Research Article - Daila Perkons

     For my research question, I was interested in the behaviours of kindergarten students and any factors that would influence their learning skills and capabilities in the classroom.  In the end, my question was something like this: "Are the skills of children in early school years affected by gender?".  The articles I had found concerning the subject of kindergarteners in school were very effective and helpful and although the main ideas of the articles would vary, the final conclusion would be that girls generally learn faster than boys do in their early school years.

     The article that set the ball rolling for my research was titled: Gender Differences in Early Literacy:  Analysis of Kindergarten Through Fifthe-Grade Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills Probes.  Jamie Below, by conducting various interviews and controlled tests had showcased the differences in literary skills of both male and female students from kindergarten to the fifth grade as well as presented various different statistics and analyses on the genders of kindergarteners related to their preformance in school.  The data had showed that girls in kindergarten generally have better listening and writing skills than the boys in the classroom.

     The second article to present itself showed neither girl-strong statistics nor boy-strong statistics.  Esther Adi-Japha had used the data about the marks and preformance of kidnergarteners in an elementary school in India along with some of her own experiments to exhibit the ways that boys and girls solve mathematical problems and the translation of these skills into their daily lives.  Even though there were differences in how the children solved the problems, they regularly came up with the same answers.  It proved that neither gender had a stronger achievement in the field of mathematics.

     The third article had a prominent opinion on female students in kindergarten and how their behaviours in the classroom are related to their literary skills.  Using different behavioural experiments and by observing the behaviours of students in an American elementary school, Douglas Ready and Laura Logerfo came up with an interesting idea of looking at the skills of the two genders differently, and also looking at subdivisions of girls and boys with good or bad social skills.  Against the expected results, it showed that the highest ranking students were girls with good social skills, then boys with good social skills, followed by girls without those skills, and lastly, boys without the skills. 

     The fourth article was geared more towards the behaviour of the students rather than their academic preformace.  It was created by Andrea Zevenbergen by simply observing the interactions of kindergarteners with each other, and their personalities in the classroom.However, it still examined the attention problems of girls and boys in pre-school years in relationshipto their expressive language skills and academic skills.  It portrays both the advantages and the disadvantages of both genders in the classroom.  In the end, neither gender showed a stronger disadvantage than the other in their literary skills.
     The last of the articles proved to be very intriguing.  Instead of looking at the reading or listening skills of children, Michelle Haney and Victor Bissonette focused specifically on their name writing abilities.  It exposed the relationhips between their literacy skills in later years and their abilities to write their names clearly and neatly in kindergarten.  It ended up showing a direct relationship between their early understandings of symbols and their future reading abilities, it confirmed that gender had no infliction upon the neatness in the name writing of the students, but their reading and writing skills later on in life.

     There were a few articles that I had read that had to do with my question.  Most of them showed no differences in the skills of female and male students, but those that did had favoured girls.  To conclude, although there may be a very slight advantage for girls in kindergarten to do better in school, both males and females have very similar acheivements in early school years.

Andrea Zevenbergen, Meghan Ryan:  Early Child Development & Care; Dec2010, Vol.  180 Issue 10, p1337-1348, 12p, 2 Charts

Douglas Ready, Laura Logerfo, David Burkam, Valerie Lee:  Elementary School Journal;  Sep2005, Vol. 106 Issue 1, p21-38, 18p, 4 Charts

Jamie Below, Christopher Skinner, Jamie Fearrington, Christy Sorrell:  School  Psychology Review 2010, Vol. 39 Issue 2, p240-257, 18p

Michelle Haney, Victor Bissonnette, Kimberly Behnken:  Child Study Journal; 2003, Vol.  33 Issue 2, p99-115, 17p, 2 Charts

Pnina Klein, Esther Adi-Japha, Simcha Hakak-Benizri:  Educational Studies in  Mathematics; Apr2010, Vol. 73 Issue 3, p233-246, 14p, 5 Charts