The Benefits of Attending a Girls' School:
What the Research Shows

 

Gender and the Brain

Using powerful new imaging techniques, scientists today are seeing the human brain in a depth and detail never before possible. From the familiar CAT and MRI scans, to Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET), these 'neuroimaging' tools allow researchers to observe not only how our brains are constructed but also - in real time - how we think, how we respond, how we process  the information our senses take in.

 

Begin with the very structures that make up the human brain:

 

A 2005 joint study by the University of California-Irvine (UCI) and the University of New Mexico (UNM) showed that men's brains have more gray matter, while women's brains  have more white matter. Gray matter represents areas  where information is processed, while white matter represents the connections between these areas. Think of one large computer, versus a series of smaller computers networked together to work as one. (NeuroImage, 2005)

 

"These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," said study co-author Dr. Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the UCI Department of Pediatrics, in a UCI statement on the research.

 

Dr. Rex Jung, UNM neuropsychologist and study co-author, said the research sheds light on why men tend to excel at tasks requiring localized processing, like mathematics, while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from throughout the brain: 'whole-brain' tasks such as language skills.

 

Real-time neuroimaging can reveal these differences in action in the brains of living subjects. Dr. Joseph T. Lurito of the Indiana School of Medicine showed that men use the left side of the brain when listening to someone speaking, while women use both sides to process the same information in a different way. (Indiana U. School of Medicine, Nov 2000)

 

Dr. JoAnn Deak, psychologist and author of Girls Will Be Girls: Raising Confident and Courageous Daughters, puts it this way: "Girls and boys are as different from the neck up as the neck down."  She says our brains, because they are influenced in their development by  hormones, are differentiated along gender lines when it comes to our learning styles.

 

Dr. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College, London, notes that the differences, while apparent from the earliest days of childhood, become especially stark during adolescence.

 

In her book The Learning Brain: Lessons for Education, Dr. Blakemore notes that the prefrontal cortex - the region of the brain responsible for decision-making and social interaction - undergoes major changes at the beginning of the teen years.

 

"Since puberty generally occurs later in boys than in girls, a pattern that is paralleled by frontal lobe development, a gender difference in the development of frontal activity might be expected," she writes in Brain Development During Puberty: State of the Science. (Developmental Science, April 2006)

 

However, none of this is to suggest that girls and boys have innate, gender-based differences in their potential to achieve. The difference seems to be in how they access that potential, how they put their skills and talents to work.

 

All children are capable of learning in all subject areas. It's how they're taught that matters.

 

Dr. Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard University examines math and science skills: "Behavioral and neuroimaging studies of human cognition and cognitive development suggest that our species' talent for mathematical and scientific thinking has a considerable genetic basis. These core systems are equally available to males and females. They provide the biological foundation for a set of cognitive capacities that men and women share." (American Psychologist, 2005)

 

So, is brain structure destiny? Not at all, according to Dr. Kurt Fischer, Director of the Mind, Brain & Education Program at Harvard University School of Education. The reality is far more complex than that.

 

"Modern biology shows that an individual's learning environment influences the growth of new patterns of activity in the brain-it even shapes how genes are expressed in brain activity," Dr. Fischer states. "We educators must make sure that research is conducted responsibly and that we are training people to truly understand the connection between brain science and the world of education."

 

Girls' schools are committed to integrating the latest brain research into the classroom: by engaging  girls in what Dr. Deak calls against-the-grain activities they may not be hardwired to choose on their own; matching curriculum to brain development at each stage of a girl's life; and offering collaborative learning  settings in all subjects, to name a few examples. In short, we will continue to look to the experts and draw on brain science to "learn more about how girls learn."

 

What the Research Shows » 

 

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