The Boy Question

How To Teach Boys To Succeed In School

Mark Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000404678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Following on from the huge success of Boys Don't Try? this essential new book answers nine key questions about how teachers and schools can best tackle boys' academic underperformance. For decades schools have grappled with the most significant barriers to male academic success: a lack of motivation to succeed, poor attitudes to learning, lower literacy levels and a reluctance to read for pleasure or write at length. In this compelling book, Mark Roberts provides clear answers about how teachers can tackle 'The Boy Question'.

Each chapter answers a frequently asked question about how best to teach boys, outlining the issue and demonstrating what can be done about it. Informed by a wealth of research and the author's personal experience of successfully teaching boys, this book offers an abundance of practical advice for the busy classroom teacher. It will shine a light on what makes boys tick and how we can design effective curriculums to ensure they can best acquire powerful knowledge.

With practical advice and examples to help address anti-social attitudes and stem the cycle of boys' underachievement, this is essential reading for all teachers and school leaders.

Part B

Instilling high expectations in boys

What's the issue?

Let's begin with an uncomfortable truth: no matter how good the teaching, once our students leave the classroom, their performance could well be undermined by poor study behaviours. In their 2008 meta-analysis of over 70,000 students in the United States, Crede and Kuncel concluded that students’ study habits, skills and attitudes ‘were found to rival standardized tests and previous grades as predictors of academic performance’¹.

What do we mean by study skills, habits and attitudes?

In their helpful summary of teaching study skills Fisher and Frey (2017) break the term down into three wide-ranging but essential areas²:

1. Cognitive skills – including note-taking, mnemonics, mind-mapping and flash cards.
2. Metacognitive skills – such as planning, monitoring, time managing, rehearsing and self-evaluation.
3. Affective skills – this term covers overlapping concepts like motivation, agency and self-concept. These are the kind of skills that we covered in detail in Chapter 1.

The effectiveness of our students’ study skills will have a big impact on their academic outcomes. A student who can appreciate not only which revision techniques to use (cognitive skill) but also understand when to adapt and refine the use of these techniques (metacognitive skill) has a far better chance of success than one who plods on through their notes robotically.

Teachers try their best to close attainment gaps during lessons. But what if our students are hampering their efforts to memorise knowledge, by sticking to familiar but flawed study techniques, like a teenager clutching on to a comforting but tattered childhood toy?

There's a significant body of research that suggests that certain study methods better help students retain and recall key knowledge. But how confident can we be that our students – especially the underperforming boys – are embracing these vital techniques?

Which study techniques are ineffective?

In an important 2013 study, Dunlosky et al.³ evaluated the effectiveness of ten learning strategies that are popular with students. They argued that some of the most frequently used study techniques have a ‘low utility level’ and should be avoided. Other techniques were assigned a ‘high utility level’, given the wealth of research supporting their effectiveness as study tools:

Effectiveness	Technique	Explanation
Low utility ✗	Rereading notes, textbooks, revision guides etc.	Gives students a shallow understanding of what they have read Any benefits tend to be short-term in nature Can often remember things shortly after rereading but struggle with long-term recall and comprehension
Low utility ✗	Highlighting	Gives students an illusion of fluency yet offers little long-term cognitive benefit Students usually mark too much text when highlighting, so key information is less likely to be remembered Novices find picking out the main points of a topic difficult Students who use highlighters during tests only perform at a similar level as those who have merely read the text
High utility ✓	Retrieval practice	Using aids like flashcards forces students to recall information from memory Makes students face up to the gaps in their knowledge Offers clear advantages in follow-up assessments
High utility ✓	Spaced practice	Encourages students to distribute their revision in smaller chunks over a longer period of time Ensures they revisit things they haven’t recently learned Students who space their revision outperform those who study by cramming in long sessions just before a test

Using retrieval practice and spaced practice feels significantly more challenging than rereading or highlighting notes, which feel good but don’t really work. By emphasising the usefulness of the power of retrieval and spaced practice, Dunlosky et al. contend, teachers can help underperforming students maximise their potential.

Is retrieval practice useful for younger children?

Reading research into the most effective study techniques, we might be forgiven for picturing them being used by older students, hunched over desks, late at night, ahead of GCSE, A level and degree examinations. Yet studies have shown that younger children also benefit when using these strategies. For example, Dunlosky et al.⁴ point to research which found learning advantages in the use of spaced practice for nursery children, who could recall more visual detail over time⁵. Karpicke et al. (2016) found that 9–11-year olds made learning gains from retrieval practice in terms of recall and item recognition⁶. While some studies suggest that the benefits of retrieval are relatively greater with slightly older children⁷ – the age of 8 is mentioned in this research – Dunlosky et al.'s overview⁸ details a deep body of research, which allows them to conclude that ‘some form of testing effect [i.e. positive impact of retrieval practice] has been demonstrated’ with EYFS, primary school and middle school children. Researchers into psychology and cognitive science may quibble over the precise advantages of retrieval and spaced practice for children of different ages, but there appears to be a consensus that they will all benefit in some way from frequent low-stakes testing.

Do students use the most effective study strategies?

In his recent overview of improving learning and memory⁹, Jeffrey Karpicke notes that ‘many learners do not practice retrieval as often or as effectively as they could’. Despite the very limited usefulness of rereading notes and textbooks, Karpicke et al. found that even when students were made aware of the cognitive benefits of retrieval practice and the negatives associated with rereading, they still made poor metacognitive choices: ‘not only was repetitive reading the most frequently listed strategy, it was also the strategy most often listed as students’ number one choice, by a large margin’¹⁰.

Students’ awareness of their unsatisfactory study effort were also in evidence in a 2013 study by Susser and McCabe, who found that students tend to dedicate less time studying for a particular topic than they themselves believe should be undertaken by a typical ‘good student’¹¹. Put simply, despite knowing the effort that is required to get good grades, many students still don’t live up to this standard, even though they realise this means they’ll not meet their potential.

Blaisman et al.'s 2017 research compared students’ study skills intentions to their actual study habits. They discovered that, ahead of looming exams, students professed that they intended to follow good study practices and ‘intended to rely more heavily on flashcards and taking practice tests’. Yet, in reality, their best-laid plans soon went awry and these ‘two strategies ended up being two of the most infrequently used’¹². Cramming was a popular strategy, used by the majority of students, who despite what we know about the benefits of spaced practice, largely began studying ‘about two days before the exam’, with ‘53% admitting to studying in a single session right before an exam’. Perhaps most perturbing of all is the paltry number of hours students spent studying in total for each exam. Taking their own research and past studies into account, Blaisman et al. calculate that ‘the majority of students study about four hours total per exam’. Yes, I’m afraid you did read that right: four hours in total per exam.

Even when students have an awareness of the most effective learning strategies, they often forget or become confused about the relative strengths of different learning strategies. Blaisman et al. give the example of some students asserting that rereading textbooks was an ineffective strategy but erroneously believing that rereading notes was somehow more effective. Their confusion is unsurprising and understandable, however, when we take into account the mixed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part A: Motivating boys to work hard
• Part B: Instilling high expectations in boys
• Part C: Developing boys’ literacy
• The final word
• Index