Effects of attending single-sex and coeducational high schools on achievement, attitudes, behaviors, and sex differences.

The purposes of the present investigation were (a) to compare the effects of single-sex and coed high schools on achievements, attitudes and behaviors and (b) to determine whether attending single-sex schools affected well-established sex differences in these variables. Subjects were 2,332 Catholic high school students attending one of 47 single-sex or 33 coed schools included in the nationally representative High School and Beyond (HSB) study. The effects of school type, sex, and their interaction on senior year outcomes and postsecondary activities were examined after controlling for variables measured during the sophomore year. Changes in a wide variety of outcomes during this critical sophomore-to-senior period were nearly unaffected by school type. Changes in many of these outcomes were related to sex, but these sex differences were also nearly unaffected by school type. Interpretations of this study contradict those of earlier studies that were also based on large nationally representative data bases, but the differences were apparently explicable in terms of methodological problems identified in the earlier studies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)