Canada: Girls top boys in literacy

Article here. Excerpt:

'Girls are better than boys -- in literacy, at least. And the gender gap keeps getting wider.

Males have been doing worse compared to their female classmates when taking the Grade 10 Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) during the last five years -- from 6.6% below the girls in 2009 to 9% last year, according to this year's Fraser Institute Secondary School Report Card.

"That's a fair increase -- almost 50% increase from where it was before," said the Fraser Institute's Peter Cowley.

Meanwhile, the Grade 9 math gender gap favoured boys at 45% of schools across the province. The sexes performed evenly at 32.4% of schools.
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Education research analyst Terri Thompson said girls seem to be doing better in all academic areas except math. The reading gap between boys and girls has been a long-standing issue for the past few decades.

"One of the reasons why girls are starting to do better in science is because literacy is becoming more embedded in the curriculum across the board," she said. "Narrative fiction is what girls tend to enjoy, whereas boys often don't enjoy that as much," she added. "But they have a wide range of material they often do enjoy, but are often not represented in schools -- like non-fiction and some graphic novels."'