On the myths and truths about how girls learn

Knowledge is (girl) power

Anti-fragility in action. Photo by Vince Fleming on Unsplash

I’ve worked in girls’ education for about eight years. It’s not entirely by design—more a matter of circumstance, but I’ve enjoyed many aspects of it. My children went to girls’ schools (one public and one independent), I’m a girl, and I think girls are great! My own children would have been far less ambitious if they had to fight for a seat at the table for the past six years—the girls’ school environment is certainly unique.

Working in girls’ schools as long as I have, including being tangentially involved in marketing and enrolments, I’ve had to grapple with the truths and myths of girls’ learning. And since there’s such a lack of agreement on the purpose of schooling anyway, it should be expected that some of the myths are based on harmless ideology and good vibes. Some of these vibes I endorse!

But girls’ education in the New South Wales public system is under threat and many boys’ schools are opening to girls, which drains enrolments away from girls’ schools. The marketing of said schools is a mix of neuromyth and motherhood statements. More on this later.

At a time when we should be looking with clear eyes at the benefits of girls' schools, my colleague Cassandra Pride and I decided we should get to the bottom of what’s real and what’s not when it comes to girls’ education. We presented on the myths and truths of how girls learn at the International Coalition of Girls Schools conference a few days ago.

Some of the myths are truly harmless, but some of the marketing messages and folk wisdom about how girls learn may actually be holding them back. Here are five enduring myths about girls’ education, with their appeal explained, and the truths that should take their place.

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1. Myth: Girls Learn Differently from Boys

You’ve heard it before: girls are visual learners, boys are kinaesthetic. Or girls prefer discussion while boys prefer action. These ideas stem from the long-debunked learning styles theory, which you may know as VARK (visual, auditory, reading/writing, kinaesthetic). Even if proponents hedge by claiming they’re all about the student’s individual preferences, this myth is insidious because there is absolutely not a shred of evidence that it enhances learning. And even if it does affect motivation, it is grossly unrealistic to expect teachers to cater to every student preference.

Against our best interests, we teachers might find this myth appealing because we work in a care-based profession. Who doesn’t want to serve each of their students individually and create optimal conditions for interest and “engagement”? I’m putting engagement in scare quotes because I’m referring to the teacher tap-dancing kind.

Instead, we know from process product research (and other places) that universally great whole-class instruction is the most efficient and effective way to teach novice learners—which is anyone learning something new. Yes, gifted students also need to learn new things.

Boys and girls have limited working memory. Learning about physics with dry spaghetti, pipe cleaners and a few rubber bands is a poor proxy for learning, no matter what the student’s sex. Optimising cognitive load by breaking down difficult concepts and skills, checking for the understanding of the whole class, and giving opportunities for guided practice are the best ways for students of any sex to learn.

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2. Myth: Girls Learn Better Collaboratively

As Cass (half) joked, every teacher has set an open-ended group research task that took the best part of the week at some point in their career. Perhaps we have set it around the time of peak mock marking or the week before reports are due. Perhaps it has freed up several hours of preparation and teaching time, which may or may not have worked in the favour of our workload at the time. Who’s to say?

It’s worth stating that students are not mini-adults, with fantastic time management and self-regulation—they rely on us adults for this. And as a colleague pointed out to me, for most adult workers, collaboration consists of quick steering meetings before everyone goes off individually and follows through on their chunk of the work. Look, maybe I’m doing group work all wrong, but it seems like a shocking waste of student time. I mean, see Myth 1.

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3. Myth: Girls Respond Well to a Growth Mindset

Dweck’s work on mindset has been widely embraced, particularly in girls’ schools. But evidence suggests it’s not the silver bullet we hoped for—especially when we rely on self-reports, which in this case don’t align with follow-through behaviours. It also has low predictive validity, which means that there is little relationship between self-reported mindset and outcomes, and this diminishes even more when we control for ability and SES.

If you want to implement it, knock yourself out. It’s very low cost (except for time). People probably like it because it’s truthy. We see kids all the time who happen to believe in themselves and happen to work hard and achieve. But one does not beget the other. Nicolas Cage and drownings come to mind.

There’s just better research out there. Andrew Martin’s Growth Goals for example have been shown to be more motivating. Because they’re supported actively by a school through feedback and feedforward, students know how to achieve mastery in the area of their choice.

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4. Myth: Girls Are Fragile

Mental health statistics for young people, especially girls, are sobering. There’s some truth to this myth. But fragility is a problematic frame; it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Jonathan Haidt outlines some myths of fragility in his essay and book, The Coddling of the American Mind, the main one being, “Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us weaker.”

Schools feel responsible for wellbeing. In the past 50 years, schools have taken on the work of parents and almost every community institution you can think of. For all our talk about girl power, we tend to protect girls from the opportunities that will only serve to make them stronger. In the pursuit of happiness and comfort (our own and students’), we protect girls from the experiences that build strength and resilience.

In fact, avoiding anxiety-inducing experiences makes it worse. The cycle of avoidance should be… actively avoided in schools. Rather, we should be looking for opportunities to expose girls to challenges, much as phobias are treated. A good example is mathematics anxiety, worse in girls, which is treated by practice testing. Cold calling is another avoided strategy that actually increases voluntary participation by students, especially girls!

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5. Myth: Girls Are Better Off Educated With Boys

Co-ed schools often claim to reflect the “real world.” They promote socialisation, diversity, and “balance.” But that doesn’t always translate to equity in the classroom, the co-curricular space, or in student leadership. Co-ed settings are the norm, and they’re easy to market, with official-sounding language like “our research shows…”. I suppose girls’ school marketing has its good vibes, and so does co-ed.

But research shows that in mixed environments, boys receive more teacher attention. Behavioural issues like ODD and ADHD are more common in boys, creating disruptions that affect girls. The male variability hypothesis also suggests that in a co-ed classroom, more boys than girls will have complex needs, for example, twice-exceptionality or learning difficulties.

It’s hard to see how girls would be better off in co-educational environments, where they have to fight for leadership and voice, rather than sitting at a table full of other girls.

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We can draw on the strategies that support all learners, and discard the ones that waste time and diminish student resilience. Families have all sorts of reasons for choosing single-sex and co-educational schools. My own choices were probably based on a combination of the school’s reputation and hunch. But as teachers, we can support the next generation of girls by being armed with more than this. With knowledge comes power, and with power, responsibility.

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Tom Bennett is coming to Australia at the end of this month, and it’s not too late to get tickets in Sydney!

Professor Tom Bennett, OBE, is the School Behaviour Advisor to the UK government, the author of multiple best-selling books on classroom behaviour, and has worked with over 1300 schools in 18 countries. More importantly, he ran challenging classrooms for 14 years.

After last year’s highly popular training tour in 2024, he is back with a limited number of dates. Tom’s sessions are informed by a vast amount of school experience, and by working with thousands of colleagues around the world who have demonstrated expertise, as well as the best of what we know from evidence and research.

School behaviour is the number one priority in any institution. If they aren’t behaving well, they aren’t safe, learning, flourishing, or succeeding anywhere close to where they could be. And too often, we struggle with low and high-level disruption, unable to know what to do. But there’s no need: we already know, and teachers and leaders around the world have been doing it for a long time. In Tom’s training days, he’ll teach you how.