Academy for Educational Development

Washington, D.C., April 16, 2009 —A new AED initiative is harnessing the power of social media to connect with girls, parents, and educators about how to foster young women’s interest in science and technology.

The program, “Science: It’s a Girl Thing,” offers web-based and easy-to-use resources for conducting science activities at home. Regular updates, comments, videos, and links to materials will be posted on its Facebook page and other Web sites, which will add interactive and dynamic features to the lessons.

Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, the program targets bloggers and parents who use social media-such as Twitter and Facebook-to find and share information about education.

“We’ve based the design of this initiative on what we know works, namely our classroom-based program that provided science lessons to Pre-K through 3rd grade students,” said Merle Froschl, co-director of the Educational Equity Center at AED, which developed “Science: It’s a Girl Thing.” “Now we’re adapting that model for dissemination over the Web, which will take the lessons out of the school setting and make them available to a far wider audience.”

That original program, she added, was named a Promising Gender Equity Program by the U.S. Department of Education in 2000.

“Parents are crucial to developing girls’ interest in STEM-science, technology, engineering, and math-professions,” said Barabra Sprung, co-director of the Educational Equity Center at AED. She noted that according to a 2007 report from the National Science Foundation, women are still vastly underrepresented in the STEM professions, and that as of 2004, women accounted for only 22 percent of all engineering graduate students.

“Science: It’s a Girl Thing,” can be explored at http://facebook.dj/scienceitsagirlthing. The material will also be available on the Educational Equity Center at AED website, www.edequity.org.

ABOUT EEC: The Educational Equity Center at AED is an outgrowth of Educational Equity Concepts, a national, nonprofit organization with a 22-year history of addressing educational excellence for all children regardless of gender, race/ethnicity, disability and level of family income.

ABOUT AED: AED is a nonprofit organization that works globally to improve education, health, civil society and economic development-the foundation of thriving societies. Focusing on the underserved, AED implements more than 250 programs serving people in all 50 U.S. states and more than 150 countries (www.aed.org).

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