According to the 2004 National Assessment of Educational Progress, males who have made it through 12 years of school have significantly poorer reading skills than their female peers. In every age group, boys have been scoring lower than girls annually for more than three decades on U.S. Department of Education reading tests. The longer boys are in school, the wider the reading gender gap becomes. Boy-friendly instructional strategies grounded in research can help increase overall student achievement. In this article, the author describes strategies that will help teachers to improve the reading scores of boys. Brain research, when combined with research from other fields--education, gender differences, psychology, and sociology--can effectively inform gender-based instructional strategies that boost test scores.