Friday, September 23, 2011

Single sex schools no better than co-ed

From io9
Science has just published an article stating that claims of the benefit of single sex schooling lack any empirical evidence. The authors go so far as to call these claims pseudoscience.
The researchers argue that there's no evidence of academic advantage to single sex schools, and that such claims are "deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence."
This research looked at single- and mixed-sex school in the USA, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. While students at single sex schools do tend to perform better, this is just as easily explained by other reasons — most notably, these schools tend to be more academically rigorous, and the students who attend them are strong learners already. The researchers also note that many single-sex schools will swiftly transfer out poorly-performing students, thus artificially boosting graduation and college acceptance rates.
See the full article for details.

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