Girls and Women in STEM in Asia: UNESCO Report

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki 

Curriki was very pleased to be in attendance on March 9th when UNESCO’s Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education unveiled their report on girls and women in STEM fields, at the Bangkok Science Center for Education in Thailand.

Titled “A Complex Formula: Girls and Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics in Asia”, the report examines the status of girls studying math, science and engineering subjects in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education, and the current state of employment for women in STEM fields. The report was based on in-depth country studies from Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, the Republic of Korea and Viet Nam, in conjunction with other statistics from the region. The full 122-page report is freely available here on the UNESCO Bangkok web site.

Key Findings 

The highest level message of the report is that “early and targeted intervention through education can greatly facilitate girls’ and women’s increased participation in STEM fields”.

While there are a number of interesting variations among the 7 countries studied, substantial consistency was found across a number of key findings.

• Overall there is a shortage of talent on STEM fields in the Asia-Pacific region.
• Globally, fewer than 30% of STEM researchers are women.
• Gender differences in STEM topics become especially apparent around age 15, during secondary school education.
• The gender gap at the secondary level correlates with under-representation of women in STEM during higher education and in the workforce.
• Within the STEM fields, both in higher education and in the workforce, women tend to be found primarily in biology, chemistry and medicine.
• Women are very lightly represented in physics, engineering and computer science/IT.
• These latter fields are more math-intensive, and in school girls report more anxiety around, and lower interest levels in, mathematics.
• There are fewer female teachers in STEM, implying fewer role models for girls.
• Gender stereotypes are widespread in teaching and learning materials for STEM subjects.

Recommendations

A few of the recommendations from the report are:

“Teacher education and policies on recruitment must ensure a fair representation of both male and female teachers in all subjects, including mathematics and science, at all levels if education.

• Teacher education… should be transformed to ensure that teachers are trained in gender-responsive teaching strategies.
• Promoting more female role models in STEM, whether female teachers…female students and faculty members in higher education, and more broadly more women working in STEM fields, is an important strategy.

Curricula and learning materials should undergo further rigorous review from a gender perspective to ensure that they do not perpetuate gender stereotypes.”

Curriki is particularly interested in the last of these recommendations. We have tens of thousands of STEM materials at www.curriki.org, available for free, to support STEM education for girls and boys in Asia and around the world. We encourage you to upload STEM materials onto the Curriki web site, especially those that show equal participation of girls and boys in STEM learning roles, across the various disciplines, and that reflect both men and women as role models, equally. If you have such materials to upload, Curriki and our large, global educator and learner community will be most appreciative.

Physics Resources for the Flipped Classroom

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

Physics is not only interesting, but also helps us to understand how things work – whether it’s understanding kinetic energy in a looping roller coaster, or why your singing voice sounds so much better in the shower.

At Curriki, we have thousands of resources for teaching and learning physics. Here are a few of our favorites that can be used as part of the Flipped Classroom:

Coaster Creator
Learn the physics of roller coasters with this free, online game that allows students to explore kinetic and potential energy. Per Curriki Member Anna, “This is a great visual aid for students to understand potential and kinetic energy. In addition, it is engaging students to create a roller coaster on their own in order to experiment on what factors affect the change in energy.”

Full Physics Course from Sal Khan
You’ll find about 100 straightforward 10 – 15 minute tutorial videos comprised of simple graphics and personable narration, covering all topics in a complete high school or college course in Physics.

Physics Videos from STEMbite
These short video clips are created by online science and math teacher, Andrew Vanden Heuvel, from Michigan, USA. Using Google Glass he makes  bite-sized videos highlighting the science in our everyday lives. The extensive Physics collection features such engaging topics as the physics involved in tennis, playrooms, and even singing in the shower!

The Physics of Sailing
Inspired by the America’s World Cup, Curriki just announced a new project-based learning (PBL) course that will be available shortly called The Physics of Sailing. Thanks to a grant from Oracle Corporation, the project will be developed by Curriki’s PBL team with contributions from sailing experts from Oracle Team USA.

Do us a favor please and share this with someone who’s interested in physics.

Girls and STEM: Bias begins with Toddlers?

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

Even when girls and boys demonstrate similar actual competence levels in math, during the early school years, boys are more confident about their math skills. Already by kindergarten, boys have more interest in pursuing math learning than do girls.

STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) related jobs are some of the best jobs out there, and increasingly important in our technology-driven economy. But the percentage of women in many STEM jobs remains very low. Only about 1/4 of STEM jobs in the U.S. are filled by women. Women’s share of computer jobs has actually been falling in recent years. At present, only 18% of U.S. computer science majors are women.

According to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, women in STEM professions earn 33% more than those in other fields.

It’s generally understood that by school age, girls receive less encouragement in math and science pursuits than do boys, from both parents and teachers. What’s interesting is that it now seems this bias starts from a very early age, less than the age of 2 years!

In a study entitled “Gender Biases in Early Number Exposure to Preschool-Aged Children”, published in 2011 in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, researchers at the University of Delaware found that mothers spent fully twice as much time talking to their sons about numbers and numeric concepts as they did with their daughters! The average age of the children in the study was only 22 months, for both the boys and the girls.

Here’s a related set of resources on Curriki – Math for Girls. This link includes a series of videos featuring women working in mathematics and presenting pieces of math that excited them when they were in middle and high school.

Help girls realize that math and sciences education is not just for the boys. Even if they don’t end up pursuing STEM careers, there is a lot of useful and interesting knowledge to be gained in studying math, science and engineering topics. The use of math in traditionally non-STEM careers, such as finance and marketing, is only increasing. And maybe they are better at math than they think they are!

http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_jpinto/MathforGirls

You’ll also find other resources at this link including profiles of women in Math, and in STEM careers in general.

References:

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/09/10/2599491/women-stem/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alicia-chang/bridging-the-gender-gap-encouraging-girls-in-stem_b_4508787.html

http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/women

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/mothers-talk-less-to-young-daughters-about-math/?_r=0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_11rwb4vEc#t=40 – Girls in STEM: A New Generation of Women in Science

10 Most Popular Teaching Resources in 2013

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

Whether you teach math or language arts, Curriki offers thousands of free resources to help with lesson planning.  Here are Curriki’s ten most popular resources this year. I encourage you to check them out!

1. Grammar Collection by Rob Lucas – This is an extremely rich resource offering a complete unit on teaching grammar in a fun way. Inclusion of a version of Mad Libs and a project requiring students to collaborate in a small group presentation offers as much creativity for teaching grammar as possible. A humorous poem in worksheet form makes the lesson engaging and interesting. A scoring guide for the presentation makes the unit meaningful and understandable to students.

2. Developing Biology by Rob Lucas – This collection contains a wide variety of activities, labs, slide shows and worksheets on the topics of Cells, Cellular Transport, DNA, Photosynthesis & Respiration, Mitosis & Meiosis, Genetics, Evolution, and Classification. Much of the material is suitable for both middle school and high school students, although some of the pieces (such as the Photosynthesis PowerPoint presentation) have complex material better suited for more advanced biology classes.

3. Physics by Khan Academy – This collection contains about 100 videos, covering all topics in a complete high school or college course in Physics. Many of the videos demonstrate solutions to sample problems. This is excellent primary material for long distance learning, or rich supplementary material for any physics course.

4. Math eTextbooks – Free mathematics textbooks ranging from calculus and statistics and probability, to geometry and trigonometry.

5. Teaching Fractions – This highly-rated collection of resources includes videos and lessons for teaching fractions.

6. Tuck Everlasting Novel Study by Holly Mercado – This resource provides an excellent 25 day unit on the novel Tuck Everlasting. With an emphasis on questioning, particularly question-answer relationships, the novel study materials guide students to develop critical thinking skills.  All materials like question cards, game instructions, graphic organizers, rubrics, templates for character development, vocabulary development, etc., are included in this thorough, comprehensive, highly usable resource.

7. Grammar Lessons, Practice and Worksheets – This site offers general writing, research writing, and ELL resources. Each section is well developed and contains a wide variety of information and resources to help students become excellent writers.

8. Geometry Bingo This is a bingo game involving visuals to help students learn and identify key vocabulary for geometry on the 5th and 6th grade levels.

9. Getting Started with Java Using Alice – This workshop engages students with little or no programming experience to learn basic Java programming concepts. Participants use Carnegie Mellon’s Alice* platform to do something fun – create animated stories, movies and games.

10. Word Search Games and Other Fun English language activities – This web site is for people studying English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL). There are quizzes, word games, word puzzles, proverbs, slang expressions, anagrams, a random-sentence generator and other computer assisted language learning activities.

 

Nobel Prizes Awarded for 2013

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

Somewhere around the world, in one of your classrooms, there is a future Nobel Prize winner in the making! Help inspire them and all your other students toward future successes, great and small. Curriki has thousands of resources related to the disciplines in which the Nobel Prizes are awarded.

These most prestigious of prizes are awarded each year in accordance with the will of Alfred Nobel, who was born in Sweden 180 years ago. An inventor, chemist, and engineer, he is best known as the inventor of dynamite; when he died in 1896 he had 355 patents in his name. The Nobel committee which decides on the awards in the various categories is based in Sweden. An exception is that the Peace Prize is selected by a committee based in Norway. Prizes are awarded at the discretion of the committees in the categories of Chemistry, Physics, Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics.

Alfred Nobel

For this year, awards have been made as follows:

Chemistry – Drs. Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel were awarded the Chemistry Prize for advances in molecular modeling using high performance computers. You can find around 745 chemistry resources on Curriki at http://www.curriki.org/welcome/resources-curricula/ (by searching on Science / Chemistry).

Peter Higgs (image credit: Gert-Martin Greuel)

Physics – Drs. Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were awarded the Physics Prize for their Higgs boson prediction. The new particle, named for Higgs, was discovered in 2012 after decades of searching and is the mechanism providing mass to other fundamental particles (such as quarks, electrons). You can find 1287 physics resources on Curriki.

Medicine – Drs. James Rothman, Randy Sheckman and Thomas Sudhof were awarded the prize in Medicine for increasing our understanding of transport mechanisms inside cells. There are around 1288 health resources on Curriki.

Too Much Happiness, short stories by Alice Munro

Literature – The Literature Prize was awarded to Alice Munro, a Canadian, for her contemporary short stories. You can find around 1520 literature resources on Curriki.

Peace – The Peace Prize for 2013 has been awarded to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons “for its extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons”. The OPCW is supported by the United Nations, and according to the NY Times “The organization’s mission is to act as a watchdog in carrying out the Chemical Weapons Convention, which came into force in 1997 with four aims: to destroy all chemical weapons under international verification, to prevent the creation of new chemical weapons, to help countries protect themselves against chemical attack, and to foster international cooperation in the peaceful use of chemistry. Since its creation, the organization has sent experts to carry out 5,000 inspections in 86 countries..” There are a number of resources on issues around peace on Curriki, but we’d like to see more, please contribute in this category if you are able.

Economics – The Economics Prize is not yet announced as this blog goes to press. There are over 1000 economics-related resources on Curriki.

These several thousands of open educational resources freely available on Curriki may help you inspire a future Nobel Prize winner, or if not, at least can help to inspire and educate a future great scientist, author, or contributor to world peace. And if you can add to the collections in any of these categories, please do!

2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for Discovery of Accelerating Universe

 

 

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was announced on October 4. The new Nobel laureates, Drs. Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt, were the leaders of two separate competing teams studying distant supernovae as cosmological indicators. Their research produced the first clear evidence of an accelerating universe in 1998. Not only is our universe as a whole expanding rapidly as a result of the Big Bang, it is in fact speeding up!

Accelerating Universe

Cosmology is the study of the properties of the universe on the largest scales of space and time. Supernovae are exploding stars at the ends of their lives. The two teams introduced new automated search techniques to find enough of the right kind of supernovae to achieve their results.

The kind they searched for, Type 1a, all have the same mass and same brightness, which makes them very useful as so-called standard candles. Once we know the absolute brightness, which is known for this type, we can calculate the distance.

Measuring distance in this way allows a cosmological test of the overall properties of the universe including whether the expansion is slowing down, as was originally expected by the vast majority of the astronomical community, or in fact whether the expansion was speeding up. The big surprise was that the expansion rate from the original Big Bang has stopped slowing down due to gravity and has instead been accelerating for several billion years! This requires new physics.

Amazingly, Einstein added a term to his equations of General Relativity early in the 20^th century, even before the Big Bang itself was discovered – a term which can explain the behavior. Most of the mass-energy content of the universe appears to reside in this so-called dark energy, which is the irreducible energy of a vacuum. Empty space is not empty!

As a result our universe is slated to expand in an exponential fashion for trillions of years and more. This is rather like the continuing inflation of prices, compounding upon itself.

We honor the achievements of Drs. Perlmutter, Riess, and Schmidt and of their research teams in increasing our understanding of our universe and its underlying physics. Interestingly, only a few weeks before the award, a very important supernova in the nearby M101 galaxy was discovered, and it is also a Type 1a. Perhaps this celestial fireworks display was in celebration of their Nobel Prize?

Resources:

http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1633 (Telephone interview with Dr. Adam Reiss)

http://supernova.lbl.gov/ (Supernova Cosmology Project)

http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_perrenod/DarkEnergy-Whatisit (Introduction to Dark Energy)

http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_perrenod/DarkEnergyaudiofromYale  (Audio from Yale University on Dark Energy)