A United States-based special education trainer and author has challenged local educators to utilise a range of simple strategies in getting boys to learn as well as girls.

Kelly King, a former elementary school principal and associate director of the Gurian Institute in Colorado Springs, USA, said recent research shows significant differences in the “hard wiring” of male and female brains, which influence how boys and girls learn and suggest the best ways of teaching them.

She explained that an appreciation of the difference between the brains of males and females was important to the special education conference, because most children diagnosed with learning disabilities are boys.

Noting that poor performance in education among males is “an international phenomenon”, King cited a study which shows 90 per cent of discipline referrals relate to boys, 80 per cent of children with attention deficit disorder (ADD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are boys, and 70 per cent of substance abusers are boys.

“There are over 100 chemical and structural differences between male and female brains. The female brain has 20 per cent more nerve connectivity between the (brain’s) hemispheres than the male brain,” King noted.

The result is that in general males are able to concentrate more deeply on one task and lose track of others, while females tend to multi-task.

“None is better; they are just different,” King said of the brains of males and females.

She was addressing a workshop at the conference held under the “Falling through the cracks: professional development to help meet special education needs in the classroom” and hosted by the Nathan Ebanks Foundation at the University of the West Indies on Tuesday.

The educator added that the physical differences are reinforced by cultural norms about what boys and girls should and should not do.

“The biology drives how we socialise kids. Pecking order is very important among boys. What gets you higher in the pecking order is not by being a really good reader, but by being a really good athlete,” she noted.

King instituted a number of small changes at her school to get boys to learn which yielded “powerful results”. These included creation of single-gender classes, the reading of specific books by boys only, and mentorship and reading by well-known males from the community.

The result was that in one year the school closed the gap in the reading levels of the boys and the girls. The boys made a 24-point gain in reading compared with a three-point gain for the school district, while the girls made an 18-point gain compared with a six-point gain for the district.

The school’s successes were featured in Newsweek Magazine and on The Today Show in 2006.

But King emphasised that the focus on the boys also helped the girls to improve.

“No girls were harmed in the implementation of these strategies,” she quipped.

Founder and executive director of the Nathan Ebanks Foundation Christine Staple-Ebanks challenged the participants to use the information to change how education is delivered in their schools and institutions.

“If I listened to all the professionals, my son would not have achieved what he has so far,” said Staple-Ebanks whose son Nathan has a disability and who was the inspiration for her establishing the foundation.

“Let us not wait for the government policy to change,” she added.

Participants in the workshop included instructors from HEART/National Training Agency, the Jamaica Council for Persons with Disabilities, and school teachers and administrators.