Gordon Dryden: For boys the trick is to find what each one is good at

COMMENT

Auckland Grammar School headmaster John Morris presents cogent reasons why the newly-appointed ministerial taskforce should look at good single-sex schools to find reasons why boys are not achieving as well as girls at high school.

Few people would question his school's consistent ability to achieve high scores in external exams and many other fields, including sport. But I suggest the ministerial think tank should also look further afield, not just at the grammar school model, or even at high schools generally.

First, the good news bears repeating. Despite all the criticism, the average New Zealand student at 15 rates among the most literate in the world: number three in reading literacy (after Finland and Canada), number three in science (after Japan and South Korea) and eighth in mathematics (after six European countries and Japan).

I'll also be surprised if, in the next international survey, our best primary schools don't top the world in the use of interactive technology.

Now the good-bad news. New Zealand students score so high on average because our very best are outstandingly good. But our lowest-ranked students in reading, maths and science perform well below most other low achievers in comparable countries.

So irrespective of gender, our high school results are skewed much as they are in the United States. Our average is much higher, but both the US and New Zealand have a "First World" achievement rating and a "Third World" one, too.

Now the difference between sexes, and there are some. Sex hormones affect boys and girls differently. And these tend to "wire" male and female brains in different ways. The corpus callosum - the vast "telegraph system" that links the left and right sides of the brain together - is generally thicker in girls than boys.

These differences generally mean that boys perform better than girls at certain spatial tasks - such as space-based maths problems and navigating through a route. Boys also generally develop before girls in "target-directed motor skills", such as throwing a ball.

And girls, on average, tend to read before boys, speak earlier and learn languages more quickly.

But even given these possible gender differences, good research throws up more important lessons.

As the Gallup Organisation concluded after researching a million people in companies around the world: "Everyone has a talent to be exceptional at something. The trick is to find that something."

Everyone has a learning style, a thinking style and a working style that is as individual as his or her fingerprints.

Harvard professor of education Howard Gardner has argued for 20 years that there are many forms of intelligence. Most formal, fixed examinations, he argues, test for only two of those, logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligence, and they discriminate against other attributes or strengths.

This means the "one best way suits all" teaching method is not the best way for everyone to learn.

George Bernard Shaw was generally at the bottom of the class at school, yet went on to become one of the world's great playwrights. Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein were completely bored at school, probably because their learning styles did not match their schools' teaching style.

It is significant that boys with strong (and natural) physical drive - kinesthetic intelligence, Gardner would call it - are often bored, and underachieve in many traditional classrooms.

Significantly, when high-achieving golf, tennis and athletic students are selected to take up American college sports scholarships, they do extremely well.

Perhaps there are some lesson here for all talents.

Fortunately, New Zealand has some brilliant primary school research and results to show what else can be done.

Dr John Medcalf's doctoral research in Hawkes Bay, for instance, found that boys, not surprisingly, prefer to read action stories. But such stories are underrepresented in most reading lists. Yet when these were made available - the same stories were recorded on audio cassettes and boys could read them and hear them at the same time - reading scores soared. On average they improved three years in reading ability over 10 weeks.

Under-achieving girls caught up at a similar rate, but generally chose much different books than their testosterone-richer boy classmates.

In the past few months, I have taken Chinese professors of education, British principals, a Hungarian educational psychologist and two Norwegian principals to typical New Zealand "lead primary schools" in interactive technology. Without exception the visitors have been amazed. What struck them most was the world-leading level of "21st-century literacy".

In most cases the students regularly work together in multimedia teams, each combining their talents, abilities and skills to produce fully professional videotape and computer-animated versions of award-winning New Zealand literature.

One of the brightest schools of all, incidentally, has a 30 per cent Maori roll. So perhaps we do know how to bridge the gaps after all.

* Gordon Dryden, an Auckland author on education, is responding to John Morris' view that the methods used in successful boys' schools are the key to boys achieving as well as girls.