A review of 1.6 million students has failed to find any advantages to single-sex education, says the former president of American Psychological Association Diane Halpern.

Professor Halpern, who has spent three decades researching the psychology of single-sex education, will present the keynote address at the Australian Psychological Society Congress in Melbourne on Wednesday.

The former psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College will draw on the work of her American Psychological Association colleague, Janet Hyde, who undertook a meta-analysis of 184 studies of more than 1.6 million students from K-12 schools between 1968 and 2013.

"Proponents of single-sex schools argue that separating boys and girls increases students' achievement and academic interest," Dr Hyde said in the 2014 study. "Our comprehensive analysis of the data shows that these advantages are trivial and, in many cases, non-existent."