The answer, according to a new study by Thomas Dee, a professor of economics at Swarthmore College, depends on your gender.
His findings, based on a survey of 25,000 8th graders, show that boys learn best from male teachers, and girls learn best from female teachers.
Interestingly, when I think back to elementary and high school, and even college, I actually find this to be personally true…
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Hah. Interesting. I’m in high school right now, and the 2 classes I’m doing worst in are AP Statistics and Chemistry, and those are both taught by men. The class I’m best in, History, is taught by a female, and always has been for me, which doesn’t go along with the data, because I’ve always done good in that.
I’ll tally up my results in my head.
Agreeing = good with a male teacher, or bad with a female teacher.
Disagreeing = good with a female teacher, bad with a male teacher.
leaving out electronic/art type classes, and gym:
Agreeing with the statement (that i can recall): 3
Disagreeing: 9
so there you have it. I am totally abnormal. haha. actually, I’d say it’s just that the correlation between the variables isn’t very strong, and hence there are many other factors that come into play. Such as: I’ve liked all of my history/global teachers, and global has always been a strong subject for me. I’ve always disliked math classes with lots of memorization of formulas, and since Chemistry has a lot to do with that, it makes sense. Statistics I’m just doing bad in because the teacher goes out on tangents way too much, and everyone is doing bad in that class. also, its an advanced placement class, so it’s made to be tough. My english classes I do good in, because I like to write and read, except for sophmore year when I hated my teacher, and thus I did bad.
So based on myself as a sample, I would say that the correlation between gender of teacher and doing good in that class is fairly weak.