Describes the different preferences in learning styles of adolescents based on the pioneering work on values development done by Kohlberg and Gilligan. Focuses on learning preferences of males and females and values research and its role in learning. Offers recommendations of middle-level academic and cocurricular planners. (RJM)

Research on girls' development has found that girls see the world that coheres through human relationships rather than through systems of rules, and that 12 or 13 is a watershed age for girls, a time of "central relational crisis." As their bodies enter the physiological transformations that culminate in womanhood, they face an onslaught…