1. The Sorting Project Lower School Diversity Committee 2009

2. Mission Create a written and visual exploration of gender similarities and differences Analyze gender’s influence on student’s interests, choice of activities, feelings about family, friends and education

3. Process -Letter to teachers asking for help doing survey -Survey of students -Data entered into database -Students investigated data, sorted, invented hypotheses -TBD - bulletin boards, book, other visual representations

4. Worksheet

5. Sorting Card

6. Favorite Part of School

7. Student Sorting results of “Favorite Part of School”

8. Students were asked to divide the big yard group - how? Of six groups of Second Graders, only one group thought of “boys and girls” as a way to divide students. Fourth Graders, when asked the same question, thought of dividing by sex immediately.

9. Fourth Grade Hypothesis (after school activities)

10. Electronics “After school, I like to… watch TV, play DS, play video games, etc.” - 18 boys, 8 girls -PreK/K category equal to 4th Grade

11. “After school I like to… do homework.”

12. Homework “After school I like to… do homework.” -2nd Graders like homework more than 4th Graders -Girls are more likely to say it’s what they like to do

13. “In the summer, I like to… ride my bike.”

14. “In the summer I like to… go swimming.”

15. What We Would Change We should have been more explicit with survey directions –students needed to pick ONE favorite answer –teachers needed more guidance (they WERE allowed to say “Yard” as a favorite but some teachers told them they could not). Phrasing of questions about family and friends made responses hard to categorize and responses may have been conditioned