The reason boys don’t like reading

Girls outperform boys in reading, but if there’s no neural reason for this to be the case, what are we doing wrong? Mike Davies does the research...

I’ve been doing some reading. Not bad for a boy (albeit an old one) because, as we all know, ‘boys don’t like to read’. However, this issue is so close to my heart that I thought I’d look a little more deeply. So forgive the research, but academic rigour is a good antidote to blinkered ideology.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that girls outperform boys in reading. Why should that be? Is there something deficient in boys? Not according to research. Eliot (2013) suggested that there is no difference between boys and girls in ‘the neural basis of learning’ that would give girls the edge in reading. What’s more, ‘cognitive, emotional and self-regulatory abilities’ differ much more within gender groups than between them. In other words, the equipment is much the same, although it is also noted that ‘boys and girls have differing interests.’ Ah!

What about their approach to reading? Do they have different motives for picking up a book? Yes, according to Van der Bolt and Tellegen (1995), who found that girls are more likely to start reading with the intention of gaining from the experience. (Which rather begs the question, why do boys ever start reading? Because they have to?) More specifically, girls seemed to use reading to avoid boredom, tension or loneliness. Perhaps boys start reading to avoid hassle from teachers or parents.

Happily, once they’ve got into a book, boys do report experiencing positive emotions, such as amusement, as frequently as girls. However, they are less likely to experience ‘negative’ reactions, such as grief or anger, or neutral ones, like curiosity. Which is interesting, but not entirely counter-intuitive. When I go out with my female friends, the conversation covers all parts of the emotional spectrum. When I go out with blokes, we mainly try to make each other laugh.

One of the keys to keeping boys reading is to make them feel good about their ability. Logan and Medford (2011) found that, compared with boys, girls were more motivated to read, no matter how competent they thought they were. Meanwhile, the worse boys thought they were at reading, the less they wanted to pick up a book and the less effort they put into reading.

Above all, boys need to read texts in which they are interested. Anyone who thinks force-feeding primary-age boys a diet of Shakespeare and Victorian poets (regardless of their undoubted merits) is completely barking up the wrong tree. A relatively recent study (Oakhill and Petrides, 2007) comparing performance in actual SATs reading tests found that boys scored significantly higher where the text covered subject matter that appealed to them. Spiders and evacuation were the two topics in question and, in case you haven’t guessed already, boys were much more interested in spiders. Presumably, slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails would also have rated above domestic upheaval. But before anyone cries ‘foul’, or ‘sexist’, the girls’ performance was not affected by the topic.

This confirms a suspicion I had whilst invigilating tests. Sometimes I felt desperately sorry for the poor children having to plod through the driest stories on some of the hottest days of the year. I’m not questioning the craft of the authors, just the choice of the content. Anyone who remembers the tale of an American farming family suffering a drought might know what I mean. I could see my class wilting before my eyes as they read it. Especially the boys.

The thing is, boys are much more interested in facts than fiction. Search your heart and you’ll know it’s true – not exclusively, but generally. However, I sense a clear bias in the messages we transmit in school: information texts help with our work, but when it comes to reading for pleasure, it’s stories good, non-fiction bad.

Just get them reading – isn’t that the most important thing if we want to raise ability? And, as we’ve seen, in order to start boys reading, they’ve got to feel confident. To build confidence, they need to keep practising. To keep practising, they’ve got to be interested.

So when you send your class out to the library to get a reading book, are there as many Horrible Histories as Princess Diaries? Would you snap if a child chose the Bumper Book of Sharks? What’s wrong with learning facts anyway?

Boys do like to read, but compared with girls, it has to be on their own terms. If you want them to read, let them read what they want. The love will come later. And even if it doesn’t, at least they’ll have the ability.