Unravelling gender composition effects on rule-breaking at school: a focus on study attitudes.

Previous research on consequences of schools' gender composition has mostly investigated students' socio-emotional well-being and achievement, while students' academic attitudes and behavioural outcomes – including school deviancy – have been studied less. Moreover, most studies compared single-sex and coeducational schools, and did not focus on the proportion of girls at school. Starting from reference group theory, we hypothesise that boys attending schools with a higher proportion of girls adopt the latter's positive study attitudes, rendering them less susceptible to disruptive behaviour. Conversely, girls in schools with more boys are expected to adopt the latter's negative study attitudes, consequently being more likely to misbehave. Multilevel analyses on data from the Flemish educational assessment, consisting of 5961 girls and 5638 boys in 81 schools, showed that both boys and girls valued studying more and were less likely to misbehave at school when proportionally more girls attended their school. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]