It's EE, boys and girls - and comments to Amy and Matt

This is how I envision our project reports will look in April. It was good to read again through a lit review, through the method, and results. This is an article that I will add to my research, and it is already in the big funnel, swirling around to eventually bring me to a focused question, data and method.
Even with my discomfort with girl and boy classification, I thought the article did a great job of cleanly looking at the data... here's how boy's improved, here's how girl's improved, here's the mean and sd, and the comparisons of each. Regardless of my thoughts on whether there should be a difference, we see specific results based on catagorizing by gender. Simple. Not the whole story, but a part of the story. Boys gains appear to be higher when learning outdoors/actively then when learning in indoor reading/lecture. Girls appear to gain some value from outdoor/active learning, but the gains aren't as big as the boys. (Interpretted correctly, I hope...) One thing I considered during the reading was how challenged I was by Lisa's outdoor lessons in July. I'd thought of a variety of reasons, my hearing, my lack of content knowledge, my dislike of mosquito bites,my discomfort with the new situation, etc. I had not considered that there may be gender implications. Hadn't even crossed my mind. It actually allows me to judge myself less harshly for it. Interesting. So, if I intend to bring students into outdoor environments for teaching, one thing to pay attention to is how to support the students who are less comfortable with the active (less controlled?) environment. That might be optional structures, etc (like we do with scavenger hunts,etc.)
Great article. Good to read/blog when I'm not up against the deadline.

Comment to Amy --- I was really struck by the mention of authentic experiences, also. Making the lesson relevant seems to be the key to engagement. If we can do this for real (soil structure and samples for a garden, for instance, instead of just data), I think we become teachers changing lives and the world.

comment to Matt --- What do you think of the all girl/all boy classes? What's the professional take on this? It's been done on and off and here and there forever, so it seems that there would be data on it. I take it our concern here is can we be separate and equal.