Same-gender teacher assignment, instructional strategies, and student achievement: New evidence on the mechanisms generating same-gender teacher effects. (August 2019) - Andersen, Ida Gran
Highlights: We study the effect of assignment to a same-gender teacher on academic achievement. We hypothesize that the instructional strategies of male and female teachers explain this effect. Assignment to a teacher of the same gender raises performance in general and in particular for girls. Differences in instructional strategies between male and female teachers explain the same-gender teacher effect for boys and reduce it with 20 percent for girls. The mechanism which generates same-gender teacher effects thus differs for boys and girls. Abstract: This paper analyzes whether differences in instructional strategies between male and female teachers explain the same-gender teacher advantage on student achievement identified in previous research. We argue that the mechanism generating same-gender teacher effects is the increased pedagogical efficiency in the instructional process that arises when students are assigned to same-gender teachers. We apply within-student across-subjects models to combined survey and register data from Denmark, and show, first, that assignment to a same-gender teacher increases student achievement; second, that the effect is much larger for girls than for boys; and, third, that teacher instructional strategies eliminate the same-gender teacher effect for boys and reduce it by approximately 22 percent for girls. The findings stress two important points. First, boys and girls benefit from dissimilar instructional approaches, and second, the mechanism generating a same-gender teacher advantage differs for boys and girls.