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Single-Sex Mathematics Classrooms

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Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education
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Introduction

In recent years it has become popular to replace the word “sex” in single-sex classrooms and single-sex schools with the word “gender.” This substitution warrants some attention for “(p)recision is essential in scientific writing” (American Psychological Association [APA] 2010, p. 71).

The APA (2010) advocates the use of the term “Gender …when referring to women and men as social groups. Sex is biological; use it when the biological distinction is predominant” (p. 71). A similar distinction is made by the World Health Organization (WHO) (2012): “‘Sex’ refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women. ‘Gender’ … to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.” Given that the division of students into same-sex classrooms is invariably based on biological characteristics, it is appropriate to retain the term sex in the heading of this contribution....

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References

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Correspondence to Gilah Leder .

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Leder, G. (2020). Single-Sex Mathematics Classrooms. In: Lerman, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15789-0_139

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