It is crucial that educator training provide future educators with the skills and strategies to ensure gender-fair education for girls and boys from all cultures. To investigate the effect of gender bias on students, the differences between teachers in urban and rural settings must be examined. This descriptive study sought to determine the practices of elementary teachers in rural classroom situations in five South Central Missouri schools regarding gender equity as perceived by administrators, teachers, and students. The study examined interactions between teacher and student, along with participants' perceptions. In each school, two classrooms were used, and through selected random sampling, 173 students in grades 3-8 were surveyed. The principal selected the classrooms that were observed according to instructional expertise of the teacher; each teacher observed was deemed to be a master teacher based upon performance as measured by the state performance based teacher evaluations. Ten teachers and five principals were included in the surveys, observations, and interviews. Findings suggest that teachers gave females more praise while calling on males more often and asking males more higher order thinking skill questions. Thus, male students might receive more negative attention than females. Students' perceptions of which gender received more teacher attention duplicated the gender of the student. Principals overwhelmingly perceived that interactions in their "best teachers" classrooms would almost always be equal, but observations did not support that perception. While the teacher's perceptions paralleled the composition of the class regarding gender, their perceptions did not reflect the actual observed interactions. Contains 5 tables of data and 28 references. (BT)