An article co-authored by Associate Professor Hosun Kang (left), Professor Sandra Simpkins (right) and their colleagues is one of the Science Education Journal’s top-10 percent most downloaded articles of 2019.
The article – How do middle school girls of color develop STEM identities? Middle school girls’ participation in science activities and identification with STEM careers – explores ways to support girls of color in forming their senses of selves in science, technology, engineering, and math during the middle school years.
The publication was borne out of data Kang collected while a doctoral student at Michigan State University. During the project, Kang shadowed a group of seventh- and eighth-grade girls at an urban middle school for one year. She found that the Black students’ discourse and attitude toward science dramatically changed over the course of just one year. Their brilliant ideas and rich experiences outside the classrooms were not leveraged, their peers did not recognize them as capable of doing the work, and support was not provided.
(Read more here.)