Speak to any parent. Visit any playground. What do you notice? The boys are running around, throwing themselves energetically onto the equipment, taking up the majority of the space.

The girls are playing quietly around the edges, talking, playing clapping games...

Of course there are exceptions to these statements, but what parents have instinctively known for years is now becoming more understood by educators.

There is a new branch of neuroscience that is effectively 'gender science' which is uncovering the differences between the male and female brain. More than 100 differences have been found so far!

For example, girls, in general, have stronger neural connectors in their temporal lobes than boys: allowing girls to listen better — boys need more sensory-tactile experiences than girls in order for their brains to light up with learning.

The hippocampus (another memory storage area in the brain) works differently in boys than girls. Boys need more time to memorise written items than girls. Girls' frontal lobes are generally more active than boys and grow at earlier ages. This enables girls to control their impulsivity more easily than boys.

Girls tend to get earlier and more advanced development of the Broca's and Wernicke's area in the frontal and temporal lobes which are the main language centres of the brain.

It now appears that the language areas of the brain in many five-year-old boys look like the language areas of the brain of an average three-and-a-half-year-old girl.

Chemically, we also know boys and girls are very different.

Boys tend to have more dopamine in their bloodstream — which can increase impulsive risk behaviour — and they process more blood flow in the cerebellum which is the part of the brain associated with 'doing' and 'physical action'.

Girls have more oestrogen and oxytocin than boys. These chemicals have a direct connection with the use of words — oxytocin rises when girls talk to friends or family members. Boys, with less oxytocin, don't learn through sitting and talking, nor gravitate to it naturally.

Put simply, boys learn best by doing. They cannot sit still! The language area of a boy's brain develops later than girls. Girls are more able to sit and listen.

There is a mismatch between how our boys learn naturally and how many of our schools are set up.

In its 2003 "Position Statement on Student Grade Retention", the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) reports: "Students who are retained are more likely to drop out of school compared to students who were never retained. In fact, grade retention is one of the most powerful predictors of high school dropout".

The evidence also shows that more boys are retained than girls and minority students are more likely to be retained than Caucasian students. So, put simply, it is predominantly black boys who are retained. Eighty percent of high school dropouts are male.

Major studies around the world (including the US, Canada, England and Australia) have demonstrated that single-gender education can help both boys and girls.

One study of over 250,000 students over six years in 53 academic areas found students in single-sex classrooms scored between 15 percent and 22 percent higher in academic performance than their co-ed counterparts.

A 'boy friendly' classroom would allow more physical movement, more teaching with diagrams, graphs and pictures, more art and music, more boy-friendly books and comics and more male teachers and volunteers.

Males and females even process light differently!

Males need brighter light to play, read and learn.

Of course, teachers who are knowledgeable about gender science will educate both boys and girls better.

Rebecca Van Homan is a reading recovery and learning support teacher. She is the newly appointed vice president of the Bermuda Reading Association.