Most of the attention on single-gender education focuses on all-girl classrooms, as studies have shown teachers overwhelmingly favor male students in coed classrooms. Male students in coed classrooms are praised more highly, participate more fully and receive more comprehensive training. In single-gender classrooms, teachers do not have to fight their own unconscious gender bias, providing more complete instruction for female students. Likewise, all-girl classrooms encourage girls to explore non-traditional gender activities and removes incentives for girls to consciously or unconsciously tailor their behavior to impress male students.
Research has shown that single-gender education benefits boys as well as girls. In 2008, the results of a four-year study showed only 55% of boys in a coed classroom were proficient on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) while 85% of the boys in the single-gender classroom scored a proficient grade. Comparable studies in Australia and England provided similar results. Single-gender classrooms also allow teachers to custom tailor their curriculum to match boys' learning styles and interests.
Some schools provide single-gender options for specific classes, but remain coed elsewhere. This allows for many of the advantages of single-gender education while reducing the need for entirely separate female and male facilities. However, many proponents of single-gender education encourage an all-in approach, in which the entire educational experience is single-gender.
Single-gender education is not without controversy. While some research has shown a significant educational advantage to single-gender education, other studies have shown little or no difference between it and coed education. Likewise, single-gender education assumes that all children fit the gender and sexual identity to which they were assigned, and this may not apply to students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. In such situations, some of the advantages of single-gender education, focusing on learning instead of sexual interaction, become lost. For transgender students, single-gender education can inflict harm by reinforcing an incorrect gender experience.