The progress that girls made in the STEM classes have become opposite from the pandemic

The school teacher in the Dallas region had stressed that in the construction process, there is nothing like errors. Only iterations. Thus, the girls dug in the block of blocks and released an orange card. They held it on the sensor and the machine set in motion.

“Oh! Oh, it reacts differently to different colors,” said the sixth year Sofia Cruz.

In the first year of Zavala as a school of choice, technology, engineering and mathematics, the school recruited a sixth year class which is half of the girls. The heads of school hope that the girls will stick to STEM fields. In the upper notes of De Zavala – whose students joined before it was a STEM school – certain elective STEM courses have only one registered girl.

The efforts to fill the gap between boys and girls in the STEM classes reproduce after losing steam nationwide during the chaos of the COVVI-19 pandemic. Schools have complete work in advance to compensate for the girls on the ground lost, both in interest and performance.

In the years preceding the pandemic, the gap between the sexes has almost concluded. But in a few years, the girls have lost all the field they had won in the results of mathematics tests in the previous decade, according to an Associated Press analysis. While the scores of the boys also suffered during the cocoat, they recovered faster than the girls, widening the gap between the sexes.

While learning had left online, special programs to hire girls detached – and schools were slow to restart them. Zoom School has also focused on heart learning, a technique based on rehearsal which, according to some experts, can promote boys, instead of teaching students to solve problems in different ways, which can benefit girls.

Old practices and prejudices have probably reappeared during the pandemic, said Michelle Stie, vice-president of the National Math and Science Initiative.

“Let’s just call it what it is,” said Stie. “When the company is disrupted, you fall back into bad diagrams.”

The pandemic has changed progress towards the gender gap commission

In most school districts of the 2008-2009 school year, boys had higher mathematics scores on standardized tests than girls, according to AP analysis, which examined scores over 15 years in more than 5,000 school districts. It was based on the results of average tests for third year students in the eighth year in 33 states, compiled by the University of Stanford University.

A decade later, the girls had not only caught up, they were ahead: just over half of the districts had higher mathematics for girls.

In a few years of the pandemic, parity has disappeared. In 2023-2024, boys have surpassed girls in mathematics on average in nearly nine out of 10 districts.

A distinct study by NWEA, a research company in education, revealed that the gaps between boys and girls in science and mathematics on national assessments went from practically nonexistent in 2019 thanks to boys around 2022.

Studies have indicated that the girls reported higher levels of anxiety and depression during the pandemic, as well as more caretaker charges than boys, but the drop in academic performance did not appear outside the rod. The girls surpassed the boys while reading in almost all the country’s districts before the pandemic and continued to do so thereafter.

“It was not something like Covid happened and the girls collapsed,” said Megan Kuhfeld, one of the authors of the NWEA study.

Initiatives to strengthen girls’ confidence in the lost traction of girls

In the years preceding the pandemic, teaching practices have moved to highlight the speed, competition and memorization by heart. Thanks to new study program standards, schools have moved to research -supported methods that have stressed how to think flexibly to solve problems and how to solve conceptually digital problems.

The educators also favored participation in STEM subjects and in programs that have strengthened the confidence of girls, including parascolia that emphasized practical learning and abstract concepts connected to real applications.

When the STEM courses had a large male inscription, the Superintendent Kenny Rodrequez noticed that the girls lost interest while the boys dominate the discussions in class in his schools of Grandview C-4 District outside of Kansas City. The girls were much more committed after the district moved part of its practical introductory rod program to lower levels and with balanced sex classes, he said.

When the schools closed its doors for the pandemic, the district had to focus on learning distance work. When the prices in person resumed, some of the teachers had left and new ones had to be trained in the program, said Rodrequez.

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

Prejudices against girls in stem persist

Despite changes in societal perceptions, a bias against girls persists in scientific and mathematical matters, according to teachers, administrators and defenders. It becomes a message that girls can internalize on their own capacities, they say, even at a very young age.

In his third year class in Washington, DC, Professor Raphael Bonhomme begins the year with an exercise where students break down what makes their identity. Girls rarely describe themselves as good at mathematics. Already, some say that they are “not mathematics”.

“I’m like, you are 8 years old,” he said. “What are you talking about:” I’m not mathematics? ” »»

Girls may also have been more sensitive to changes in teaching methods stimulated by the pandemic, said Janine Remillard, professor of mathematics education at the University of Pennsylvania. Research has revealed that girls tend to prefer learning things related to real examples, while boys generally do better in a competitive environment.

“What the teachers told me during Covid is the first thing to do are all these processes of meaning creation,” she said.

A school district renews its commitment

At Zavala Middle School in Irving, the STEM program is part of a push that aims to strengthen curiosity, resilience and problem solving on all subjects.

Leaving the pandemic, Irving schools had to make a renewed investment in training for teachers, said Erin O’Connor, a specialist in STEM and innovation.

Last year, the district also piloted a new scientific program of Lego education. The lesson involving Zavala’s machine, for example, made students known on kinetic energy. The fifth year students learned genetics by building dinosaurs and their offspring with Lego blocks, identifying the shared features.

“He is only rebuilding the culture of, we want to build critical thinkers and problem solvers,” said O’Connor.

Tenisha Willis teacher recently led second -year students at the Townley elementary school in Irving by building a machine that would push blocks in a container. She knelt next to three girls who struggled.

They tried to add a board to the machine body of the machine, but the blocks did not move enough. A girl became frustrated, but Willis was patient. She asked what they could try, if they could turn some parts. The girls still ran the machine. This time it worked.

“Sometimes we can’t give up,” said Willis. “Sometimes we already have a solution. We just have to adjust it a little.”

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Lurye reported to Philadelphia. Todd Feathers contributed to New York reports.

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