De Courtin-Myers would like to take the research out of the lab and put it into the classroom. "I think that it would make sense to build on those areas in which boys and girls differ on psychometric tests," she says. "Learning success may be significantly enhanced when using strategies that match each gender's natural strength rather than imposing a learning style that may be contrary. For example, to find a specific location, it may be fully adequate to give a map to boys while girls may benefit from additional verbal information. After all, if male rats use different strategies to navigate a maze than female rats, why not humans?"

But not all researchers agree the classroom should be divided along gender lines.

"A properly functioning educational system holds open to individuals the possibility and the opportunity of becoming different from what they are," says Grobstein. "It is not a good idea to design educational systems for women or men which 'play to their strengths and avoid their weaknesses', because the goal of education ought to be transformation, perhaps even self-transcendence. One outcome of educational systems which recognize the importance of transformation may well be to lessen some of the existing differences (both real and perceived) between women and men and, over the longer run, to alter as well cultural expectations which contribute to those differences."