Single-Sex Education - Essay Example

By the end of the 19th century, coeducation was widespread in American elementary as well as secondary public schools. By the close of the twentieth century, this trend was prevalent globally. In recent times, however, there has been a revival of interest in the establishment of single-sex schools in various societies across the world, in both the private and public sectors (Riordan, 2011). In 2005, the US Department of Education commissioned a study that reviewed coeducational schooling versus single-sex schooling.

 The study which had various statistical controls found that the outcome of a study on the effects of single-sex versus coeducational schooling is vague. The study, on one hand, supports the premise that single-sex education can be useful, particularly for certain results related to scholarly achievements as well as more positive educational aspirations. Most of the outcomes provided no substantiation of either advantage or harm. According to the study, there is inadequate support for the argument that single-sex education may be detrimental or that coeducational teaching is more advantageous for the student.

Generally, however, most of the studies reported affirmative effects for single-sex schools on all topic success tests as well as the predominance of studies on issues such as concurrent and long term scholastic accomplishment and concurrent and long term socio-emotional maturity results providing support to single-sex schooling (U.S. Department of Education, 2005. Antagonists of single-sex education, argue that single-sex education is not the underlying factor producing optimistic outcomes with students but rather the availability of resources in addition to the teacher's motivation that leads to these results.

They consider that single-sex schools do not prepare the students for the real world, a setting where they will be required to exchange correspondence with people of the opposite gender. Their argument states that coeducational learning institutions break down chauvinistic attitudes by fostering interaction with members of the opposite sex. There is, however, no study that has explicitly confirmed these claims and so they are basically just theories. Several studies, on the other hand, have shown that attending a single-sex school as opposed to attending a coeducational school is significantly linked with superior average scores in exams (Park, Behrman, & Choi, 2012).

 The male students in coeducational schools are less prone to take up classes in the arts such as poetry or embark on complex academic courses purely to steer clear of being classified as a nerd. in the same way, female students avoid technology and the sciences since they don't fancy being typecast as tomboys. Single-sex schools allow students to individualism while learning. Single-sex schools should make an international comeback to enable students to improve their academic performance as well as letting them grow in an environment where they can achieve their full potential with minimal distractions in the learning process.