Boys don't read

Educators feel it is all dependent on the teaching methods.

Sharon Grover's son loved books early in elementary school but mysteriously lost interest at about third grade, declaring: "My mother is a librarian, but I hate to read.'' He did, however, start reading again for pleasure-in his 20s.

Jerilynn Hoffman couldn't get her young son to read much until she found a book that wasn't her cup of tea but definitely was his: The Day My Butt Went Psycho.

Enticing boys to read - and to keep reading - is the flip side of the sometimes fierce debate about girls and their mathematics and science abilities, and both issues are receiving new attention as educators focus on how boys and girls learn differently.

Controversial comments

The controversy about gender and learning was stoked anew when Harvard University President Larry Summers questioned girls' intrinsic abilities in mathematics and science. United States first lady Laura Bush then spoke about her new effort to help boys, who she said are falling dangerously behind girls in such areas as literacy.

"Part of it is biological and part of it is sociological, but boys are definitely drifting down,'' said Jon Scieszka, author of the The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, and founder of the website www.guysread.com, aimed at helping interest boys in reading. "We've been testing kids in America for the last 25 years and finding out that boys are doing worse than girls,'' he said. "But we don't do enough to change that.''

Wrong move

The new push to have children learn key skills earlier - reading in kindergarten and first grade, for instance - works against boys, some educators say.

"It goes totally against the brain research showing how young boys and girls develop,'' said JoAnn Deak, a school psychologist and co-author of Girls Will Be Girls: Raising Confident and Courageous Daughters.

Most teachers are not schooled in dealing with children's biological differences, experts say, and many teachers beyond the third-grade level do not understand that they can do a lot to build up students' reading skills and confidence.

Being boy-friendly

"If we don't teach reading and writing to boys in a boy-friendly way, they will continue to fall behind,'' said Michael Gurian, author and co-founder of the Spokane, Wash.-based Gurian Institute, which trains educators in gender differences in learning.

The notion of confidence in reading is central to the issue, said Professor Michael W. Smith of Temple University, US. He said that people like to do what they are good at and that when boys stumble early in learning to read, it is often a skill they never warm to.

Another factor, said Hoffman, a reading specialist at Pattie Elementary School in Virginia, is that it is more difficult for many boys to sit still for classes, much less to "cuddle up with a book''.

"They are just more active,'' she said.

What experts say

An exaggerated issue
- Some educators have said that the concern over boys is exaggerated and that boys end up doing just fine, holding top jobs and being paid higher average salaries than women

Scientists have said that boys are born with smaller language centres in their brains - and larger spatial centres - than girls and that boys develop language abilities at a slower rate, though eventually they catch up

A definite concern
- Other educators have said boys face an unprecedented literary crisis that limits their opportunities, citing studies showing that the gap between the sexes - dating back to the 19th century - has increased markedly

- Teachers say girls generally learn to read and understand language sooner than boys, which helps to explain why early remedial reading classes are most often heavily populated with boys.

Global phenomenon
There is no consensus on how much genetics, environment and culture are responsible for the gap. Stephen Gorard, education professor at the University of York in England, reviewed scores for 22 countries and discovered gaps in every one, despite differences in school set-ups and curricula.

What is known is:
- Boys generally take longer to learn to read than girls;
- They read less and are less enthusiastic about it
- They have more trouble understanding narrative texts yet are better at absorbing informational texts

- Findings from a literacy study done in 2002, Reading Don't Fix No Chevys by Michael W. Smith, a Temple University professor, and Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Boise State University English education professor