Junk Science Watch

Lots of press this week for a new study (no link available) purporting to show that spanking in early childhood leads to an increase in risky and deviant sexual behavior in adulthood. Researcher Murray Strauss surveyed "14,000 students in 32 nations" and found a correlation between respondents saying that they were spanked as children, and respondents saying that they had coerced someone into sex or participated in risky sexual behavior. We at Early Ed Watch are hardly pro-spanking partisans, but there are some real reasons to view this research with skepticism, as Alex Tabbarock points out here. We're also curious about the reliability of college students' self-reported recollections of whether or not (and how much) they were spanked as children. Longitudinal research would seem, to us, like a much better strategy for evaluating this question--although it still wouldn't get at the causality issue Tabbarock highlights. We doubt, however, that an RCT of spanking would go over well with, or be faithfully implemented by, parents.

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine featured a very long article that's purportedly about single-sex public schooling, but is really about a narrower--and much more problematic--concept of gender-based education. Gender-based education is the notion that "Boys and Girls Learn Differently"--that's even the title of a book by Michael Gurian, one of the leaders of a cottage industry that's grown up to promote the idea. Specifically, it's the idea that recent neuroscience research shows significant difference in male a female brains and that as a result educators must employ different approaches in teaching male and female students. Unfortunately, many of the arguments for gender based education are bunk--and often have more to do with outdated gender stereotypes than the cutting edge research proponents claim they're based on.