The achievement gap between males and females in T&T is worrying academic professionals who have decided that it is time to focus on the reasons why males are not performing as well as their female counterparts.
Speaking during the Ministry of Education's first quarterly research colloquium at the School of Education, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, yesterday, Dr Marc Jackman referred to the results of the recent Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exam, in which the results revealed that males continued to trend downwards in both traditional and non-traditional subjects.
During his presentation, titled Examining the Growing Male/ Female Achievement Gap at Secondary School Level: Recognising and Respecting the Students, Jackson said T&T was ranked third in the magnitude of the gender gap. Claiming the female to male ratio in terms of performance now stood at 65 and 35 per cent, respectively, Jackson said between 2005 and 2010, CSEC results in English language revealed a ten to 15 per cent gap in the performance of males and females.
Claiming the failure rate was around the same as the performance gap between both sexes, Jackson said in areas such as woodwork, technical drawing and building technology, which were traditionally male-dominated subjects, girls were outperforming the boys as was evident in the 2014 Caribbean Adv-anced Proficiency Exam (Cape) results. In the areas of sciences and maths, females trumped the males.
Offering several hypotheses regarding the alarming development of male under-achievement, Jackson attributed it to the feminisation of the schooling concept; a lack of male teachers as role models; curriculum gender mismatch. Elaborating on the genetic arguments, which claim boys develop slower than girls, have shorter attention spans, and are not as goal-oriented or focused on academia, Jackson sought to debunk that as he said many of the students who were randomly sampled were able to correctly diagnose their shortcomings and the reasons for the low performance.