Boys marked down - study shows

[drummersmum]

Have you seen this?
www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-31751672

Boys' presentation is likely to be worse than girls'. I don't know whether this starts with them being behind girls in developing fine motor skills in reception and just continues through school, but you know if you get a beautiful colour coded and highlighted piece of work, it'll be a girl who did it.

So if boys are being marked down and girls are being marked up, I wonder if it's not anything to do with a subconscious gender bias, but because the girls' work looks better.

Rather than fine motor skills, doesn't it come down to the female approach to order and beauty in general. My concept of ugly or messy encompasses way more than DH's!

Rather than fine motor skills, doesn't it come down to the female approach to order and beauty in general. My concept of ugly or messy encompasses way more than DH's!

Legible handwriting doesn't equate to being academic though. DH's is barely readable (he didn't exactly fly at primary school) but he still managed a degree from Imperial and a PG degree from Kings. Whether the writing is neat and colour coded should have nothing to do with what marks are given, it should imho be all about the content.

But then again I have two clever boys with dyspraxia, so I may be biased.

Writing does need to be neat enough to be legible. If you can't read the answers given, you can't mark them.

Unfortunately the article doesn't do much to inform us of how this conclusion was achieved. As with most articles on education, I find myself asking more questions.

In my experience, it is certainly true that girls' work is generally neater than that of boys'. So what?

Has anyone been lauded for Presentation (arts aside)? Has anyone won a Nobel prize for Neatness? Does an employer hire the Best Behaved? Does Colouring Within the Lines lead to a happy, productive life? I don't know.

As a parent to children of both sexes, I'm neither alarmed nor inspired by this study and its conclusions, as presented in the article.