Single-sex schooling, gender and educational performance: Evidence using PISA data

The advantages and disadvantages of single-sex  schooling continue to be a source of policy and public  debate. Previous empirical evidence is somewhat  ambiguous, with some studies finding a positive  impact of single-sex schooling on education achievement and others finding no differences across school  types. The relationship between single-sex schooling on academic outcomes is typically problematic to  examine, as in most countries single-sex schools are  selective and the numbers attending them are relatively small. In Ireland, a high proportion of secondary  school children (~1/3) attend a single-sex school. In  addition, these schools are largely state-funded and  non-selective but differing in composition compared  to mixed-sex schools. For this reason, the Irish  educational system provides an interesting setting  for exploring the outcomes of single-sex schooling. In  this context, this study utilises the 2018 PISA data for  Ireland to examine the relationship between single-sex education and mathematics, reading and science  literacy performance for boys and girls, respectively, as well as differences across gender in these  outcomes. We find significant raw gaps in reading,  science and mathematics scores between females in  single-sex and mixed-sex schools and in mathematics scores for males across the same school types.  However, after controlling for a rich set of individual,  parental and school-level factors we find that, on  average, there is no significant difference in performance for girls or boys who attend single-sex schools  compared to their mixed-school peers in science,