Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships Blog

The National Science Foundation hopes to jump-start women’s involvement in STEM fields by awarding $250,000 to create a Fast-Track Math for Women program at Sacramento State in California.

This K-12 program provides public school math teachers and community college professors with techniques to utilize in the classroom such as “creating a friendlier environment for female students and encouraging them to do well in math,” according to Program Researcher and Sociology Professor Mridula Udayagiri.

“If a woman or anybody is going to go to these technical fields”, Director of Sacramento State’s Mathematics Engineering and Science Achievement program, Madeline Fish, said, “ the key classes that they have to do well in and keep taking are math classes.”

Educators dedicated to the program trust that Fast-Track will raise awareness of gender issues in the classroom, especially among women in STEM fields.

“We believe that a lot of students, after taking a lot of years in math, very often end up with gaps in their math education, and those gaps make it impossible for them to really be math thinkers,” Fish said. “We have a math program that we think can help repair those gaps. What we’re doing is we’re isolating each student’s problem area or gaps and we’re filling those. So we’re going to teach math teachers how to administer that math program.”

Teachers who participate in Fast-Track‘s summer training sessions will begin training fellow teachers at their schools in addition to teachers throughout their respective school districts.