2014年12月大学英语六级考试真题和答案(一).docVIP

2014年12月大学英语六级考试真题（一） 文库精选版Writing (30 minutes) Section B Should Single-Sex Education Be Eliminated? [A] Why is a neuroscientist here debating single-sex schooling? Honestly, I had no fixed ideas on the topic when I started researching it for my book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain. But any discussion of gender differences in children inevitably leads to this debate, so I felt compelled to dive into the research data on single-sex schooling. I read every study I could, weighed the existing evidence, and ultimately concluded that single-.sex education is not the answer to gender gaps in achievement—or the best way forward for today’s young people. After my book was published, I met several developmental and cognitive psychologists whose work was addressing gender and education from different angles, and we published a peer-reviewed Education Forum piece in Science magazine with the provocative title, “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Education.” [B] We showed that three lines of research used to justify single-sex schooling— educational, neuroscience, and social psychology—all fail to support its alleged benefits, and so the widely-held view that gender separation is somehow better for boys, girls, or both is nothing more than a myth. The Research on Academic Outcomes [C] First, we reviewed the extensive educational research that has compared academic outcomes in students attending single-sex versus coeducational schools. The overwhelming conclusion when you put this enormous literature together is that there is no clear academic advantage of sitting in all-female or all-male classes, in spite of much popular belief to the contrary. I base this conclusion not on any individual study, but on largescale and systematic reviews of thousands of studies conducted in every major Englishspeaking country. [D] Of course, there’re many excellent single-sex schools out there, but as these careful research reviews have demonstrated, it’s not their single-sex composition that makes them ex