SciGirls Strategies is a National Science Foundation–funded project led by Twin Cities PBS (TPT) in partnership with St. Catherine University, the National Girls Collaborative, and XSci (The Experiential Science Education Research Collaborative) at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for STEM Learning. This three-year initiative aims to increase the number of high school girls recruited to and retained in fields where females are traditionally underrepresented: technical science, engineering, technology, and math (STEM) pathways. We seek to accomplish this goal by providing career and

Access to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields serves as a key entry point to economic mobility and civic enfranchisement. Such access must take seriously the intellectual power of the knowledge and practices of non-dominant youth. In our case, this has meant to shift epistemic authority in mathematics from academic institutions to young people themselves. This article is about why high school-aged students, from underrepresented groups, choose to participate in an out-of-school time program in which they teach younger children in the domains of mathematics and computer

Underrepresented populations such as women, African-Americans, and Latinos/as often come to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) careers by less traditional paths than White and Asian males. To better understand how and why women might shift toward STEM, particularly computer science, careers, we investigated the education and career direction of afterschool facilitators, primarily women of color in their twenties and thirties, who taught Build IT, an afterschool computer science curriculum for middle school girls. Many of these women indicated that implementing Build IT

Numerous studies have indicated a need for a diverse workforce that is more highly educated in STEM and ICT fields, and one that is capable of responding creatively to demands for continual innovation. This paper, in response, chronicles the implementation of the Digital Pathways (DP) program, a two-time ITEST recipient and an ongoing initiative of the Bay Area Video Coalition. DP has provided low-income, underrepresented minority young people with 180 contact hours of activities in digital media production to prepare them to pursue higher education and technology careers. A design-based

This paper focuses on the notable heightening of underrepresented students’ engagement in STEM education through project-based learning CincySTEM iTEST projects. The projects, funded by an iTEST NSF grant, were designed and facilitated by teachers at a new STEM urban public high school serving low-income African-American students. Student engagement conceptualized as a psychological process involving affective and behavioral participation in classroom activities was evaluated through a mixed-methods approach. Findings indicate that affective and behavioral participation was significantly