Northwest Collaborative Goes National, Linking

STEM Programs for Girls

Your friend, "Anita," is a pregnant teen who thinks nothing of drinking alcoholic beverages. What advice would you give her?

That question was the "hook" for a lunchtime science program for under-achieving young women at an inner-city Seattle high school. During the course of two weeks, the teens experimented with the effect of alcohol on fish eggs and plainly saw what even mild alcohol levels did to the size and color of the embryos inside the transparent eggs.

By the end of the course, the students were able to speak authoritatively about prenatal health issues. And, they also came away with an enthusiasm for science that—in some cases—translated into higher grades and greater involvement in the classroom.

The program organizers, high school biology teacher Rebecca Shope and University of Washington researcher Jessica Thompson, agree that the collaboration "brought together research and practice in a way that was both creative and iterative." And, they say, they wouldn't have done it without the motivation and financial boost they got from a mini-grant from the Northwest Girls Collaborative Project (NWGCP).

Shope and Thompson's "lunchtime science" is just one of more than two dozen STEM (or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) programs in Oregon and Washington that received support from NWGCP. The collaborative—a partnership between the Puget Sound Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology; Washington MESA (Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement); and the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory—offers girl-serving STEM organizations a platform for networking, collaborating, and sharing resources. It also provides $1,000 mini-grants to encourage gender equity programs to work together. The project has proven so successful that the National Science Foundation is now funding national replication of the model.

Three areas have been chosen for the expansion effort: Indiana, California, and a northeast collaborative serving Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. Each of those locations has extensive, though uncoordinated, activity in support of girls in STEM.

Puget Sound and NWREL staff members will train the regional leaders and provide continuing technical assistance to help them identify strategic partners and form collaborative networks.

Project Director Karen Peterson, of the Puget Sound Center, acknowledges that progress has been made in gender equity, but there are still gaps—especially in disciplines such as computer science and biotechnology. One statistic illustrating the problem is that women make up 45 percent of the U.S. workforce yet hold just 12 percent of the science and engineering jobs. "Clearly these projects can learn from one another, but more important, [they] can further the larger goal of eliminating the gender gap in STEM areas," she says.