Canada: Closing the gender gap on reading

Article here. Excerpt:

'For the past two years, he has been researching the reading gender gap in Ontario as part of a project with the Education Quality and Accounting Office, an agency of the provincial government.

"It's a goal of the province to reduce the gap," said Klinger. "We want a strong knowledge economy. We have a goal in this province where we want 75 per cent of the children producing at what we call level three in achievement, which is considered to be the level of literacy you need to be successful. The girls are there; the boys aren't."

The reading gender gap is not exclusive to Ontario; it's an international problem. Girls, on average, are better readers than boys in every country in the world.

I met Klinger in his office at Queen's to learn about his work. I'm also an educational researcher who is trying to understand the reading gender gap,. I have visited schools in the U.S., Japan and Taiwan to better understand this phenomenon.'