Literature and Gender Stereotypes: Designing a survey for primary school teachers and students

Abstract

Introduction and objective. This paper presents the ad hoc questionnaire designed to study the influence, on male and female students in 5th and 6th grades of Primary School, of the gender stereotypes that appear in some works selected from the 2018 survey on Reading Habits and Book Purchasing and to determine the knowledge and training that teachers of these grades have on gender issues. Objectives. To design and apply a questionnaire for these pupils to find out the possible influence that the gender stereotypes that appear in a given corpus of works could have; we also aim to find out, through this same questionnaire, what activities the children carry out with the readings in the classroom and how much time is dedicated to this activity; finally, we also aim to design and apply a questionnaire for the teaching staff of these courses to find out their degree of knowledge about gender issues and the approach they give to working in the classroom with Children's and Young Adult Literature materials. Methodology. It was based on the development of two ad hoc online forms which were pilot-tested and then used to create two final questionnaires whose data were analyzed using the IBM SPSS Statistics 22 programme. Results and conclusions. The results show a high reliability of the instrument presented and a high number of responses, with 2,124 students and 72 teachers. The main contribution of this contribution is the wealth of information obtained through questionnaires that have a high degree of reliability and that can serve as a basis for the development of various studies with a gender perspective.