knowledge causes beliefs. In my five-step scenario, what should I have named my website?
      - ronaldx 13y ago
        Choosing the singlesexschools.org domain would be poor judgement on your part; as would publishing a biased report without reference to how you ensured its veracity. If your original research was complete and unbiased, you ought to be proud to show that in your work and in your choice of headline domain. The idealist but misguided situation you describe is not the case here, anyway. This reaseach was published by a group formerly known as the NASSPE - the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.
        thaumasiotes 13y ago
        > Choosing the singlesexschools.org domain would be poor judgement on your part No, it wouldn't. Someone more interested in dismissing my ideas than in learning what they were could just as easily say "Effective Schooling is a known advocate of single-sex education, and can therefore not be trusted to report on the issue" (indeed, people say this all the time). The fact that someone is willing to tell you what his ideas are doesn't automatically make them bad ones. And everyone choosing to talk about an issue is going to have an opinion on it.
    - spindritf 13y ago
      First, OP's author went through the trouble of citing a bunch of third-party sources. Second, confirmation bias or your beliefs don't go away just because you didn't state them. Not only that, but it's entirely proper, even desired, to state your hypothesis before testing it. Scientists are fighting for it right now, some are proposing a registry of hypotheses to be tested to fight another problem -- publication bias.
      - ronaldx 13y ago
        It's easy to "go through the trouble" of picking the matching third-party sources and rejecting non-matching third-party sources. If you are an association trying to present one viewpoint (as this is), that's pretty much your first job. The article here touts the word "random", which is essential to the science of the claim - but despite being claimed repeatedly, it remains totally unexamined. There is bias and there is bias - this article makes no attempt to clear any source of bias, and as such is about as biased as you can get.
- angerman 13y ago
  I think this is a dangerous fallacy many of us run into: judging content by it's domain name. Would the same content on a completely different domain change the prejudice towards the contents of the text? Similarly would a url shortener hide the potential bias? By seeing the domain name in this case one could assume a bias towards single sex schools. At least the author of that presence would be frank about it. Similarly couldn't it be that the author chose singlesexschool.org for it's catchiness and still favor coed? While this particular article presents facts in favor of single sex schools, I would think that our duty is to educate our kids and peers to critically question anything they read and at least do a little research (scanning the site to get a basic understanding of the agenda the author may be pushing; to follow the supposedly supporting links, ...).
  - leoedin 13y ago
    I'm not sure if it's an entirely dangerous fallacy. The internet is packed with conspiracy theories and crackpot ideas, and one of the filters that I'd imagine most people develop over time is to try and understand the source of what they're reading. Mainstream news outlets, or fairly well renowned websites, have a well understood bias (I would expect to see arguments for social welfare on the guardian, less so on the telegraph) and the advantages of widespread scrutiny (which acts as a limiter for entirely non-factual stuff). This site has neither. In fact, the only metric that I have to determine whether to believe anything I read in the article is the source. Given that it's clearly a single topic advocacy site, I think not judging it by its domain name would be a mistake.
- interpol_p 13y ago
  I initially felt the same, but the paper linked makes the relevant claims in its abstract (although I'm not paying up to get the full text). http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0157-1 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0157-1 Also, posted by another commenter in this thread: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/graduates-of-all-girls-schools-85038.aspx http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/graduates-of-all-girls-... It's enough for me not to dismiss the idea.
- reinhardt 13y ago
  It is biased in the sense of choosing to publicize and comment on a research study that agrees with its premise. That doesn't make the research study biased.
derefr 13y ago
Schools are structured environments for the socialization of youth, as much as they are learning environments. Attending a single-sex school might lead to knowing a little bit more about Plato or the Crimean War (let's just concede the point for the sake of argument), but they're kind of ignoring the negative impact it'll have on the emotional intelligence and gender-relations of the kids who will be stuck in a place where they never get a chance to learn from the perspective of someone of the opposite sex. I would like the article to answer this: how well do the kids in the single-sex schools do later on in life, when they end up having to work alongside people of the opposite sex? What are the relative rates of rape, spousal abuse, divorce, unplanned pregnancy, etc. between adults who came from the single-sex vs. the co-ed schools?
- brianbreslin 13y ago
  Would it be possible to study divorce rates or other inter-sex socialization cues of single-sex vs coed kids over time? What other factors could one look at to ascertain how well they were socialized?
  - avar 13y ago
    What lesson would you draw from numbers like divorce rates anyway? Say children from single-sex schools grow up to be in relationships that have lower divorce rates. Does that mean that single-sex schools better prepared them for marriage? Or are they just in unhappy relationships that children that grew up in coed schools would know to end earlier since they've more inter-sex socialization experience?
    - brianbreslin 13y ago
      I honestly don't have a hypothesis. I am curious if less socialized (with the other gender) kids grow up to have more stable relationships as adults.
- booop 13y ago
  > I would like the article to answer this: how well do the kids in the single-sex schools do later on in life ... A little googling led me to this article about a study which looked at the same: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/graduates-of-all-girls-schools-85038.aspx http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/graduates-of-all-girls-... And what I thought would be of interest to us here: In an indication of greater, though still low, interest in the field of engineering, alumnae of single-sex independent schools are three times more likely than those from coeducational independent schools to report that they intend to pursue a career in engineering (4.4 percent vs. 1.4 percent).
antihero 13y ago
I think this study misses a lot of the point. Sure, schooling is about grades, but it's also a huge part of childhood and teenagerhood, bonding and interacting and meeting people and having experiences. So whilst the grades went up, how well socially adapted were people and how good were they at bonding with the other sex? Of course this also misses the colossal point of enforcing the gender binary, which is terrible and leads to a broken, sexist society. Single sex schools are, quite frankly, unethical.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Single sex schools are, quite frankly, unethical. Teens will find ways to socialize with each other whether or not they're in a single-sex environment. It's not unethical to split based on "this group responds better to these methods of teaching." School isn't the epicenter of all social interaction during a person's youth, nor should it be. Taking this view leads to teen suicide, because if teens are convinced that all of life is just like cruel highschool then they'd rather not live at all. (If your highschool years weren't cruel, then I'd imagine it's hard to understand why this is true. Take it from someone who was hunted.)
  - stdbrouw 13y ago
    > School is not, and should not be, the epicenter of all social interaction during a person's youth. How can it not be the epicenter of social interaction for young people when it's where they spend the majority of their waking hours? How many people did you meet in high school vs. how many in extracurricular activities?
    - sillysaurus2 13y ago
      EDIT: The lack of compassion for outliers is an alarming indication of the general attitude toward education at large. Outliers are who advance the world.[1] If you don't help them, then you'll live in a poorer country. If splitting by gender is the most basic thing we can do toward that end with proven results, and "... But socialization! (except for those I don't care about)" is standing in the way, then the situation is pretty grim. I'm going to bow out of this conversation now. [1] http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html
croisillon 13y ago
I'd be interested to see the poster's comment about this article: what did this bring you to think? While the site seems indeed very strongly opinionated from the onset, if the studies are right it's probably interesting to reflect about the topic and especially about the reasons behind studies' results. If I had to put kids in a single-sex school I can imagine that some pupils would get more focused in their work and hence overall get a better mark. My worry though is for their emotional intelligence and ability to grow-up in a mixed world. School is quite a big chunk of kids' life nowadays, where they learn much more than math and history, but also socializing, playing, listening, collaboration, respect. If all those notions are taught only within their own gender, what would/will be their reaction outside this world?
emocakes 13y ago
I was really hoping for the article to have some pretty graphs.
tinco 13y ago
Note for anyone ready to dismiss based on title alone: The big idea is not that girls distract boys and boys distract girls, so they should be apart. The big idea is that boys and girls, especially at high school age learn/are motivated in fundamentally different ways so splitting them and teaching them in different ways could be more effective. So this is not empirical evidence, but my mom who has been teaching high school for over 30 years strongly agrees with this. In her opinion the average boy just can't sit still and needs to be motivated more competitively, whilst girls benefit from more social engagement. Of course that analysis is rather crude. There's subtleties there. Of course boys would benefit from being taught to be more social, and girls would benefit from being taught to be more competitive. But it's clear that there's efficiencies to be had here. For me personally high school felt as a very inefficient time of learning, but I also had much fun and made many friends with both boys and girls. I wonder if the research has shown anything there. Do boys who graduate from boys-only schools work well with girls? What is their opinion on them? And vice versa? Although I think high school could benefit from efficiency improvements, I also think high school is an important preparation for growing into a broad-minded adult. I hope they keep that in mind when the decisions are made.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  The big idea is that boys and girls, especially at high school age learn/are motivated in fundamentally different ways so splitting them and teaching them in different ways could be more effective. That is all very well, but where do the hermaphrodites go?
  - tinco 13y ago
    I don't know, that's a good question. Perhaps to where they feel most safe? Or perhaps in which learning style they most fit in? The question also reveals the imperfection of the solution. What of the boys who identify as male, but think/learn/are motivated more like girls are? And vice versa? If we were thinking purely in terms of effectiveness, we would instead devise a test that would determine which teaching style would best suit you. But then these boys would likely be a small minority in girls classes, would that lead to social problems for them? Would it be preferable to just go to a boys class for them?
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pessimizer 13y ago
What if single-race schools led to somewhat better outcomes, sometimes, according to some metrics, highly contingent on the skill of the instructor and highly variable depending on location? What about schools segregated by political party or religion?
- smtddr 13y ago
  Indeed, which brings us to... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education I thought we, as a society, already concluded that separate cannot be equal. But I have to say, for some reason I don't feel the same negativity towards separation by gender as I do by race. I just think that if we've already decided that divide-by-race is a bad idea then how can divide-by-gender be good? I have a funny feeling that divide-by-political-stance, and race, is already happening due to divide-by-wealth via school fees. I wonder what the dominate race & political-affiliations are at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc. versus http://www.csueastbay.edu/ http://www.csueastbay.edu/
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    That struck down the doctrine of 'separate but equal' as a lie. But it wasn't the separate that was the problem, it was the equal. If you could truly prove that you could have separate and better, Brown v. Board of Education would not apply.
silverbax88 13y ago
This is a dangerous idea. Why? Because it starts with the idea that single-sex schools are better, then proceed to attempt to prove that point with studies that show single-sex classrooms get on average better grades and are more likely to attend college. But attending college and getting better grades is not the goal. In fact, one of the biggest employment and political problems in the United States is due to so many middle class parents conditioning their kids into thinking that going to college will solve their future and guarantee them employment. But, let's toss that aside for the moment. The argument on this site begins with a study of South Korea, which randomly assigns students to coed or same-sex schools (we don't REALLY know how random this is), and shows data which these students are more likely to get higher grades and attend college. But the real question is NOT can they get better grades - the question is whether there are educational systems that can better prepare students to be a success in LIFE, not just get to college. Do students who attend same-sex schools fare better in relationships, do they push society forward in the underlying principals of a better civilization? Do they make the world better, and are they happy? The real result? South Korea is ranked 111th in the world in gender equality. (For comparison, the United States is ranked 22nd). So let's ask something that SingleSexSchools.org will NEVER want to answer - are opportunities for girls in South Korea as good as those offered by men? Is the education of girls in South Korea equal to the education offered to boys? The reality is that South Korea is not just a bad environment for women and girls - it's bad and getting worse. Their rankings in these categories were some of the lowest just a few years ago and have steadily declined each year. I don't really have time for a point-by-point rebuttal, but the basic point is this: removing diversity never makes society stronger. Are there benefits for single-sex activities and education? Of course. Is it 'better' to reduce students interaction with the opposite sex to almost none in day-to-day education? The evidence says otherwise. The issue is always when someone argues for widespread, radical change based on the wrong goals.
- VLM 13y ago
  "Do students who attend same-sex schools fare better in ..." This being HN I suspect most of us are men who attended sausage-fest university courses. The all male electronics lab was in the same (large) building as the all female nursing courses. Technically a coed school, but the last woman dropped out of the electronics program in 2nd or 3rd semester. Every year is of course a little different. Some statistical analysis of different engineering and hard science grads social outcomes would be interesting. Assuming the rate of female engineers varies much by type. Perhaps a better comparison would be other technical disciplines, from memory the math dept was a much better integrated program. "opportunities" As if college application screeners don't care about a students unique history. All you need is a reputation that school xyz only admits girls from all-girl schools not coed and shockingly the quantity of applications from girls from coed schools will collapse. Why waste time applying if you know they'll not admit you?
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ivanhoe 13y ago
Considering the domain on which this was published we can safely presume that the author did his best NOT to mention any possible social/emotional side-effects. How well socialized are the kids from those two groups? How happy are they? How many emotional/sexual relationships did they have and how satisfied with their sexual life have they been? How many of them are suicidal (huge problem in South Korea)? And just for the fun, what's the ratio between hetero and gay people before and after the school? :)
TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
I don't like single-sex schools because I don't think they promote healthy gender relations. I recall reading that boys at single-sex schools had much worse success in relationships. I also don't like them because they're hell for trans kids. Your education record will out you because your school was single-sex, and you can't transition in school or at least daren't try. But the needs of minorities don't matter, right? The thing with girls being more likely to study science actually applies to me. I dropped Physics this year partly because of grades but also I didn't like the male-dominated environment. Had I been to an all-girls' school, maybe that'd be different. But I'm trans, so I'd be stuck at an all-boys' school. That'd be awful.
TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
I don't like single-sex schools because I don't think they promote healthy gender relations. I recall reading that boys at single-sex schools had much worse success in relationships. I also don't like them because they're hell for trans kids. Your education record will out you because your school was single-sex, and you can't transition in school or at least daren't try. But the needs of minorities don't matter, right? The thing with girls being more likely to study science actually applies to me. I dropped Physics this year partly because of grades but also I didn't like the male-dominated environment. Had I been to an all-girls' school, maybe that'd be different. But I'm trans, so I'd be stuck at an all-boys' school. That'd be awful.
lazerwalker 13y ago
I'm shocked that research published by the "National Association for Single Sex Public Education" found that single sex education was most effective. Shocked. Maybe this is a topic worth discussing; if that's the case, though, give me something not so clearly biased.
- sampo 13y ago
  That was just a web page. The research was published in a journal Demography, by 3 researchers from the University of Pennsylvania: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0157-1 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0157-1
malange 13y ago
The studies carry evidence that confirms the hypothesis that single-sex school is more effective than coed schools in reaching some (I assume there are probably more) goals of basic education, which is academic achievement. Many comments noted that social achievement is not measured. Aside from the fact that more studies have to be done to further confirm the hypothesis or negate it, this one seems to focus completely on sex segregation. It does not take a closer look at why coed schools are worse than single-sex schools in academic results. What I think matters more is to find out the where, when, who, why and what of coed and single-sex schools before pointing out a how (to fix academic performance). With that, we will, for instance, be able to eventually adapt the coed model to provide the same or better academic results than single-sex. I prefer neither model. I was educated for 6 years in a single-sex environment and 8 years in a coed. I can attest that I had a better academic performance in single-sex than coed, but that should not (or could not) be the main point of discussion as I explained above. The goal is to understand de 5Ws and 1H of the education system and this article fails to do so.
ollysb 13y ago
So we're reducing children's lives to the pursuit of some bullshit test scores?! Maybe the absence of the opposite sex in their lives heightens their malleability? i.e. there's an implicit threat here, If you don't do well on tests then when you enter the real world no girl will want you(or vica versa).
- VLM 13y ago
  Certainly, the modern education system is primarily focused on authoritarianism and conformity rather than skills training and education. It would be very interesting to add that as a dimension to the study, are SS grads more or less likely than coed grads to vote for a 3rd party or become an active member of a major party or support the militarization of police etc. Its possible but unlikely there is a real difference in ability to learn based solely on genital shape. Probably more likely the SS grads are somehow less individualistic, more socialized, better indoctrinated, and more conformity oriented, tangentially including better academic results as one of many mere side effects. In that case rather than opening a giant can of worms WRT segregation, it would be much simpler to increase nationalist movements. Mandate saying the pledge of allegiance, uniforms, (one single) youth psuedo-political organization, military marching D+C in gym class, institute the 5 minutes hate and two way telescreens, encourage the rewriting of history in writing class, bland conservative blather in lit classes instead of real lit, etc. Not saying the cultural effects would be an improvement, but if all you want is great test scores this might be a less controversial method.
derleth 13y ago
From TazeTSchnitzel, who has been hellbanned: BEGIN I don't like single-sex schools because I don't think they promote healthy gender relations. I recall reading that boys at single-sex schools had much worse success in relationships. I also don't like them because they're hell for trans kids. Your education record will out you because your school was single-sex, and you can't transition in school or at least daren't try. But the needs of minorities don't matter, right? The thing with girls being more likely to study science actually applies to me. I dropped Physics this year partly because of grades but also I didn't like the male-dominated environment. Had I been to an all-girls' school, maybe that'd be different. But I'm trans, so I'd be stuck at an all-boys' school. That'd be awful. END
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tgb 13y ago
Seriously HN - is this site incapable of ever updating its beliefs in even the slightest way based off of genuine evidence? Ignore the fact that this article is written on an obviously politcally motivated source - in fact ignore the whole article. You don't need it, since they're providing you with the actual studies backing up their beliefs. If you don't like this view, then your critiques had better be of the articles they cite, not of this sumamry article! I can agree that seeing a grade improvement is not, by itself, enough to get me say we should separate classes by gender here in the US. But if this article didn't make you at least consider that option a bit more than it did before, then you're doing this incorrectly. These are large differences - 0.8 standard deviations increase in scores! They are verified over a large body of students and it was actually randomly assigned. This is great! There are so many questions that I'd pay to have an actual study of that caliber done to answer. Again, it's not the whole answer. Not everywhere is Seoul and not all students are the same. (In fact, the given article agrees: "Our only concern with the article is with its underlying premise: namely, that either single-gender or coed must be "best." We believe that premise is fundamentally mistaken. The single-gender format is better for some students, and coed is better for others,"). I'm not saying you should be completely convinced by every article that gets posted here that happens to have a scholarly citation. But if this site continues to automatically and consistently dismiss these things just as a matter of course, then how can we ever hope to learn new things and change our views? There's something here. "Grades aren't everything" doesn't mean that "grades aren't important," which doesn't mean "this study is pointless."
intenex 13y ago
Aside from all the other points, I'm curious to see further longitudinal data on the comparative success of these students once they enter college compared to their peers at college. Further, it'd be interesting to see their eventual success against those who went to the coed schools. It'd also be interesting to run a self-assessment of the single-sex students vs the coed students asking them a broad array of well-being questions, e.g. their happiness, level of fulfillment and satisfaction in life, etc. Interesting starting point, but like pointed out flawed to say single-sex schools are better overall purely based on this one metric. The only thing that can be said here is that single-sex schools drive greater admission to colleges than coed schools in Seoul, given the way these schools are administered there. Things that definitely need to be addressed - what are the differences in the coed vs single-sex schools these people go to? Are the single-sex schools taught differently at all? And if so, how? Why does Seoul have a single-sex vs coed separation in the first place?
memracom 13y ago
The bit about Fairhurst High School is one of those garbled things that you get by playing Chinese whispers. In fact John Fairhurst was the well-regarded head teacher at Shenfield High School in Shenfield, Essex, a small town in the commuter belt east of London. You can read more in this article that I found on Google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lNLliSZ42EEJ:web.alfredstate.edu/library/English%2520Comp%2520Articles%2520Spring%25202008/Sax%2520article.doc+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lNLliSZ... He has since retired but not before serving as president at the Association of School & College Leaders. And he has regularly been featured in the British press commenting on the need for more innovative ways to educate kids.

43 points by dsego 13y ago

kken 13y ago

An article comparing single-sex vs. coed on a domain called singlesexschools.org? Without even looking into the background of this: Can we really expect the article not to be biased?

spindritf 13y ago
All humans and all of their work is biased in some way. You can never expect anything to be unbiased. Without even looking into the background of this The fact that someone made up their mind on an issue doesn't by itself mean they're wrong though.
- ronaldx 13y ago
  Unreliable witnesses can be right, indeed, but being correct doesn't make evidence a reliable source - you can be right for the wrong reasons. Having a stated belief upfront puts your work in obvious danger of confirmation bias[0]. It can and should be assumed that you will promote results which support your belief and ignore results that don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    Consider the following scenario: 1. I wonder about the effectiveness of single-sex vs. coed schooling. 2. I do a bunch of research. 3. I conclude that single-sex education is significantly more effective, and that students are being harmed by the dominant paradigm of coed schooling. 4. I establish a website to promote my views, and I call it "singlesexschools.org". 5. I display, on my website promoting single-sex schools, the arguments and papers that convinced me single-sex schools were a good idea. Pretty much anyone who possesses knowledge will be able to give you a "stated belief up front" if you ask them about it. That doesn't mean they started with the belief. Knowledge causes beliefs. In my five-step scenario, what should I have named my website?
    - ronaldx 13y ago
      Choosing the singlesexschools.org domain would be poor judgement on your part; as would publishing a biased report without reference to how you ensured its veracity. If your original research was complete and unbiased, you ought to be proud to show that in your work and in your choice of headline domain. The idealist but misguided situation you describe is not the case here, anyway. This reaseach was published by a group formerly known as the NASSPE - the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.
      - thaumasiotes 13y ago
        > Choosing the singlesexschools.org domain would be poor judgement on your part No, it wouldn't. Someone more interested in dismissing my ideas than in learning what they were could just as easily say "Effective Schooling is a known advocate of single-sex education, and can therefore not be trusted to report on the issue" (indeed, people say this all the time). The fact that someone is willing to tell you what his ideas are doesn't automatically make them bad ones. And everyone choosing to talk about an issue is going to have an opinion on it.
  - spindritf 13y ago
    First, OP's author went through the trouble of citing a bunch of third-party sources. Second, confirmation bias or your beliefs don't go away just because you didn't state them. Not only that, but it's entirely proper, even desired, to state your hypothesis before testing it. Scientists are fighting for it right now, some are proposing a registry of hypotheses to be tested to fight another problem -- publication bias.
    - ronaldx 13y ago
      It's easy to "go through the trouble" of picking the matching third-party sources and rejecting non-matching third-party sources. If you are an association trying to present one viewpoint (as this is), that's pretty much your first job. The article here touts the word "random", which is essential to the science of the claim - but despite being claimed repeatedly, it remains totally unexamined. There is bias and there is bias - this article makes no attempt to clear any source of bias, and as such is about as biased as you can get.
angerman 13y ago
I think this is a dangerous fallacy many of us run into: judging content by it's domain name. Would the same content on a completely different domain change the prejudice towards the contents of the text? Similarly would a url shortener hide the potential bias? By seeing the domain name in this case one could assume a bias towards single sex schools. At least the author of that presence would be frank about it. Similarly couldn't it be that the author chose singlesexschool.org for it's catchiness and still favor coed? While this particular article presents facts in favor of single sex schools, I would think that our duty is to educate our kids and peers to critically question anything they read and at least do a little research (scanning the site to get a basic understanding of the agenda the author may be pushing; to follow the supposedly supporting links, ...).
- leoedin 13y ago
  I'm not sure if it's an entirely dangerous fallacy. The internet is packed with conspiracy theories and crackpot ideas, and one of the filters that I'd imagine most people develop over time is to try and understand the source of what they're reading. Mainstream news outlets, or fairly well renowned websites, have a well understood bias (I would expect to see arguments for social welfare on the guardian, less so on the telegraph) and the advantages of widespread scrutiny (which acts as a limiter for entirely non-factual stuff). This site has neither. In fact, the only metric that I have to determine whether to believe anything I read in the article is the source. Given that it's clearly a single topic advocacy site, I think not judging it by its domain name would be a mistake.
interpol_p 13y ago
I initially felt the same, but the paper linked makes the relevant claims in its abstract (although I'm not paying up to get the full text). http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0157-1 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0157-1 Also, posted by another commenter in this thread: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/graduates-of-all-girls-schools-85038.aspx http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/graduates-of-all-girls-... It's enough for me not to dismiss the idea.
reinhardt 13y ago
It is biased in the sense of choosing to publicize and comment on a research study that agrees with its premise. That doesn't make the research study biased.

derefr 13y ago

Schools are structured environments for the socialization of youth, as much as they are learning environments. Attending a single-sex school might lead to knowing a little bit more about Plato or the Crimean War (let's just concede the point for the sake of argument), but they're kind of ignoring the negative impact it'll have on the emotional intelligence and gender-relations of the kids who will be stuck in a place where they never get a chance to learn from the perspective of someone of the opposite sex. I would like the article to answer this: how well do the kids in the single-sex schools do later on in life, when they end up having to work alongside people of the opposite sex? What are the relative rates of rape, spousal abuse, divorce, unplanned pregnancy, etc. between adults who came from the single-sex vs. the co-ed schools?

brianbreslin 13y ago
Would it be possible to study divorce rates or other inter-sex socialization cues of single-sex vs coed kids over time? What other factors could one look at to ascertain how well they were socialized?
- avar 13y ago
  What lesson would you draw from numbers like divorce rates anyway? Say children from single-sex schools grow up to be in relationships that have lower divorce rates. Does that mean that single-sex schools better prepared them for marriage? Or are they just in unhappy relationships that children that grew up in coed schools would know to end earlier since they've more inter-sex socialization experience?
  - brianbreslin 13y ago
    I honestly don't have a hypothesis. I am curious if less socialized (with the other gender) kids grow up to have more stable relationships as adults.
booop 13y ago
> I would like the article to answer this: how well do the kids in the single-sex schools do later on in life ... A little googling led me to this article about a study which looked at the same: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/graduates-of-all-girls-schools-85038.aspx http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/graduates-of-all-girls-... And what I thought would be of interest to us here: In an indication of greater, though still low, interest in the field of engineering, alumnae of single-sex independent schools are three times more likely than those from coeducational independent schools to report that they intend to pursue a career in engineering (4.4 percent vs. 1.4 percent).

antihero 13y ago

I think this study misses a lot of the point. Sure, schooling is about grades, but it's also a huge part of childhood and teenagerhood, bonding and interacting and meeting people and having experiences. So whilst the grades went up, how well socially adapted were people and how good were they at bonding with the other sex? Of course this also misses the colossal point of enforcing the gender binary, which is terrible and leads to a broken, sexist society. Single sex schools are, quite frankly, unethical.

sillysaurus2 13y ago
Single sex schools are, quite frankly, unethical. Teens will find ways to socialize with each other whether or not they're in a single-sex environment. It's not unethical to split based on "this group responds better to these methods of teaching." School isn't the epicenter of all social interaction during a person's youth, nor should it be. Taking this view leads to teen suicide, because if teens are convinced that all of life is just like cruel highschool then they'd rather not live at all. (If your highschool years weren't cruel, then I'd imagine it's hard to understand why this is true. Take it from someone who was hunted.)
- stdbrouw 13y ago
  > School is not, and should not be, the epicenter of all social interaction during a person's youth. How can it not be the epicenter of social interaction for young people when it's where they spend the majority of their waking hours? How many people did you meet in high school vs. how many in extracurricular activities?
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    EDIT: The lack of compassion for outliers is an alarming indication of the general attitude toward education at large. Outliers are who advance the world.[1] If you don't help them, then you'll live in a poorer country. If splitting by gender is the most basic thing we can do toward that end with proven results, and "... But socialization! (except for those I don't care about)" is standing in the way, then the situation is pretty grim. I'm going to bow out of this conversation now. [1] http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html

croisillon 13y ago

I'd be interested to see the poster's comment about this article: what did this bring you to think? While the site seems indeed very strongly opinionated from the onset, if the studies are right it's probably interesting to reflect about the topic and especially about the reasons behind studies' results. If I had to put kids in a single-sex school I can imagine that some pupils would get more focused in their work and hence overall get a better mark. My worry though is for their emotional intelligence and ability to grow-up in a mixed world. School is quite a big chunk of kids' life nowadays, where they learn much more than math and history, but also socializing, playing, listening, collaboration, respect. If all those notions are taught only within their own gender, what would/will be their reaction outside this world?

emocakes 13y ago

I was really hoping for the article to have some pretty graphs.

tinco 13y ago

Note for anyone ready to dismiss based on title alone: The big idea is not that girls distract boys and boys distract girls, so they should be apart. The big idea is that boys and girls, especially at high school age learn/are motivated in fundamentally different ways so splitting them and teaching them in different ways could be more effective. So this is not empirical evidence, but my mom who has been teaching high school for over 30 years strongly agrees with this. In her opinion the average boy just can't sit still and needs to be motivated more competitively, whilst girls benefit from more social engagement. Of course that analysis is rather crude. There's subtleties there. Of course boys would benefit from being taught to be more social, and girls would benefit from being taught to be more competitive. But it's clear that there's efficiencies to be had here. For me personally high school felt as a very inefficient time of learning, but I also had much fun and made many friends with both boys and girls. I wonder if the research has shown anything there. Do boys who graduate from boys-only schools work well with girls? What is their opinion on them? And vice versa? Although I think high school could benefit from efficiency improvements, I also think high school is an important preparation for growing into a broad-minded adult. I hope they keep that in mind when the decisions are made.

moocowduckquack 13y ago
The big idea is that boys and girls, especially at high school age learn/are motivated in fundamentally different ways so splitting them and teaching them in different ways could be more effective. That is all very well, but where do the hermaphrodites go?
- tinco 13y ago
  I don't know, that's a good question. Perhaps to where they feel most safe? Or perhaps in which learning style they most fit in? The question also reveals the imperfection of the solution. What of the boys who identify as male, but think/learn/are motivated more like girls are? And vice versa? If we were thinking purely in terms of effectiveness, we would instead devise a test that would determine which teaching style would best suit you. But then these boys would likely be a small minority in girls classes, would that lead to social problems for them? Would it be preferable to just go to a boys class for them?

deleted 13y ago

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pessimizer 13y ago

What if single-race schools led to somewhat better outcomes, sometimes, according to some metrics, highly contingent on the skill of the instructor and highly variable depending on location? What about schools segregated by political party or religion?

smtddr 13y ago
Indeed, which brings us to... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education I thought we, as a society, already concluded that separate cannot be equal. But I have to say, for some reason I don't feel the same negativity towards separation by gender as I do by race. I just think that if we've already decided that divide-by-race is a bad idea then how can divide-by-gender be good? I have a funny feeling that divide-by-political-stance, and race, is already happening due to divide-by-wealth via school fees. I wonder what the dominate race & political-affiliations are at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc. versus http://www.csueastbay.edu/ http://www.csueastbay.edu/
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  That struck down the doctrine of 'separate but equal' as a lie. But it wasn't the separate that was the problem, it was the equal. If you could truly prove that you could have separate and better, Brown v. Board of Education would not apply.

silverbax88 13y ago

This is a dangerous idea. Why? Because it starts with the idea that single-sex schools are better, then proceed to attempt to prove that point with studies that show single-sex classrooms get on average better grades and are more likely to attend college. But attending college and getting better grades is not the goal. In fact, one of the biggest employment and political problems in the United States is due to so many middle class parents conditioning their kids into thinking that going to college will solve their future and guarantee them employment. But, let's toss that aside for the moment. The argument on this site begins with a study of South Korea, which randomly assigns students to coed or same-sex schools (we don't REALLY know how random this is), and shows data which these students are more likely to get higher grades and attend college. But the real question is NOT can they get better grades - the question is whether there are educational systems that can better prepare students to be a success in LIFE, not just get to college. Do students who attend same-sex schools fare better in relationships, do they push society forward in the underlying principals of a better civilization? Do they make the world better, and are they happy? The real result? South Korea is ranked 111th in the world in gender equality. (For comparison, the United States is ranked 22nd). So let's ask something that SingleSexSchools.org will NEVER want to answer - are opportunities for girls in South Korea as good as those offered by men? Is the education of girls in South Korea equal to the education offered to boys? The reality is that South Korea is not just a bad environment for women and girls - it's bad and getting worse. Their rankings in these categories were some of the lowest just a few years ago and have steadily declined each year. I don't really have time for a point-by-point rebuttal, but the basic point is this: removing diversity never makes society stronger. Are there benefits for single-sex activities and education? Of course. Is it 'better' to reduce students interaction with the opposite sex to almost none in day-to-day education? The evidence says otherwise. The issue is always when someone argues for widespread, radical change based on the wrong goals.

VLM 13y ago
"Do students who attend same-sex schools fare better in ..." This being HN I suspect most of us are men who attended sausage-fest university courses. The all male electronics lab was in the same (large) building as the all female nursing courses. Technically a coed school, but the last woman dropped out of the electronics program in 2nd or 3rd semester. Every year is of course a little different. Some statistical analysis of different engineering and hard science grads social outcomes would be interesting. Assuming the rate of female engineers varies much by type. Perhaps a better comparison would be other technical disciplines, from memory the math dept was a much better integrated program. "opportunities" As if college application screeners don't care about a students unique history. All you need is a reputation that school xyz only admits girls from all-girl schools not coed and shockingly the quantity of applications from girls from coed schools will collapse. Why waste time applying if you know they'll not admit you?

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ivanhoe 13y ago

Considering the domain on which this was published we can safely presume that the author did his best NOT to mention any possible social/emotional side-effects. How well socialized are the kids from those two groups? How happy are they? How many emotional/sexual relationships did they have and how satisfied with their sexual life have they been? How many of them are suicidal (huge problem in South Korea)? And just for the fun, what's the ratio between hetero and gay people before and after the school? :)

TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago

I don't like single-sex schools because I don't think they promote healthy gender relations. I recall reading that boys at single-sex schools had much worse success in relationships. I also don't like them because they're hell for trans kids. Your education record will out you because your school was single-sex, and you can't transition in school or at least daren't try. But the needs of minorities don't matter, right? The thing with girls being more likely to study science actually applies to me. I dropped Physics this year partly because of grades but also I didn't like the male-dominated environment. Had I been to an all-girls' school, maybe that'd be different. But I'm trans, so I'd be stuck at an all-boys' school. That'd be awful.

TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago

lazerwalker 13y ago

I'm shocked that research published by the "National Association for Single Sex Public Education" found that single sex education was most effective. Shocked. Maybe this is a topic worth discussing; if that's the case, though, give me something not so clearly biased.

sampo 13y ago
That was just a web page. The research was published in a journal Demography, by 3 researchers from the University of Pennsylvania: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0157-1 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0157-1

malange 13y ago

The studies carry evidence that confirms the hypothesis that single-sex school is more effective than coed schools in reaching some (I assume there are probably more) goals of basic education, which is academic achievement. Many comments noted that social achievement is not measured. Aside from the fact that more studies have to be done to further confirm the hypothesis or negate it, this one seems to focus completely on sex segregation. It does not take a closer look at why coed schools are worse than single-sex schools in academic results. What I think matters more is to find out the where, when, who, why and what of coed and single-sex schools before pointing out a how (to fix academic performance). With that, we will, for instance, be able to eventually adapt the coed model to provide the same or better academic results than single-sex. I prefer neither model. I was educated for 6 years in a single-sex environment and 8 years in a coed. I can attest that I had a better academic performance in single-sex than coed, but that should not (or could not) be the main point of discussion as I explained above. The goal is to understand de 5Ws and 1H of the education system and this article fails to do so.

ollysb 13y ago

So we're reducing children's lives to the pursuit of some bullshit test scores?! Maybe the absence of the opposite sex in their lives heightens their malleability? i.e. there's an implicit threat here, If you don't do well on tests then when you enter the real world no girl will want you(or vica versa).

VLM 13y ago
Certainly, the modern education system is primarily focused on authoritarianism and conformity rather than skills training and education. It would be very interesting to add that as a dimension to the study, are SS grads more or less likely than coed grads to vote for a 3rd party or become an active member of a major party or support the militarization of police etc. Its possible but unlikely there is a real difference in ability to learn based solely on genital shape. Probably more likely the SS grads are somehow less individualistic, more socialized, better indoctrinated, and more conformity oriented, tangentially including better academic results as one of many mere side effects. In that case rather than opening a giant can of worms WRT segregation, it would be much simpler to increase nationalist movements. Mandate saying the pledge of allegiance, uniforms, (one single) youth psuedo-political organization, military marching D+C in gym class, institute the 5 minutes hate and two way telescreens, encourage the rewriting of history in writing class, bland conservative blather in lit classes instead of real lit, etc. Not saying the cultural effects would be an improvement, but if all you want is great test scores this might be a less controversial method.

derleth 13y ago

From TazeTSchnitzel, who has been hellbanned: BEGIN I don't like single-sex schools because I don't think they promote healthy gender relations. I recall reading that boys at single-sex schools had much worse success in relationships. I also don't like them because they're hell for trans kids. Your education record will out you because your school was single-sex, and you can't transition in school or at least daren't try. But the needs of minorities don't matter, right? The thing with girls being more likely to study science actually applies to me. I dropped Physics this year partly because of grades but also I didn't like the male-dominated environment. Had I been to an all-girls' school, maybe that'd be different. But I'm trans, so I'd be stuck at an all-boys' school. That'd be awful. END

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tgb 13y ago

Seriously HN - is this site incapable of ever updating its beliefs in even the slightest way based off of genuine evidence? Ignore the fact that this article is written on an obviously politcally motivated source - in fact ignore the whole article. You don't need it, since they're providing you with the actual studies backing up their beliefs. If you don't like this view, then your critiques had better be of the articles they cite, not of this sumamry article! I can agree that seeing a grade improvement is not, by itself, enough to get me say we should separate classes by gender here in the US. But if this article didn't make you at least consider that option a bit more than it did before, then you're doing this incorrectly. These are large differences - 0.8 standard deviations increase in scores! They are verified over a large body of students and it was actually randomly assigned. This is great! There are so many questions that I'd pay to have an actual study of that caliber done to answer. Again, it's not the whole answer. Not everywhere is Seoul and not all students are the same. (In fact, the given article agrees: "Our only concern with the article is with its underlying premise: namely, that either single-gender or coed must be "best." We believe that premise is fundamentally mistaken. The single-gender format is better for some students, and coed is better for others,"). I'm not saying you should be completely convinced by every article that gets posted here that happens to have a scholarly citation. But if this site continues to automatically and consistently dismiss these things just as a matter of course, then how can we ever hope to learn new things and change our views? There's something here. "Grades aren't everything" doesn't mean that "grades aren't important," which doesn't mean "this study is pointless."

intenex 13y ago

Aside from all the other points, I'm curious to see further longitudinal data on the comparative success of these students once they enter college compared to their peers at college. Further, it'd be interesting to see their eventual success against those who went to the coed schools. It'd also be interesting to run a self-assessment of the single-sex students vs the coed students asking them a broad array of well-being questions, e.g. their happiness, level of fulfillment and satisfaction in life, etc. Interesting starting point, but like pointed out flawed to say single-sex schools are better overall purely based on this one metric. The only thing that can be said here is that single-sex schools drive greater admission to colleges than coed schools in Seoul, given the way these schools are administered there. Things that definitely need to be addressed - what are the differences in the coed vs single-sex schools these people go to? Are the single-sex schools taught differently at all? And if so, how? Why does Seoul have a single-sex vs coed separation in the first place?

memracom 13y ago

The bit about Fairhurst High School is one of those garbled things that you get by playing Chinese whispers. In fact John Fairhurst was the well-regarded head teacher at Shenfield High School in Shenfield, Essex, a small town in the commuter belt east of London. You can read more in this article that I found on Google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lNLliSZ42EEJ:web.alfredstate.edu/library/English%2520Comp%2520Articles%2520Spring%25202008/Sax%2520article.doc+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lNLliSZ... He has since retired but not before serving as president at the Association of School & College Leaders. And he has regularly been featured in the British press commenting on the need for more innovative ways to educate kids.