Single-Sex Education

Education is always the vital issue in our society. Nowadays, there are two education approaches in Hong Kong: single-sex education and co-education. The former one means the male and female students attend classes separately, which may be in different classrooms, buildings or schools. The latter one means all students study in the same class regardless of their gender.

Hong Kong does have single-sex schools, but the amount of them are getting less now. In these 14 years, the number of this kind of school has decreased 20%. The number was down from 90 to 72 from 1998 to 2012. Some single-sex school has changed to co-ed schools and at the same time, there isn’t any single-sex school has been launched. But, is co-education really better for students?

Single-sex education is advocated under the circumstance of tradition as well as religion. Not only does it bring the sense of mental well being to religious people, but also the additional benefits to students comparing to co-education approach. Through discussing the academic, gender concept and leadership aspect, we can conclude that single-sex education is actually more beneficial to students.

To begin with, there is a fact that boys always do better on the mathematics and science side while girls do better on humanity side because of the biological structure of our brain. However, single-sex education can literally help to improve this situation. A number of further studies conducted in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s indicated that girls tended to have higher academic achievement levels in single-sex classes and/or schools (Ormerod 1975; Spender and Sarah 1980; Deem 1984). Attributing to the flexible teaching process, students who are under single-sex education usually have a better academic result comprehensively.

The same gender generally has a similar biological structure. In single-sex schools, students in the same genders are in the same class. Since they have a similar biological structure, they usually have a similar understanding. Teachers therefore can provide suitable materials to them according to their progress. Reviewing co-educational schools, it is hard for teachers to take care the academic need of boys and girls in the same class, as there is an understanding gap between. Comparing these two situations, we can point out that single-sex education is more favorable to students.

A research( H Park, JR Behrman, J Choi 2012) has been done in Seoul high school, which is about the difference of the student performance. As Seoul students are assigned to schools randomly, the scenario of students with particular background can go into particular schools will never happen. Referring to this research, girls' schools students have an  higher mean score in college entrance exam (CSAT) compared with girls in coed schools. For example, in Korean of CSAT, the former gets 1.267 while the latter get o.6 only. Likewise, boys' schools students apparently more likely to attend a 4-year college compared with boys from coed schools. The single-sex schools boys get 3.047 in English of CSAT while the co-educational school boys get 0.827.