Gender-based differences in reading literacy in the first two years of school: In this case, type of school trumps gender

The phenomenon of gender-based differences in students ’ literacy achievement in the later years of schooling has been widely researched and reported but it cannot be taken as given that such differences span the entire age continuum. The current study considered the reading literacy of boys and girls in the first years of schooling from two major perspectives: The expectations of students, teachers, and parents were sampled, and the literacy of those boys and girls measured by system measures of reading performance and an external assessment of reading comprehension. It was not surprising that student, parent, and teacher attitudes predicted gender-based differences in reading literacy, nor that the school-based Year 2 Diagnostic Net test provided statistical evidence of such differences, nor was it surprising that girls generally outperformed boys. What was surprising was that other internal and external measures of achievement found no significant differences for gender. Instead, what emerged was a significant gap in terms of both achievement and attitude related to type of school attended together with some agreement about a child’s judgment that he/she reads well as the most important concomitant of reading literacy