A recent and interesting article that I came across in Science Daily titled: Boys’ and Girls’ Brains are Different: Gender Differences in Language Appear Biological provided evidence for biological differences in language abilities between boys’ and girls’. Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa have shown that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and found that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these language tasks. For the study, fMRI was used to measure brain activity in 31 boys and in 31 girls from ages 9 to 15 as they performed spelling and writing language tasks. The study consisted of both visual (reading words without hearing them) and auditory (hearing words but not reading them) tasks. The researchers found that girls showed significantly greater activation in language areas of the brain than boys. The information in both of the tasks provided evidence for activating areas of the brain associated with abstract thinking through language in girls. In boys, however, accurate performance depended, when reading words, on how hard visual areas of the brain worked. In hearing words, performance depended on how hard auditory areas of the brain worked. This evidence could help inform teaching and testing methods, as well as providing support for single sex classrooms. And as a result of this study, the evidence shows that when testing, boys may be more effectively evaluated on their knowledge gained from lectures using oral tests and on knowledge gained by reading using written tests. Girls, however, would not benefit from these same methods because their language processing seems to be more abstract in approach. This study concludes by mentioning that if the pattern of females relying on an abstract language network and of males relying on sensory areas of the brain extends into adulthood, it could possibly explain why women often provide more context and abstract representation than men. A good example is that women tend to provide more information when giving directions than men do.
I feel that this study relates to topics we have already read about and discussed in class. A few of our readings have examined the different aspects of teaching in the classroom, and it seems that the evidence provided by this study could be one way to modify teaching and/or testing techniques to even the playing field for both boys and girls. We have already discussed changes that have been made and other possible changes that could be made for bilinguals when testing, but this study shows that maybe we should test boys and girls differently based on the knowledge that they activate different areas of their brain, or in other words, think differently.