9450593 DeFrancis The Montshire Museum of Science, in collaboration with the Swift Water Council of the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. and the Women in Science Project of Dartmouth College, proposes to develop and pilot a program to encourage young women, grades 7-9, in science and mathematics. The program will provide participants with experiences to increase their confidence in science and math, to increase their interest in science and math courses (and other educational experiences in these fields), and to spark their consideration of careers in science and math. Project participants will be young women from New Hampshire and Vermont drawn from the Cadette Program of the Swift Water Council of the Girl Scouts. Approximately 80 scouts will participate in the pilot program. Following its development, Montshire Museum and the collaborating organizations intend to conduct the program on an on-going basis, assuring that the experiences will be available to many thousands of young women in the two-state region. The program will be composed of the following elements: (a) a series of workshops in hands-on science education held at the Montshire Museum of Science involving Girl Scouts and led by Museum staff and Dartmouth "Women in Science" undergraduate students; (b) visits by the Girl Scouts to Dartmouth College science labs organized by undergraduate Dartmouth women conducting research projects in these labs; (c) science activities developed by the Girl Scouts, with help from the women Dartmouth students and Montshire Museum staff, and presented in community settings in their home towns; (d) a culminating event for participating Girl Scouts and their parents to be held at Montshire and at Dartmouth College; and (e) a pre-project workshop to disseminate gender equity issues widely to volunteer Girl Scout leaders, teachers from the participants' home schools, and others. An experienced evaluator of informal science programs will be integral to the project, providing sum mative data to assess the project's impact. Information about it will be widely disseminated to encourage use of the project as a model for application elsewhere. ***
