Girls in science

Three Centreville middle school girls showed off their jewelry projects Saturday to attendees of the second Sally Ride Science Festival as they stood in a booth, their lab book nearby.

Amanda Taylor, Emily Edwards and Jessica Sugarman were wearing lighted butterfly earrings, cross necklaces and flower-decorated silver rings. They had applied fundamental electronics principles to create a complete circuit in the jewelry pieces, using two small watch batteries connected by wires to light-emitting diodes.

“We wanted to make something more for the girls, because the boys have all of this electrical stuff,” Emily said during the festival, held at George Mason University in Fairfax.

Emily, 14, helped the five-member team design an electronics kit catered to girls, with instructions and materials for making light-up jewelry, desktop fans, flashlights, musical jewelry books and lighted picture frames.

The team entered the kit in the second-annual TOYchallenge Regional Showcase, a toy- and game-design competition held at George Mason University for middle-school-age students and a precursor to the July 8 National Showcase at the San Diego Aerospace Museum. Eight teams, which are required to be at least 50 percent girls, participated.

“You can buy this stuff anywhere, but it’s more fun to put it together,” Emily said.

Six hundred girls in the fifth to eighth grades attended the Sally Ride Science Festival, a daylong festival designed to encourage girls’ interest in science, math and technology.

The festival, open to both students and adults, started with a street fair with 25 exhibits and hands-on activities, followed by a keynote speech given by Ms. Ride, America’s first female astronaut and the founder of the festival.

“There are lots and lots of opportunities for you in science and engineering,” Ms. Ride said during the keynote address. “When I was a little girl, I always dreamed of flying in space and, amazingly, that dream came true for me.”

Ms. Ride, who holds a doctorate in physics, said she grew up playing with a chemistry set, a microscope and her dog and added that her favorite subject in school was science. She applied to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration after seeing an ad in Stanford University’s newspaper. The ad said NASA was accepting applications for its astronaut corps, including from women, a first for the agency.

Thirty-five people, including six women, made the cut out of 8,000 applicants.

Ms. Ride flew on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983 and again in 1984 to conduct experiments and deploy communications satellites. Six years later, she joined the University of California at San Diego as a professor of physics. There, she directed the California Space Institute. In 2000, she founded Imaginary Lines Inc. to motivate and support girls in math, science and technology through events, programs and activities. The company, along with Smith College and Hasbro Inc., created the TOYchallenge.

“Frankly, I never planned on being an astronaut,” Ms. Ride said.

She is among the women who make up 19 percent of the technical work force, though eight of the 10 fastest-growing careers are related to science and technology, according to information provided by Imaginary Lines.

An equal number of boys and girls are interested in math and science in the elementary grades, but by the sixth grade, girls begin to disengage from the two subjects, the company says, using data from commission reports and the National Center for Education Statistics published in 2000.

That is not the case for 14-year-old Katte McGowan, a middle school student in Vienna who plans to be a marine biologist or a doctor. She attended a Discovery Workshop on submarines, knowing she wants to ride in one someday.

“I didn’t know women couldn’t be in Navy submarines, and I hope that changes, because I think it would be cool to work in a submarine,” Katte said.

Katte and the other festival participants could choose to attend two of 22 workshops given by female professionals, including veterinarians, astronomers, microbiologists and engineers, after the keynote speech.

“When you expose someone at a young age, you increase awareness of the variety of opportunities in the high-tech world,” said Denise Saiki, systems engineer and director of technical operations at Lockheed Martin in Manassas. She led the workshop “Exploring Underwater Worlds: Sonar and Submarines.”

Math and science are involved “in almost every job, and you need a head start in it when you’re younger so you understand it better,” said 11-year-old Amber Frollini of Manassas.

Metro-area assessment tests are showing that girls are taking an interest in math and science at all grade levels.

Maryland girls test higher than boys in math and science, and even more so in reading and the language arts, says Rocco Ferretti, principal at Central Elementary School in Anne Arundel County. The Maryland State Department of Education referred questions about academic performance and gender to Mr. Ferretti, who has worked on the issue.

The gap in the four subject areas develops as early as the first grade and continues through the elementary grades across the school district, he says.

“It’s as remarkable as a 20-point difference in past assessments,” he says. “That has held steady almost forever. Even when there are discrepancies, there are mild discrepancies.”

Mr. Ferretti says he expects the discrepancies to continue “until we start attending to it aggressively. We don’t hold the boys up to high expectations, as we should. Culturally, in this country, we say, ’Boys will be boys.’”

He does not think “the work or the curriculum has changed in any way that is more advantageous to gender,” he says. “There may be more cultural awareness to it, but there is not gender awareness.”

At the high school level, the gender gap becomes less pronounced, says William Reinhard, public spokesman for the Maryland State Department of Education. “In math and science, the scores are pretty similar,” he says. “Boys start to do better in math and science as they get into high school.

However, boys test slightly better than girls on their SATs in both the math and verbal sections, Mr. Reinhard says.

“It could be a statistical anomaly — that there’s more girls going on to college than boys,” he says.

Boys and girls tested in Virginia public schools perform similarly in math and science. “We really don’t have a gender gap in terms of our [Standards of Learning] tests between male and female students, nor does there appear to be a gender gap with the [National Assessment Educational Progress],” says Julie Grimes, public information specialist with the Virginia Department of Education.

The SOLs have been given in Virginia schools since 1998, the NAEP, or Nation’s Report Card, since 2000 in science and last year in math. The Board of Education approved the SOL curriculum in 1995, the latest major curriculum change for the state.

“These are the skills and knowledge that students going through the Virginia public school system need to know,” Ms. Grimes says. “Based on the data we have, I see no indication of a gender gap in math or science.”

Girls attending D.C. Public Schools “outperform our boys on standardized tests,” says Bill Caritj, assistant superintendent for educational accountability for the school district. “It is fairly consistent across grade levels and across subjects.”