Battle of the Genders!
Who is the Better Reader? Steven or Danya?
When Steven, an English 1302 student from UTPA, is assigned with readings from his English class, the first thing he looks for, that will motivate him to read it, is the length of the article. If the article is long, he sighs and tells himself, “Damn, I do NOT want to read this!” But if it is one of those two page, easy reading articles, he will be willing to read the article with enthusiasm and effort. While reading the article, Steven looks for connections between the text, where he then is able to develop new ideas and questions about what the author is trying to convey. “What is the author trying to say?” “Who is the audience?” These are questions he keeps in mind while reading through the article. He focuses on trying to create his own argument that either opposes or agrees with the author. Now, Danya, also an English 1302 student from UTPA, notices the length of the paper as soon as she is assigned an article to read, doesn’t intimidate her. She looks at the title for interest, to see what the article is going to be about. Motivation is in her when an article is simple and of her interest. When Danya reads the article, she underlines the relevant ideas of the article so she can find out who and what the article is talking about while taking side notes.
It is easy to see, we, Danya and Steven, have distinct differences when reading an article. Based on these methods, it is easy to say that Steven is the better reader. He reads to develop new ideas and arguments to find new solutions and Danya does otherwise. She reads simply to understand the text. But would it be stereotypical to assume that the male is the better reader? The issue here is that this stereotype exists today. Too many people are assuming that one gender is a better reader than other and for Danya and Steven, this is a huge problem. How are they ever going to reach their full potential as readers when this kind of stereotype is still existing? It is like saying males are dominant in math because there are a higher percentage of males than females enrolled in the Engineering program at UTPA. Saying that one gender can read better leads to problems and it can affect the readers themselves. If we eliminate the stereotype, we take a step forward in helping each other, whether female or male, to becoming great readers. Now, this leads to our question of, how does gender affect the way current 1302 FYC students at UTPA read, interpret, and analyze a text?
The Stereotype Progression Era in Education
To obtain a more in depth background of how stereotypes existed and progressed in education throughout the years, we incorporated articles that dated back to the 1990s. Rebecca Cummings, author of 11th Graders View Gender Differences In Reading and Math (1994), asked a group of males why they thought males were dominant over female in Math, and the responses were quite shocking. Some students claimed, “a woman’s position as being in the home; therefore, communication skills would be more practical in reading recipes and patterns…” (Cummings, 198) In addition, other males mentioned, “historically, men were the ones who hunted, tilled the land… therefore, math skills were required.” (Cummings, 198) These stereotypes held amongst students may have been one of the reasons to females lack of success in subjects like Math and Science, where a lot calculations and formulas are involved. Assuming that females or males belong in one area because of their capabilities is discouraging people from breaking their academic boundaries. In elementary, I remember the brutal arguments between females and males trying to convince each other that each gender was better than the other because of physical traits, genes that ran in the family, or historical pasts.
In 1998, Christina Haas and Linda Flowers, authors of Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning, proposed a method called Rhetorical Reading, a reading method that encourages students to construct their own meaning through asking questions and developing ideas. Haas and Flowers claim, “Rhetorical Reading is a reading method in which “meaning” does not lie in the text, but rather in the readers’ and the representation they build themselves.” (Haas and Flowers) This method of reading helps each student read beyond the text. The main focus using this strategy is to encourage the reader to read with an open mind, and discover ideas that will allow the reader to build new arguments and further ideas. Going into our first English 1301, Rhetoric and Composition, we thought that we carried all of the reading and writing knowledge that was going to earn us that A at the end of the semester. But, right after our first reading and writing assignment, we knew we were in for a long run! Luckily, our professor taught us to read beyond the lines and look for certain text that would help us readers understand the author more clearly. This method was called Rhetorical Reading and it sure did help us when it came to breaking down an article. With Rhetorical Reading we learned to write down any questions that we had about a specific text, which allowed us to think and develop new ideas. And as we developed new ideas, we created new arguments that sometimes led us to oppose, agree, or develop a new argument in comparison to the author.
Haas and Flowers brought up a new idea on how students can really understand and connect to an article they’re reading. This can really help to eliminate such stereotypes in gender, and actually have males and females read and think rhetorically. In further studies, like in the couple of sources provided, we see the differences in gender and why there is such a difference.
Trevor J. Gambell and Darryl M. Hunter, authors of Rethinking Gender Differences and Literacy (1999) explained that, “... Canada and other parts of the world reveal differential patterns in males’ and females’ achievement in reading and writing.” (Gambell, Hunter, 1). There is clearly a difference between how males and females read and write. The article mentioned that more females read for enjoyment and males read to learn how to do something, this could be an explanation for the differences in reading and writing. When it comes to saying that females are better than males when reading or writing, that is not right. As being a female, males tend to think that females love to read and write because we’re always hung up in “love stories”. In my case, Danya, that is not true. Yes, I do like “love stories”, but I hate to read and write. When I was in elementary, I would always get 2s on the writing portion of the T.A.K.S. Test. Some of my males friends would get 3s or 4s on theirs. Therefore, my male friends had better writing than I did. So, this clearly doesn’t mean that females are better than males when it comes to reading and writing.
In 1999, the experiment Gambell and Hunter performed simplified that females were dominant in reading and writing over males. According to their studies, females read out of their enjoyment and males only read when they needed to. It is possible that because females read more often than males, females obtained a more efficient reading and writing processing method that allowed for them to succeed in higher levels than males. Several years later, they decided to test whether the gender identification tag was a stimulus to drive student’s, males and females, test performance down.
Robin D. Anderson and Amy D. Thelk, authors of The Efforts of Reporting One’s Gender on General Education Test Performance (2008) examine whether, “Collection of data about gender … is a sufficient priming stimulus to trigger a stereotype threat effect and drive down student performance.” (Anderson, Thelk, 171). Both males and females did better in the non-gender identified math and sciences and arts and humanities tests. The results that Anderson and Thelk found were that, “... that the presence of a gender-identification item does not appear to be a sufficient priming stimulus to elicit such a stereotype threat effect…” (Anderson, Thelk, 188) Relating to this source, this has never really happened to me. There has been no test that didn’t provide the gender identification tag. So in further notice, we can’t really agree because in every big test there will always be a gender identification tag and we can’t really come to conclusion that it has an effect on gender.
As you see, we can’t really identify whether or not the gender identification tag is a stimulus to drive student's test performance down. In further investigation, in the year 2013, Kate Summer, wanted to show that there is a difference when it comes to choosing a certain genre in a book, and that males and females have different perspectives in reading.
Kate Summer, author of Adult Reading Habits and Preferences in Relation to Gender Differences (2013), argues that because, “students lack of experience with informational texts...” (Summers, 244) students have difficulty with informational texts, which develops differences in boys and girls and the judgment they have on reading. Summers is trying to explain how in the early years of education, teachers put an emphasis on reading fiction novels because schools find fiction “more appropriate” for students, which may not give students the thinking and analyzing skills as an informational text would. This may be one of the reasons why each gender grows a different perspective on reading as they grow, because of the choices of books each gender chooses to read.
As the years progressed, we noticed how a gap existed between each gender when it came to Math, Reading, Writing, and Science. We came across different proposals that may have caused these gaps, including gender stereotypes, students’ lack of experience with informational texts, and differences in interests. There has not been any recent studies that have shown evidence as to whether gender still has an effect on readers. So we needed to conduct our own experiment, and find out for ourselves, whether gender affects the way males and females read, interpret, and analyze a text.
GAPS Misleading the Secondary Sources
There were some limitations in the secondary sources that we found. The year of publication of the sources limited us to only a certain amount of knowledge from recent years, and the students used in the studies of the sources. The students weren’t current 1302 FYC students from UTPA. This lead us to find to do our own experiment and come up with a solution to whether if there is such a difference in gender.
Danya’s & Steven’s Experiment, Findings, & Solution
In order to for find a solution to our question of whether males and females (1302 FYC students from UTPA), read, interpreted and analyze a text differently, we developed an experiment that consisted of two females and two males.. We gave each student an article (Shitty First Drafts by Anne Lamott) and had them read, take notes, and mark up the text as they normally would in order to help them understand the author. These were our findings…
We took specific notice on the paraphrasing that each student wrote as they read the article in hopes that we would discover the differences in perspective there. It was rather surprising for us to find no distinct difference in interpretation and analyzation between each gender. Annotations between each gender such as, “all words in your mind are potential papers,” and “Whatever you create, you’ll find something in it that you love,” have led us to believe that each student understood clearly what the author was trying to express, which was the acceptance of writing shitty first drafts.
We continued to see this pattern occur throughout each student, where the male and females would paraphrase a certain text in different words, but each gender seemed to have the same understanding of the text. One female wrote, “everyone's human, we all make mistakes, we’re not perfect,” paraphrasing a text that stated not one person writes perfect first drafts. This student was explaining to herself that no one will write a perfect first draft because of human imperfection. In comparison, two males replied to the same piece of text as the female writing before writing, “The first draft is definitely for practice,” and “No one writes a perfect first draft.” Both of these males again took note of their acceptance towards “shitty” first drafts. The only distinct difference we found in that comparison in the wording between each student. Based on our experiment, we concluded that gender has no effect on the way an English 1302 FYC students at UTPA read, interpret, and analyze a text. Although we cannot base our conclusion of one study performed on four students. It would be lunatic to conclude such a theory based on a lone experiment. So, indeed there may be differences in the way males and females interpret their text, we cannot change that, it is human nature; everyone will have their own perspectives of something.
But who is to say necessarily that, perspective is something we need to change? We are trying to help English 1302 FYC students that are having difficulty when it comes to reading and analyzing an article by providing them with a building block like Rhetorical Reading that will help them continue to grow as readers.
GAPS We Faced in Our Experiment
It is hard to agree that there are no differences in interpretation and analyzation between each gender based off of only four students. There were many limitations that we faced throughout their study. There were no distinct characteristics in the students that they chose for the experiment (e.g. GPAs), which limited us to only a certain extent of ideas. Also, there were some students in the experiment that did not put much enthusiasm/effort into their role, therefore did not give us a real analyzation of their reading.
So What Now?
Too many people are assuming that one gender dominates the other when it comes to English, Math, or whatever the subject might be. These stereotypes, believe it or not, have the potential to interfere with student’s dreams of achieving academic success in a certain field that they desire. But based on our study, those stereotypes are false, correct? Wrong! It is not certain that these gender stereotypes have been wiped out of the face of this Earth. So, we need for current 1302 FYC students at UTPA, to know that the differences in gender does not matter, at the end each gender will have the same interpretation and analyzation as each other. These students need to start to think and read rhetorically. If students start to do this, they will be able to come up with more of their own ideas and not just paraphrase a certain text they underlined. As long as students do this, there will be no more gender stereotypes.
Works Cited
Cummings, Rebecca. “11th Graders view Gender Differences in Reading and Math.” Journal of Reading Vol. 38, No. 3 (Nov., 1994), pp. 196-199 Published by: Wiley
Flower, Christina Haas and Linda. "Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning." CCC (1998): 167-183.
Robin D. Anderson and Amy D. Thelk The Journal of General Education Vol. 57, No. 3 (2008), pp. 170-190
Summers, Kate. "Adult Reading Habits And Preferences In Relation To Gender Differences." Reference & User Services Quarterly 52.3 (2013): 243-249. Academic Search Complete. Web. 26 Feb. 2015
Trevor J. Gambell and Darryl M. Hunter Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation Vol. 24, No. 1 (Winter, 1999), pp. 1-16
