Product Description

Analyses the strategies teachers can use to improve the educational achievements of both boys and girls. Also challenges gender construction in the classroom and thereby addresses the 'gender-gap' in achievement.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #443450 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From the Back Cover
Girls are now out-performing boys at GCSE level, giving rise to a debate in the media on boys' underachievement. However, often such work has been a 'knee-jerk' response, led by media, not based on solid research. Boys, Girls and Achievement: Addressing the classroom issues, fills that gap and:
provides a critical overview of the current debate on boys' underachievement;
focuses on interviews with young people and classroom observations to examine how boys and girls see themselves as learners;
shows the impact of gender constructions on pupils' learning and behaviour;
analyses the strategies teachers can use to improve the educational achievements of both boys and girls.
Becky Francis provides teachers with a thorough analysis of the various ways in which secondary school pupils construct their gender identities in the classroom. The book also discusses methods by which teachers might challenge these gender constructions in the classroom, and thereby address the 'gender gap' in achievement.

About the Author
Becky Francis is Senior Research Fellow at the School of Post-Compulsory Education, University of Greenwich. Her research interests include gender identity construction in education, gender and achievement, feminist theory and policy development in nurse education.

Customer Reviews

Lads, Lasses and Citizenship?
Becky Francis writes in a lucid and entertaining style and this slim volume allows, through this facilitating prose, us a view of youth in transition at three London schools in the late 1990's. Classical ethnography usually assists us in examining the fine strokes of every day life; this ethnography is more akin to broad sweeps of the brush- based, as it is, around semi-structured interviews not in excess of 15 questions. The most entertaining, and revealing, chapter appeared previously in the British Journal of the Sociology of Education and is based around a question regarding comments made by Stephen Byers (on 'lad culture' and nothing to do with special advisors). The sample(s) are lucid and laconic and do offer us valuable insights into the issues of gendered difference in contemporary schools. However, it is all over too quickly (a bit like Christine Griffin's [1985] Typical Girls?) and ends with a discussion of how, through the conduit of citizenship education, the gendered barriers of typification and stereotyping can be overcome. Beware, for there are some absurd suggestions within an otherwise mature and interesting framework. However, the subject area is thin- and it appears all too apparent here.<

Decent Enough Ethnography
Becky Francis writes in a lucid and entertaining style and this slim volume allows, through this facilitating prose, us a view of youth in transition at three London schools in the late 1990's. Classical ethnography usually assists us in examining the fine strokes of every day life; this ethnography is more akin to broad sweeps of the brush- based, as it is, around semi-structured interviews not in excess of 15 questions. The most entertaining, and revealing chapter, appeared previously in the British Journal of the Sociology of Education and is based around a question regarding comments made by Stephen Byers (on 'lad culture' and nothing to do with special advisors). The sample(s) are lucid and laconic and do offer us valuable insights into the issues of gendered difference in contemporary schools. However, it is all over too quickly (a bit like Christine Griffin's [1985] Typical Girls?) and ends with a discussion of how, through the conduit of citizenship education, the gendered barriers of typification and stereotyping can be overcome. Beware, for there are some absurd suggestions within an otherwise mature and interesting framework. However, the subject area is thin- and it appears all to apparent here.

Decent Enough Ethnography
Becky Francis writes in a lucid and entertaining style and this slim volume allows, through this facilitating prose, us a view of youth in transition at three London schools in the late 1990's. Classical ethnography usually assists us in examining the fine strokes of every day life; this ethnography is more akin to broad sweeps of the brush- based, as it is, around semi-structured interviews not in excess of 15 questions. The most entertaining, and revealing chapter, appeared previously in the British Journal of the Sociology of Education and is based around a question regarding comments made by Stephen Byers (on 'lad culture' and nothing to do with special advisors). The sample(s) are lucid and laconic and do offer us valuable insights into the issues of gendered difference in contemporary schools. However, it is all over too quickly (a bit like Christine Griffin's [1985] Typical Girls?) and ends with a discussion of how, through the conduit of citizenship education, the gendered barriers of typification and stereotyping can be overcome. Beware, for there are some absurd suggestions within an otherwise mature and interesting framework. However, the subject area is thin- and it appears all to apparent here.