Download or read book Is There a Crisis for Boys? Gender Differences in Student Achievement and Teacher Training Characteristics in the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries written by Emily Anderson and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender differences in student achievement, and the inferred educational disadvantage of boys, is the context of the "crisis for boys" discourse in education. Ridge (2009, 2010) suggests that boys' underachievement in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) may be related to the training characteristics of expatriate male teachers in boys' schools. The UAE is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries which also includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The supposed crisis for boys, related to the training characteristics of expatriate teachers from Egypt, Jordan and Syria, has only been discussed in the UAE and not in other GCC countries; however, the UAE shares similar economic, social and political characteristics with the other GCC countries (Wiseman, 2005) including the hiring of expatriate teachers in secondary science and other high-need areas in education. This study investigates whether or not gender differences in 8th grade students' science achievement are associated with differences in teachers' training in the GCC countries using data from the 2007 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Significant differences were found in male and female 8th grade teachers' training characteristics across the countries of interest, but these differences were found to have no significant association with boys' and girls' science achievement.