Estimating the Effect of Single-Sex Education on Girls’ Mathematics and Science Achievement

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to determine if attending a single-sex, STEM-focused school was related to science and mathematics achievement among a sample of African American and Latina eighth-grade girls in one school district. A nonequivalent group, post-test only design was utilized in the study to mitigate the effects of selection bias. We analyzed secondary data using multiple regression, controlling for race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and prior mathematics achievement. The results suggest that students who attended the single-sex middle school scored significantly higher than students who attended the co-educational middle schools in mathematics and science.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the other members of the first author’s thesis committee, whose feedback helped strengthen the study.

Disclosure Statement

Neither of the authors has a financial interest in the content of the study. The first author is the former and founding principal of the all-girls school that is the focus of the study.

Notes

1. NAEP does not disaggregate data by race/ethnicity and sex (Young et al., 2017), but girls continue to underperform boys in mathematics and science, and students of color continue to underperform White students in the same subjects. We use these two data points to infer that Black and Latina girls underperform White girls.

2. An economically vulnerable student is eligible for free or reduced-price meals under the National School Lunch and Child Nutrition Program (TEA, 2007).

3. The campus worked with the district to calculate a score for each applicant based on students’ report cards and reading and math end-of-year standardized test scores from the prior year. Students who received a minimum score (in the two years under investigation here, that minimum score was 75) were eligible for admissions to the school.

4. Economic disadvantage is measured by whether a student is eligible for the federal free or reduced lunch program, is from a family with an annual income at or below the official federal poverty line, is eligible for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), or other public assistance, received a Pell Grant or comparable state program of need-based financial assistance, is eligible for programs assisted under Title II of the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), or is eligible for benefits under the Food Stamp Act of 1977; https://tealprod.tea.state.tx.us/TWEDS/66/0/0/0/CodeTable/List/8005.

5. We decided to use “small groups” instead of “other,” which is common in much quantitative research. On the one hand, there were too few students in each of the individual racial or ethnic groups at these three schools to include them in the analysis as separate categories. On the other hand, referring to them as “other” perpetuates the use of a word that excludes and denotes as other or different multiple groups of students because they are few. “Small groups” is an imperfect solution, but we argue it is an improvement over “other.”