Why are girls outperforming boys in literacy skills in the Western education system today? To date, there have been few attempts to answer this question. Literacy and Gender sets out to redress this state of affairs by re-examining the social organization of literacy in primary schools. In studying schooling as a social process, this book focuses on the links between literacy, gender and attainment, the role school plays in producing social difference and the changing pattern of interest in this topic both within the feminist community and beyond. Gemma Moss argues that the reason for girls’ relative success in literacy lies in the structure of schooling and in particular the role the reading curriculum plays in constructing a hierarchy of learners in class. Using fine-grained ethnographic analysis of reading in context, this book outlines methods for researching literacy as a social practice and understanding how different versions of what counts as literacy can be created in the same site.

This open access book presents a systematic investigation into internationally comparable data gathered in ICILS 2013. It identifies differences in female and male students’ use of, perceptions about, and proficiency in using computer technologies. Teachers’ use of computers, and their perceptions regarding the benefits of computer use in education, are also analyzed by gender. When computer technology was first introduced in schools, there was a prevailing belief that information and communication technologies were ‘boys’ toys’; boys were assumed to have more positive attitudes toward using computer technologies. As computer technologies have become more established throughout societies, gender gaps in students’ computer and information literacy appear to be closing, although studies into gender differences remain sparse. The IEA’s International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) is designed to discover how well students are prepared for study, work, and life in the digital age. Despite popular beliefs, a critical finding of ICILS 2013 was that internationally girls tended to score more highly than boys, so why are girls still not entering technology-based careers to the same extent as boys? Readers will learn how male and female students differ in their computer literacy (both general and specialized) and use of computer technology, and how the perceptions held about those technologies vary by gender.

This book's concept concerns the positive correlation between literacy and women's development and empowerment in developing countries.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Presents research into the differences in boys' and girls' experiences of the reading and writing curriculum at home and in school. The book includes an outline of the theoretical debates on gender difference and academic achievement.

Winner of the 2018 Outstanding Book by the Michigan Council Teachers of English Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2018 Winner of the 2017 AERA Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education) Exemplary Research Award This book draws upon a queer literacy framework to map out examples for teaching literacy across pre-K-12 schooling. To date, there are no comprehensive Pre-K-12 texts for literacy teacher educators and theorists to use to show successful models of how practicing classroom teachers affirm differential (a)gender bodied realities across curriculum and schooling practices. This book aims to highlight how these enactments can be made readily conscious to teachers as a reminder that gender normativity has established violent and unstable social and educational climates for the millennial generation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, (a)gender/(a)sexual, gender creative, and questioning youth.

This fascinating compilation of the recent data on gender differences in education presents a wealth of data, analysed from a multitude of angles in a clear and lively way.

This book presents a new perspective on the assumed links between women's literacy and development and explores current innovative approaches to research and policy around women's literacy.

Literacy and Gender provides a major contribution to general debates about literacy and gender in schools. It advances the theory in literacy as a social practice as well as providing practical support to those researching literacy. A timely project, it is essential reading for anyone with an interest in applied linguistics, education or gender studies.

In 1500, as many as 99 out of 100 English women may have been illiterate, and girls of all social backgrounds were the objects of purposeful efforts to restrict their access to full literacy. Three centuries later, more than half of all English and Anglo-American women could read, and the female reader was emerging as a cultural ideal and a market force. While scholars have written extensively about women's reading in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and about women's writing in the early modern period, they have not attended sufficiently to the critical transformation that took place as female readers and their reading assumed significant cultural and economic power. Reading Women brings into conversation the latest scholarship by early modernists and early Americanists on the role of gender in the production and consumption of texts during this expansion of female readership. Drawing together historians and literary scholars, the essays share a concern with local specificity and material culture. Removing women from the historically inaccurate frame of exclusively solitary, silent reading, the authors collectively return their subjects to the activities that so often coincided with reading: shopping, sewing, talking, writing, performing, and collecting. With chapters on samplers, storytelling, testimony, and translation, the volume expands notions of reading and literacy, and it insists upon a rich and varied narrative that crosses disciplinary boundaries and national borders.