Challenges in Evaluating Single-Sex Education

Abstract

As a conclusion to the two-part special issue on single-sex education in Sex Roles (Signorella and Bigler 2011, 2013a), this Feminist Forum opens with a concluding commentary by Liben (2015), followed by commentaries on Liben’s paper from three different perspectives. Liben provides an historical overview of gender and education in the U.S. to the present and identifies different approaches to the role of gender in cognition and behavior (essentialist, environmentalist, constructivist). She also reviews evidence on the impact of single-sex education in the U.S. in the context of these and other differing perspectives. She concludes by examining the role of values in drawing conclusions about single-sex education. Three comments on the matters raised by Liben explore the biological (Fine and Duke 2015), legal (Sherwin 2015), and public policy (Huston 2015) aspects of the single-sex education controversy, with the latter two focusing on U.S. laws and public policy issues. I use a recent news article concerning legal changes in the U.S. to exemplify the ongoing disputes in this arena. The papers in this collection provide important directions for future research, as well as guidelines for researchers who wish to communicate their findings effectively to the public and to policymakers.