What Will It Take to Get More Women and Students of Color to Complete College STEM Degrees?

Anurupa Ganguly is the Director of Math and Engineering at Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts. She and her team are pioneering a new-generation math, engineering, and computer science program designed to close the participation and opportunity gaps in college STEM education. I’m excited to share with you her insights on what it takes to reconceptualize K-12 math and engineering from the ground up.  

Like many young girls, I excelled in math in grades K-12. Unlike some older girls, I completed a major in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Then, like still fewer women, I continued my graduate studies in the field. 

What’s perplexing is that participation and achievement of girls in math and science are on par with boys in grades K-12; however, by college and graduate school, something mysterious happens: female participation falls to 25% in the applied math fields, and 15% in engineering. Among black and Hispanic students, attrition is even more dramatic.

What explains the drop-off? 

The fault largely lies with students’ experiences in K-12 math and science. I became acutely aware of the deficits of my high school math education during my first year in college. I had a calculus problem set due the next morning and was flipping through my notes looking for a procedure that would help me solve a particularly challenging problem. I remember my teaching assistant’s smug smile as he watched me struggle. As I grew more impatient, he quietly commented, “The solution isn’t in your notes to replicate. You’re going to have to reason this problem from first principles.” 

Reasoning from first principles requires you to start with fundamental theorems and truths to reason through a problem and eventually make a conclusion. Instead of “plug and play” calculations, you must creatively apply prior knowledge to construct meaning and derive new insights.

Today, as an experienced STEM education reformer, I understand that my teaching assistant was pointing to a learned helplessness that a majority of U.S. students internalize at a young age. True innovation requires the ability to logically reason in the absence of a prescribed method. Unfortunately, traditional approaches to K-12 math teaching and learning rob our young people of the opportunity to develop these important skills so necessary for success in post-secondary STEM fields. 

Our goal at Success Academy is to buck that trend. We do that with a math and science program that asks students to pose their own conjectures when faced with unfamiliar problems and to follow lines of inquiry by drawing on their prior knowledge. Through this process, they become comfortable with productive struggle and gain confidence in independently using their reasoning skills to arrive at solutions. Ultimately, they come to understand that the STEM canon belongs to them, too.

There’s another key ingredient missing in traditional STEM approaches that I only came to recognize when I started teaching high school math and physics in Boston prior to joining Success. My students there passed the physics state exams with flying colors, but most of them were neither equipped nor inspired to apply what they had learned to address issues our society faced. And that was because the real-world problems that are worth solving do not neatly fit within the confines of standards-based math or science. 

We seek to remedy this disconnect at SA with a curriculum that is task-based and actively illuminates relevant applications of mathematics, computing, and science tools. For example, in their math courses, students explore questions such as the impact on the economy of increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 per hour, or how to lower the price of prescription medicines for the average patient, or how to design new-generation cities that foster a healthier relationship between human beings and the environment.

As our students apply mathematical modeling to develop viable solutions, they also debate the social implications based on what the equations and data tell them. Through this process, they learn that the STEM fields offer powerful tools to engage in and potentially advance solutions to the problems that matter to them and to their communities.

Of course, a curriculum exclusively focused on real-world relevance and independent inquiry is not sufficient to prepare students for the rigors of college STEM: It must also develop computational fluency and efficiency. We believe the best way to build this critical mastery is by strategically sequencing rich tasks and laboratory exercises that create the intellectual need for new concepts and tools. Our math and science programs carefully build on previous knowledge so that no learning is discrete, but grows from prior understandings to maximize retention of skills and fluency.

Mathematical and scientific fields are exciting and innovative and creative. They provide innumerable avenues to have a meaningful and lasting impact on the world. As we know, these fields will only broaden and thrive when students with diverse backgrounds and experiences contribute to their growth. But to achieve that, we must hook our students in grades K-12 with a true experience of what STEM can offer to themselves and their surround.

Meet some of Success Academies' future mathematicians and scientists and visit our careers page to learn about opportunities at our schools!