@JLeslie My biggest concern is the reinforcement of rigid gender roles, since I think this may be the cause of many problems we’re seeing in our world today. Proponents of both coed and sex segregation each claim that their protocols concerning education actually oppose gender stereotyping, so I wanted to give each side a fair chance to convince me that their way is better.
Well, with limited access to peer review journals on various studies (it appears one has to subscribe to a site and pay to access the most important info) I tried to see what I could find. I didn’t want to go by own anecdotals from my experience attending both sex-segregated and coed classes alone to base a decision off of (like many proponents of each side tend to do).
I’ve found an article concerning a study conducted by Analia Schlosser claiming that she found students perform better overall when classrooms consist of at least 55% girls. In the study taken in Israel, she claims that when there are more girls than boys in a classroom it makes the learning atmosphere more pleasant for everyone involved, so students perform better.
Concerning the case for single-sex schooling I’d found an interesting article. There were several studies mentioned on it, with one of them focusing on gender stereotyping, whilst the other studies focused on grades and performance in sex-segregated enviroments. I’m more concerned with gender stereotyping, so I’m only going to focus on the study pertaining to that for now.
In the one study researchers wanted to focus on student performance and gender stereotyping in situations where students don’t have a choice in being randomly assigned to either a coed or single-sex school. That study conducted by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania (on the link above) was done in South Korea, since it’s illegal in the U.S to force students to attend single-sex schools. Like the article states, this study was the first large-scale study of students RANDOMLY assigned to single-gender and coed schools. That study, like others, suggested that girls in all-girls schools are more likely to study subjects such as advanced math, computer science, and physics. Boys in all-boys schools are more than twice as likely to study subjects such as foreign languages, art, music, and drama.