IRVING, Texas — Crowded around a workshop table, four girls at Lorenzo de Zavala Middle School puzzled over a Lego machine they built. As they flashed a purple card in front of a light sensor, nothing happened.
The teacher at the Dallas-area school emphasized that there is no such thing as mistakes, only iterations, in the building process. So the girls dug back into the box of blocks and pulled out an orange card. They held it over the sensor and the machine kicked into motion.
“Oh! Oh, it reacts differently to different colors,” sixth grader Sofia Cruz said.
In de Zavala’s first year as a choice school focused on science, technology, engineering and math, the school recruited a sixth grade class that’s half girls. School leaders hope the girls will stick with STEM fields. In de Zavala’s higher grades — whose students joined before it was a STEM school — some elective STEM classes have just one girl enrolled.
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Efforts to close the gap between boys and girls in STEM classes are picking up after losing steam nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools have extensive work ahead to make up for the ground girls lost, in both interest and performance.
The pandemic upended progress toward closing the gender gap
In most school districts in the 2008-2009 school year, boys had higher average math scores on standardized tests than girls, according to an Associated Press analysis that looked at scores across 15 years in more than 5,000 school districts. It was based on average test scores for third through eighth graders in 33 states, compiled by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University.
A decade later, girls not only caught up, they were ahead: Slightly more than half of districts had higher math averages for girls.
Within a few years, girls lost all the ground they gained in math test scores over the prior decade, according to AP’s analysis.
While boys’ scores also suffered during the pandemic, they recovered faster than girls. In 2023-2024, boys on average outscored girls in math in nearly nine out of 10 districts.
As learning went online during the pandemic, special programs to engage girls lapsed and schools were slow to restart them. Zoom school also emphasized rote learning, a technique based on repetition that some experts believe may favor boys, instead of teaching students to solve problems in different ways, which may benefit girls.
Old practices and biases likely reemerged during the pandemic, said Michelle Stie, a vice president at the National Math and Science Initiative. “When society is disrupted, you fall back into bad patterns,” she said.
A separate study by education research company NWEA found gaps between boys and girls in science and math on national assessments went from being practically non-existent in 2019 to favoring boys around 2022.
Studies indicated girls reported higher levels of anxiety and depression during the pandemic, plus more caretaking burdens than boys, but the dip in academic performance did not appear outside STEM. Girls outperformed boys in reading in nearly every district nationwide before the pandemic and continued to do so afterward.
Initiatives to boost girls’ confidence in STEM lost traction
In the years leading up to the pandemic, teaching practices shifted to deemphasize speed, competition and rote memorization. Schools moved toward research-backed methods that emphasized how to think flexibly to solve problems and how to tackle numeric problems conceptually.
Educators also promoted participation in STEM subjects and programs that boosted girls’ confidence.
When STEM courses had large male enrollment, Superintendent Kenny Rodrequez noticed girls losing interest as boys dominated classroom discussions at his schools in Grandview C-4 District outside Kansas City. Girls were significantly more engaged after the district moved some of its introductory hands-on STEM curriculum to the lower grade levels and balanced classes by gender, he said.
When schools closed for the pandemic, the district had to focus on making remote learning work. “Whenever there’s crisis, we go back to what we knew,” he said.
When in-person classes resumed, some of the teachers left, and new ones had to be trained in the curriculum, Rodrequez said.
Bias against girls in STEM persists
Despite shifts in societal perceptions, a bias against girls persists in science and math subjects, according to teachers, administrators and advocates. They say it’s a message girls can internalize even at a very young age.
Girls also may have been more sensitive to changes in instructional methods spurred by the pandemic, said Janine Remillard, a math education professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Research found girls tend to prefer learning things connected to real-life examples, while boys generally do better in a competitive environment.
“What teachers told me during COVID is the first thing to go were all of these sense-making processes,” she said.
At de Zavala Middle School in Irving, the STEM program is part of a push that aims to build curiosity, resilience and problem-solving across subjects.
Irving schools renewed investment in training for teachers, said Erin O’Connor, a STEM and innovation specialist there.
The district last year piloted a new science curriculum from Lego Education. The lesson involving the machine at de Zavala, for example, had students learn about kinetic energy. Fifth graders learned about genetics by building dinosaurs and their offspring with Lego blocks, identifying shared traits.
“It is just rebuilding the culture of, we want to build critical thinkers and problem solvers,” O’Connor said.
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