The progress made by girls in STEM chapters has gone back from the epidemic

The teacher at the Dallas School confirmed that in the construction process, there is nothing like errors. Repetition only. So the girls again dug in the bloc box and pulled an orange card. They held it on the sensor and the machine began to move.

“Oh! Oh, it interacts differently with different colors,” said Sofia Cruz in the sixth grade.

In the first year of De Zavala as an option school that focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the school employed a class in the sixth grade, which is half of the girls. School leaders hope that girls will adhere to STEM fields. In the higher degrees of De Zavala – to which its students joined before the STEM school – some of STEM’s optional classes have only one girl registered.

The efforts made to fill the gap between boys and girls in the STEM classes are captured after the country’s vapor losing during the chaos of the Covid-19s. Schools have a large -scale action in the foreground to compensate for land girls lost, in both attention and performance.

In the years before the epidemic, the gender gap was almost closed. But within a few years, girls lost all the reasons they gained in the degrees of mathematics test during the previous decade, according to the Associated Press analysis. While boys also suffered during Covid, they recovered faster than girls, expanding the gender gap.

With the passage of online learning, the special programs for involving girls were lacking – schools were slow to restart them. Enlargement The school also confirmed ROTE Learning, a technique that relies on repetition that some experts believe that boys may prefer boys, rather than teaching students to solve problems in different ways, which may benefit girls.

Michel State, Vice President of the National Initiative for Mathematics and Science, said that old practices and biases that are likely to be repeated during the epidemic.

“Let’s just call it what it is,” said City. “When society is disrupted, it returns to bad patterns.”

The epidemic progresss towards bridging the gender gap

In most educational areas in the 2008-2009 academic year, boys had higher degrees of mathematics in unified tests of girls, according to the AP analysis, which has searched for 15 years in more than 5,000 school provinces. It was based on the average test score for third to eighth students in 33 states, collected by the educational opportunities project at Stanford University.

After a decade, the girls not only occurred, but were at the forefront: more than half of the areas were a few mathematics averages for girls.

Within a few years of the epidemic, the equivalence disappeared. In 2023-2024, boys on average surpassed girls in mathematics in nearly nine out of 10 regions.

A separate study conducted by NWEA, an educational research company, found gaps between boys and girls in science and mathematics in national assessments from its absence in 2019 to boys around 2022.

Studies have indicated that girls reported higher levels of anxiety and depression during the epidemic, in addition to more burdens care than boys, but the decline in academic performance did not appear outside STEM. Girls outperformed boys in reading almost every region in the country before the epidemic and continued to do so.

“It was not like Covid, and girls have just collapsed,” said Megan Cooing, one of the authors of the NWEA study.

Initiatives to enhance girls’ confidence in STEM lost traction

In the years before the epidemic, teaching practices turned into emphasis on speed, competition and memorization by heart. Through the criteria of new curricula, schools moved towards the methods supported by the research, which emphasized how to think about the flexibility to solve problems and how to address digital problems in theory.

Teachers also encouraged participating in STEM topics and programs that have strengthened the confidence of girls, including the curricula that confirmed practical learning and abstract concepts associated with real life applications.

When STEM courses had large records for males, the supervisor Kenny Rodriezer noticed that the girls lost his attention while boys dominated discussions in the classroom in his schools in the GrandView C-4 outside Kansas City. He said that the girls were more involved after the region moved some preliminary training curricula to low levels and balanced classes by sex.

When schools closed the epidemic, the boycott had to focus on making learning work remotely. Rodrigat said that when he resumed the personal classes, some teachers had left, and new teachers had to be trained in the curriculum.

“Whenever there is a crisis, we return to what we knew,” said Rodriguez.

The bias against girls continues at STEM

Despite the transformations in community perceptions, the bias against girls in science and mathematics remains, according to teachers, administrators and preachers. They say it becomes a message that girls can accommodate about their own capabilities, even at a very early age.

In the third semester in Washington, DC, the teacher Rafael Bonhoum begins with an exercise as students dismantle their identity. Girls themselves rarely describe themselves as good in mathematics. Indeed, some say they are “not a person in mathematics.”

He said: “I am like, you are 8 years old.” “What are you talking about,” I am not a person in mathematics? ”

Janine Remillard, a professor of mathematics education at the University of Pennsylvania, said girls may also be more sensitive to changes in the educational methods stimulated by the epidemic. Research has found that girls prefer to learn things associated with realistic examples, while boys generally do better in a competitive environment.

She said: “What teachers have told me during Covid is the first thing that he goes to is all these sensation processes.”

The school area renews its commitment

At Di Zavala Intermediate School in Irfing, STEM is part of a batch aimed at building curiosity, flexibility and solving problems through themes.

Irene Okonor, an innovation specialist in STEM and innovation there.

Last year, the region also experienced a new scientific curriculum. For example, the lesson that includes the device in De Zavala, may learn students about kinetic energy. Fifth grade students learned about genetics by building dinosaurs and their offspring with LEGO’s blocks, with the identification of common features.

“It is merely rebuilding a culture, we want to build critical and halal thinkers,” said Okonor.

Teacher Tinisha Willis recently led the second grade students at Irving Townley Elementary School by building a machine that would push blocks into a container. I kneel next to three girls who were fighting.

Try to add a panel to the wheel wheel body, but the blocks did not move enough. One frustrated girl grew up, but Willis was patient. I asked what they could try, whether they could turn some parts around them. Girls ran the device again. This time, I worked.

“Sometimes we cannot surrender,” Willis said. “Sometimes we already have a solution. We just have to set it a little.”

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Lori mentioned from Philadelphia. Todd Rishat reports from New York.

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