Increasing the Number of Women in the STEM Workforce
A recent journal article in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) entitled “Women 1.5 Times More Likely to Leave STEM Pipeline after Calculus Compared to Men: Lack of Mathematical Confidence a Potential Culprit”, by J. Ellis, B. Fosdick, and C. Rasmussen, had some fascinating information and conclusions:
In this study, the proportions of students who cited reasons for not entering Calculus II were comparable across men and women, except for one: “I do not believe I understand the ideas of Calculus I well enough to take Calculus II.” This lack of confidence was cited by 35% of women, and only 14% of men, all of whom originally intended on pursuing a STEM career. Women switching from STEM pathways are citing a lack of understanding of the material in Calculus I as a reason for not continuing their STEM studies significantly more often than men. An article by K. Piatek-Jimenez, “On the Persistence and Attrition of Women in Mathematics”, states that: “Confidence in mathematical ability may also be a possible reason why women do not choose to pursue mathematics. Women frequently report lower self-confidence in mathematics than their equally talented male peers. This trend is true even amongst the most mathematically talented students.” Lack of confidence plagues women in other fields as well. "The Confidence Gap", by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, cite a number of studies. Hewlett-Packard found that women applied for a promotion only when they believed they met 100 percent of the qualifications listed for the job; while men applied when they thought they could meet 60 percent of the job requirements. Brenda Major, a social psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, started studying the problem of self-perception decades ago. “I would set up a test where I’d ask men and women how they thought they were going to do on a variety of tasks.” She found that the men consistently overestimated their abilities and subsequent performance, and that the women routinely underestimated both, while the actual performances did not differ in quality. “It is one of the most consistent findings you can have.” Margie Warrell, in a recent Forbes article, “For Women To Rise We Must Close 'The Confidence Gap' wrote: “…wherever I’ve worked in the world, I’ve consistently that a fundamental lack of belief in our own value, worth and ability to achieve consistently tempers female ambition and holds women back." She cited an eight-year study by Wiebke Bleidorn that analyzed data from over 985,000 men and women across 48 countries, from Norway to New Zealand, Kuwait to South Korea, asking them to rate the phrase: “I see myself as someone who has high self-esteem”, and found that across the board – regardless of culture or country, men have higher self-esteem than women. “Math for Girls, Math for Boys”, by A.K. Whitney in the Atlantic, stated that only one in ten contestants in the International Math Olympiad are female and many teams have no girls at all. Last year’s U.S. Team, which took gold for the first time in 21 years, was all male. Sherry Gong, who in 2007 was the second American girl in International Math Olympiad history to get the gold medal, recalled getting a pep talk during a competition from her coach. “I thought I was doing really badly, but ... she said girls tend to underestimate how well they are doing.” What can we do to increase confidence and foster perseverance for all students to succeed in high-level mathematics and STEM studies? Programs to increase confidence and persistence, as well as STEM skills, are growing in STEM City (aka Flagstaff). Highlighted programs include: Girls on the Run (GOTR), celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, has a primary goal of increasing self-confidence in young women. See this STEM City blog by Marney Babbitt on how you can participate. Growth Mindset is being used by a number of teachers in Flagstaff including Elii Chapman, a math and science teacher at Flagstaff Junior Academy, and the runner up for the 2016 Coconino County Teacher of the Year. (Look up Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth to learn more.) All-Girl Events/Competitions including all girls’ math or chess tournaments is another way to reduce the social issues that come with young women in competitive environments with young men. The Flagstaff Chess Club will hold its 3rd Annual All Girls Chess Tournament in January, hosted by a strongly supportive Lowell Observatory staff, and including a lunchtime talk by a female astronomer. The Cactus-Pine Girl Scouts have held all girls engineering events, coding workshops, and after-school STEM activities for local students. With Math I Can is being promoted by FUSD math specialist Jane Gaun, and others. This is a pledge we can all take to not make negative comments about mathematics! INTEL Math and other math education courses are offered to local math teachers through FUSD and the Coconino County Educational Services Agency (CCESA). Cash for Calculators is an initiative of FUSD and the Greater Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce to encourage businesses to purchase graphing calculators for schools so students can use them during the year and be more prepared for the exams that require these calculators. Engineering is Elementary (EiE) has design challenges that encourage girls and all students to increase persistence, creativity, confidence, and more. The award-winning curricula from the Museum of Science Boston (MOS) is widely available in Flagstaff. FUSD has two EiE kits at each grade level in all ten elementary schools. Thanks to funding from the Arizona Community Fund of Flagstaff (ACFF), the CCESA has all 20 kits available for K-5 teachers in any school to check out after they have taken the free workshop on using the curricula. STEM City, with funding from ACFF, the W.L. Gore Foundation and the Ernest and Evelyn Chilson Fund, have four out-of-school time kits available to Girl Scout troops, STEM clubs, etc. The nationally-recognized Center for Science Teaching and Learning at NAU is working with Flagstaff's U.S. Geological Survey's Astrogeology Center and the MOS to create three new engineering units with an astrogeology theme and cutting-edge science. Ready.Set.Code is a Greater Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce initiative working to increase computer and app coding skills in students. Scott Hathcock and cohorts at the Chamber launched Ready.Set.Code with both “Hack the Class”, and the “Summer of Code” events, after least year’s initial coding camps at College America were such a success. Robotics Camps and Clubs are both growing in Flagstaff. The County Parks and Recreation Department held two lego robotics camps in June and has room available for their two upcoming camps the first week of August. The CocoNuts robotics team leads summer camps for students and has an upcoming camp for adults interested in coaching robotics. The camp is only $20 and is coming July 26 and 27th if you are interested! The Girl Scouts recently hosted a Video Game Design Workshop for 50 girls at NAU. Killip Elementary has a K-2 coding club, FJA has a middle school coding club, and we know that the many schools with robotics teams use coding to get those robots moving! STEM City has held two free Code.org workshops with master teacher Janice Mak, and also freely loans out instruction materials. STEM City also has engineering kits, bioscience kits, and more, to freely loan out to teachers and home-school parents. Coconino Community College now offers two engineering courses as well as advanced math and physics, and has an Engineering Pathways grant to increase engineering in middle schools, high schools and at CCC. Northern Arizona University has a higher percentage of women in science and engineering than most colleges and universities (data coming soon)! Please contact STEM City if you have programs you would like highlighted in a blog post or in the STEM Community e-letter. And thank you for all you do to increase both skills and confidence in our youth! Thank you to Melissa Sevigny of KNAU and the Arizona Science and Innovation Desk for the interview on this article and inspiring this post!
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Two STEM City Stars have received their advanced degrees from NAU. Sarah Burcher earned her Master's degree on April 20th and Aaron Tabor received his Doctorate on April 27th. Congratulations!
Aaron worked with Dr. Rob Kellar in both the NAU Tissue Engineering & Regenerative (TERM) Lab as well as at Development Engineering Sciences. His dissertation research was on using plate-rich-plasma on an electrospun collagen scaffold to aid in full thickness wound healing. Aaron also serves as an instructor at both Coconino Community College and Northern Arizona University! You can read more about Sarah's and Aaron's contributions to STEM City and Killip Elementary School in this post from just over a year ago!
Superbowl of STEM The 3rd Annual Flagstaff Community STEM Celebration kicked off the week on Monday, March 7th at the NAU Skydome with almost every school, STEM business, government agency, and non-profit in Flagstaff! You can relive the excitement with Flg4TV's 2 minute video here! High-Altitude Balloon Launch On Wednesday, March 9th, Teacher Kaci Heins and 100 NPA 6th graders sent their payload to over 106,000 feet on a high-altitude balloon from the Flagstaff Airport. Community Leader Bruce Sidlinger and his Aeronautics Engineering class from Flag High, Airport Director Barney Helmick, the Coconino Amateur Radio Club, the Civil Air Patrol, and many other community partners were there to assist. You can see images and hear the story from KNAU's science and technology field reporter Melissa Sevigny here. Women Executives in STEM Panel NAU hosted the panel on Thursday, March 10th. All of the women had connections to NAU and facilitator Elizabeth Glass recommended that the many students in attendance use their alumni network as they search career opportunities. AZ North Regional The Skydome was brimming again on Friday and Saturday with the CocoNuts and 52 other teams, for NAU's inaugural FIRST Robotics Arizona North Regional contest, which pitted robots against each other to try to take down a castle. You can read Corina Vanek's article on the event here. Microchip sponsored pit tours by volunteers from many of the teams, as well as a VIP luncheon that was well-attended by Flagstaff's government, business, and education leaders. FIRST, which stands for --- , is a non-profit founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway. It encourages students to pursue STEM and also develops skills in teamwork, problem-solving, creativity, and gracious professionalism. Congratulations to everyone on helping make STEM Week 2016 the best ever in Flagstaff STEM City!
Killlip Elementary School may have the youngest coders in town! Sheryl Wells, the Technology Integration Coach, began a K-2 computer coding club for their after-school STEM program this year. The students use engaging online computer programming "games" from Code.org. They also program a small robot called the Bee-Bot. The twenty students (including three kindergarteners) are already impressive coders. Each of the students can work at their own pace and on the challenges at their own level and interest area on the wide variety of programs available on the Code.org site. They work in teams to program the Bee-Bot and determine the best sequence of instructions for it to follow the path laid down for it on the classroom floor. The birds-eye view of two 2nd graders writing code for the Bee-Bot Congratulations to the Killip Coders, and please comment below if you know of other young coders in town!
Barnes & Noble bookstores hosted Mini-Maker Faires the weekend of November 6th - 8th. Scott Hathcock and Amanda Kristinat from the Greater Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce taught a coding workshop at our local store. The Chamber has been actively involved in increasing technology education in Flagstaff through two summer camps (see blog post here) and a Hack the Class initiative at Flagstaff Junior Academy and Killip Elementary School that is expanding to other schools as well.
Killip Elementary School's 5th grade students, with their teachers Jillian Hernandez, Tracy Blahut, and Katie Butterfield, traveled to Lake Mary to make connections between the geosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere they have been studying. The students were divided into four groups and rotated to the four "sphere" stations with experts at each of the spheres. Three of the experts also participated last year, showing great dedication to this educational endeavor! Erin Young, the Water Resources Manager for the City of Flagstaff, was the hydrology expert, linking the hydrosphere with the geosphere through observations between Lower and Upper Lake Mary. The students also discussed how earth materials control water flow to lakes and wells. Below, Clare Stielstra, a hydrogeologist with Montgomery and Associates in Tucson, represented the biosphere, helping students make solid connections between organisms and the air, water, and land that supports them and us. Student questions had her eliciting information from the students on how Earth is different than Mars. Meteorologist Lee Born, below, represented the atmosphere, and helped students understand connections between atmospheric phenomena including natural disasters like floods and hurricanes, and the changes they can create on earth that impact the other spheres. Students took good notes as they will be writing reports on natural disasters as a culminating part of this unit. Vaden Aldridge, a recent graduate of NAU with a MS in geology, represented the geosphere. Vaden led lively discussions on how the geosphere impacted the other spheres and vice versa. Students had to think critically about when the biosphere becomes geosphere as fossils are formed, or as fossil fuels are buried, and then unearthed and burned becoming atmosphere! The students understanding of how the spheres interacted truly developed as they moved through the four stations. Many thanks to our local experts for helping our Flagstaff students make connections!
All four 4th grade classes at Killip Elementary School spent Monday, December 1st at Bearizona as an exciting component of their unit on Plant and Animal Structure and Function. Students were divided into six groups based on the animals they are researching: Black Bear, Javelina, Bobcat, Porcupine, River Otter and Red Fox. Shelly Shepherd from Arizona Game and Fish spent the day with each of the six groups, observing the animals, sharing information and answering questions. All the students were able to take the driving tour of the park and see the larger animals from the bus, as well as observe all the animals more closely in the contained habitat area. The students asked insightful questions and took copious notes. Thank you, Shelly!
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