The ‘ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behaviour, Confidence’ report was carried out by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to look at the differences and similarities in learning between girls and boys.
This finding was particularly interesting in light of the amount of time our kids spend on their tech devices, for both education and entertainment, but it did pinpoint the benefits of playing these games alone as opposed to collaboratively, or online.
With more boys spending time playing video games than girls according to the study, it was found that it impacted not only upon educational performance but also on thought patterns. In a study which found that girls are spending more time on study, and are outperforming their male counterparts outright, the OECD said that too much time spent on games can lead to the “crowding out” of homework.
“Because boys tend to be daily users of video games and are much more likely than girls to play online collaborative games, the gender gap in video gaming translates into a performance advantage for girls,” said an OECD representative.
While the girls may be outperforming the boys, according to this study, girls are suffering from a severe lack of confidence when it comes to maths and science subjects and, as a result, are achieving worse results in these subjects than they should.
The OECD added that this issue could be tackled by boosting girls’ attitudes towards these subjects, and encouraging the pursuit of careers in engineering.
On a more positive note for the girls, however, the study found that they generally have better attitudes towards school, do more homework and are less likely to play video games than the boys.
