Gender gaps shape student engagement and achievement in Tawi-Tawi elementary schools

On the scattered island municipalities of Tawi-Tawi, the southernmost province of the Philippines, a quiet gender divide is shaping who learns, who leads and who drops out of the classroom. A new qualitative study published in Discover Global Society finds that teachers in the province’s remote public elementary schools see gender as a powerful force in student engagement and academic achievement — and that the forces at play run far deeper than classroom behavior. Girls, the educators reported, are consistently viewed as more compliant, diligent and academically steady, submitting homework reliably and excelling in literacy tasks. Boys, meanwhile, are regarded as capable yet less disciplined, dominating hands-on science experiments and classroom discussions while neglecting written work. Beneath these surface patterns, the researchers found, lie cultural norms that prioritize boys’ education, pull girls out of school during harvest seasons to shoulder domestic labor, and rigid attendance rules that quietly erode girls’ chances of finishing school. The study, led by Radzmal Soriano Abbani of Mindanao State University–Tawi-Tawi College of Technology and Oceanography, is among the first to document how teachers on these geographically isolated islands perceive and respond to gendered patterns in learning.

The setting could hardly be more consequential. Tawi-Tawi, part of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, is among the most geographically isolated provinces in the archipelago, a chain of small island municipalities where multigrade classrooms, teacher shortages and limited learning materials are routine. A recent report by the Second Congressional Commission on Education identified the province as having the highest functional illiteracy rate in the Philippines at 67 percent — a stark contrast with Benguet in the northern mountains, where the rate falls to 12 percent. The ten most severely affected provinces, clustered in Mindanao and Eastern Visayas, register rates between 44 and 67 percent, underscoring a regional divide with direct consequences for workforce readiness and social equality. National data add a further twist: male students in the Philippines drop out of elementary and secondary school more frequently than female students, with the former Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao recording the country’s highest dropout rates. Yet even where girls achieve better academic results, that success does not translate into equal employment or pay, sustaining broader socioeconomic disparities.

To capture how these dynamics unfold at the classroom level, the research team adopted a qualitative case study design, an approach suited to phenomena that cannot be disentangled from their real-life context. Ten educators — seven school heads who also served as subject teachers and three dedicated subject teachers — were selected through purposive sampling for their direct experience managing teaching and learning in remote, resource-constrained schools. Semi-structured key informant interviews lasting 40 to 60 minutes were conducted in person, audio-recorded with consent, transcribed verbatim and uploaded to ATLAS.ti version 25 for thematic coding. The analysis followed Braun and Clarke’s six-phase framework, moving from data familiarization and initial coding through theme development, review, definition and reporting. Interpretations were guided by Self-Determination Theory, the influential psychological framework holding that engagement and achievement depend on the satisfaction of three basic needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Credibility was reinforced through member checking, peer debriefing and a documented audit trail, and the study received ethics approval from Mindanao State University TCTO in March 2025.

The coded interviews revealed where teachers see gender doing its most visible work. The theme of academic expectations and gender, with 52 codes, emerged as the most frequent, followed closely by classroom gender dynamics with 50. Educators described an implicit gender tracking that channels students into divergent academic identities. “I notice myself unintentionally praising boys for trying hard and girls for being neat, which perpetuates gender expectations,” one participant admitted. Others observed that boys dominate hands-on tasks such as science experiments while girls steer themselves into passive roles like note-taking, and that girls consistently submit homework yet avoid raising their hands, while boys dominate discussions but neglect written tasks. From the perspective of Self-Determination Theory, this amounts to an uneven distribution of psychological need satisfaction: girls’ competence is validated externally, through praise for compliance, while boys’ autonomy is selectively supported through active, self-directed engagement. The result is a motivational bifurcation — girls build academic skills through effortful obedience but may lack intrinsic motivation, while boys develop cognitive confidence and classroom voice but fall behind in sustained written work and behavioral regulation.

Beyond the classroom, the interviews exposed how family economics and cultural tradition intervene directly in girls’ schooling. Several teachers reported that parents view sons as more valuable investments in education because they will provide for families, while daughters are expected to marry. Girls are sometimes withdrawn during harvest seasons on the assumption that their labor at home is worth more than attendance, and deep-rooted traditions assign them priority over household chores, producing frequent absences. Rigid attendance policies, the educators said, compound the damage by penalizing girls for absences tied to harvest work or menstruation. One school described introducing conditional enrollment and catch-up classes for absent students, an adaptation it credited with reducing female dropout annually. The researchers interpret these constraints through the theory’s lens of relatedness: when families signal that schooling matters less for daughters, girls face a psychological conflict between belonging at home and belonging at school, a tension that rigid institutional rules convert into lost learning time, eroding confidence and, ultimately, disengagement.

The analysis also highlights subtler mechanisms that perpetuate gaps even among well-intentioned teachers. Boys, participants reported, often receive more one-on-one troubleshooting in mathematics, while girls are assumed to need less support — an asymmetry that quietly widens the competence gap. The findings echo international evidence that even when behavioral engagement is equal, gender test-score gaps persist, and that boys benefit disproportionately from autonomy-supportive teaching. They also resonate with Philippine studies documenting teacher scoring bias against boys on attendance and diligence, and with a paradox familiar to development economists: girls outperform boys in school yet encounter worse labor-market outcomes. The authors draw a distinction between controlled competence — achievement secured through compliance — and autonomous competence built through mastery, arguing that only the latter generates the self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation needed for long-term career success. In Tawi-Tawi’s classrooms, girls were seen as embodying performance as an obligation, boys as embodying it as potential, and both identities carried costs.

Yet the study is as much a catalog of responses as it is a diagnosis. Gender-responsive pedagogy and training, with 42 codes, was the most frequently cited intervention, though teachers warned it remains scarce, leaving staff ill-equipped to confront bias and calling for workshops tailored to rural contexts. Student empowerment and leadership programs followed with 39 codes. Teachers described randomly assigning classroom roles such as materials manager and presenter so that boys and girls share leadership tasks, reforming student elections to require balanced gender representation among candidates and committees, and fostering mixed-gender collaboration in which boys actively seek girls’ input on projects. A girls’ rural skills and innovation club was credited with shifting attitudes and increasing female participation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Cross-gender mentorship schemes — boys coaching girls in sports, girls tutoring boys in mathematics — were highlighted as a way to build mutual respect while providing direct evidence of competence across gender boundaries, challenging stereotypes with experience rather than exhortation.

Community engagement emerged as the third pillar, with 18 codes, reflecting the recognition that schools cannot shift norms they do not help shape. One school organizes a monthly Parents’ Leader Forum that invites local women and male caregivers to share how education uplifted their families, while another partners with tribal leaders to ensure the message resonates authentically within the cultural context. The researchers stress that such initiatives must move beyond one-off workshops toward co-constructed solutions in which communities themselves redefine the value of girls’ education. The scarcest resource, with only eight codes, was culturally relevant and inclusive curriculum material. Teachers asked for storybooks and posters picturing local heroes who defy gender norms and for local examples of gender equality woven into lessons while respecting cultural values. The payoff can be striking: participants reported that girls who studied local female navigators began to aspire to maritime careers — a vivid illustration of how representation expands what children imagine possible for themselves.

Policy and institutional reform, by contrast, registered only six codes, a signal the authors read as a critical gap between classroom initiative and systemic change. Flexible measures such as conditional enrollment remain localized solutions dependent on individual principals rather than standardized practice, and gender indicators are not yet systematically embedded in schools’ improvement plans. The researchers argue that institutions can be need-thwarting as well as need-supportive, and that rigid rules enforced without regard to circumstance undermine engagement, with effects that differ for boys and girls. Their comparative analysis places Tawi-Tawi within a wider pattern: a systematic review of low- and middle-income countries concludes that gender-related barriers to schooling are multifaceted, demanding simultaneous action on economic constraints, sociocultural norms, institutional capacity and infrastructure. In Malawi, eliminating tuition fees boosted enrollment among girls from poor households; in Bangladesh, community-based initiatives have tackled early marriage while building girls’ confidence; and in Thailand, students in poorer remote regions perform below national averages despite substantial public spending.

Translating these findings into action, the authors lay out five recommendation areas with designated lead actors, from the Department of Education’s Tawi-Tawi Division Office to the region’s Ministry of Basic, Higher and Technical Education, prioritizing gender-responsive teacher training, flexible gender-sensitive policies, community engagement, localized gender-fair learning materials and the embedding of gender equity into school systems. The team is candid about the study’s limits: ten self-reporting educators, no student or parent voices, no classroom observations and purposive sampling all constrain generalizability, though member checking and audit trails bolstered credibility. The structural context they describe is also unusual — most of the participating school heads perform administrative duties without holding official administrative positions, a mismatch symptomatic of the province’s staffing strains. Still, the central message travels far beyond the islands. Gender disparities in engagement and achievement, the researchers conclude, arise from interconnected sociocultural expectations, classroom practices and institutional conditions, and dismantling them demands more than individual teachers’ good intentions. It requires systemic support, sustained professional development, culturally grounded partnerships and policies that let every child — girl or boy — satisfy the needs for autonomy, competence and belonging on which all learning depends.