It is important to remember that during the time—even minimal amounts—spent with young people, you can serve as a role model. Exposure to female role models has been shown to improve performance on tests and to invalidate stereotypes. No matter which STEM²D category, a female role model can be found. It is important to show and teach the stories of women.

Key strategy: Provide meaningful advice. No two people or communities are alike, and no single activity or talk will meet the needs of all young people.

All volunteers—regardless of gender—can greatly enrich their time with young people by drawing on and sharing their own experiences. The Tell My Story Form supports and encourages volunteers to develop their STEM²D story and share their accomplishments in a relevant and personal way. These shared experiences provide an opportunity for you to have an impact and help girls establish a positive STEM²D identity.

Key strategy: Young people have unique social, personal, and academic needs. Approach them with sincerity and respect. Learn their names, encourage their participation, and connect the activities to young people’s current and future needs.

If you have ever learned to play a musical instrument or participated in a team sport, you know that it takes time, effort, and practice to succeed. The same is true of STEM²D subject abilities: They improve through consistent effort and learning. Knowing the right answer may make students feel smart, but what happens when there is no right answer? Then students need to problem solve, which takes a lot of time and effort. Such problem solving can be very intriguing to girls. It is important for girls to know that cognitive abilities are not fixed or determined by gender. All it takes to close the gender gap is girls having curiosity, interest, questions, and an environment that fosters those aspects of learning.

Key strategy: Teach girls that working hard to gain knowledge improves performance.

Everyone likes to hear, “good job” in terms of their performance. However, try to amend their feedback when it comes to encouraging girls’ abilities. A simple “good job” doesn’t tell girls why they are doing well, which is important in building girls’ confidence. Furthermore, stating that an answer is incorrect with no explanation can lead girls to believe they lack the ability to get it right and cannot do math and science. Informational feedback on effort and content—such as, “You worked really hard to solve that problem” or “Review your calculations in Step 3; there is a minor multiplication error”—positively influences girls’ beliefs about their abilities. This is an important strategy to keep girls interested in solving challenging problems.

Key strategy: Provide girls with positive feedback about why they are doing well and specific information about how to make corrections.

Girls perform well on tests closely related to school-taught curriculum. However, questions on standardized tests do not closely match day-to-day learning. Researchers have found that spatial skills (the capacity to understand, reason, and remember the spatial relations among objects or space) are associated with performance on math tests and that spatial skills can be improved with practice. To improve spatial skills, encourage girls to design and build things. Emphasize skills like mental visualization of what objects look like when they are rotated in space. Even at the earliest ages, increasing spatial skills is shown to improve girls’ standardized test scores later in their primary and secondary education.

Key strategy: Have girls answer math and science problems using both verbal responses and spatial displays.

Some students are naturally interested in tinkering and technology. Others have more artistic or humanitarian interests. To cultivate a long-term interest in STEM²D, exercise creativity by embedding STEM²D into fantasy scenarios, real-world problems, popular culture, and even day-to-day life. Literacy also plays a large part in this recommendation. Girls also respond well to strategies that integrate literacy with science. Reading informational text is important in the context of science because reading is something scientists do. Informational text can generate interest and further curiosity, provide data and evidence to explain phenomena, and provide the context for defining problems.

Key strategy: Embed tinkering, creativity, and literacy into science activities in contexts that are interesting to girls.