Narrowing the Gap: the Gender Agenda - Making a Difference in Science

This guide, from the National Strategies, considers the differences in educational outcomes of girls and boys with the the clear trend of girls outperforming boys at all levels and more women than men graduating from universities and with 'better' degrees. The purpose of this guide is to support science teachers and subject leaders to establish how well both girls and boys are doing in science at all stages of their secondary education and to give ideas as to how any emerging issues can be addressed as part of a development programme. The strategies included are equally applicable to boys and girls.

The guide includes:

*An introduction which includes national attainment and progress data for girls and boys including the relative performance of identified groups. The guide is equally applicable for subject leaders who have well-established and developed self-evaluation processes in place and to those who need to develop those skills, as well as teachers who wish to use self-evaluation to reflect on their own practice.

• A chart (guide overview) illustrating how the guide can be used by both teachers and subject leaders as a result of self-evaluation against current outcomes. It allows you to decide where you are within the process and to locate the appropriate part of the guide to work from.

• Case studies of how the guide has been used by subject leaders and teachers

• Follow-up tasks to support next steps and reflection

• A toolkit of resources to allow the gathering of evidence. This supports you to: interrogate available data and analyse the performance of groups of students; listen to student voice; undertake lesson observations to focus on teacher and student behaviours; and consider ideas for a departmental development session which will provide stimuli to generate discussion about how classroom practice can support the Every Child Matters agenda

• Strategies to try in order to address identified issues. Also included are tried-and-tested strategies to address issues that have been identified through the self-evaluation process to ensure all boys and girls make good progress in science.

• Support with action planning

• Appendices which include further reading, background research and references.

A separate file offers a list of interview questions which teachers or careers officers could use to discover students' attitudes to, and experiences of, science lessons and their aspirations for the future.