Reflective Research Paper

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Reflective Research Paper

Gender biases are a problem in many schools and gender equity has been used to help remove those biases. Equity refers to having equal expectations and treating students of different sexes and cultural backgrounds equally. Gender biases have been a problem in education for years. In the past boys and girls have had different expectations when it comes to education. Boys have generally been taught to take leadership roles and girls to take more passive roles. In recent years gender equity has helped remove gender biases from the classroom, giving boys and girls a more equal type of education.

In 1972 Congress passed Title IX, which forbids any type of gender discrimination in an educational setting that is receiving federal financing (Ryan & Cooper, 2000). Educators David and Myra Sadker say boys and girls have very different educations even though they use the same textbooks, sit in the same classrooms, and have the same teachers (Weiss, 2001).

Unfortunately gender biases still exist in classrooms and boys seem to benefit from them more than girls. The Sadker’s research shows that teachers tend to call on boys more than girls. They say this is because boys are more assertive and demand more attention by speaking out of turn to the teacher (Weiss, 2001). When girls call out answers it is shown teachers are more likely to point out their inappropriate behavior and not answer them, where boys generally do not get redirected and get better feedback from the teachers than girls do. Boys may also tend to have more interactions with teachers than girls and are more likely to dominate the classroom (Ryan & Cooper, 2000). Teachers have also been shown to praise boys for doing we...

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