By: Mary Ann Hupp, Special to the Detroit News
Thursday, March 27, 2003


A March 26, 2003 article in the Detroit News features a program developed in part by Professor Pamela Trotman Reid. Written by Mary Ann Hupp, the article is titled, "Ambition adds up to girls' success".

From the article:

Starlyn Robinson, a seventh-grader at Bates Academy in Detroit, could spend Saturday mornings watching TV, sleeping in or playing video games. Instead, she joins 39 of her peers from across Metro Detroit at Wayne State University for a program where middle school girls get more comfortable with math and science.

"When I get up I'm like why am I getting up so early? And then I come here and I'm glad I got up," said Robinson.

The eye-opening program is called GO-GIRL, a catchy way to shorten "Gaining Options: Girls Investigate Real Life" and runs for five hours each Saturday for 10 weeks during the fall and spring semesters...Pamela Trotman Reid, a U-M professor in education and psychology, helped develop the effort. The weekend workshops go beyond the participants' classroom lessons.

"We're just trying to stimulate girls in a new way," said Reid, director of women's studies at her Ann Arbor campus. "What we do is focus on teaching them social science research."

The students formulate research questions, then develop and evaluate predictions based on collected data. These are among questions explored this year: How many hours of television do you watch each night on average? How much longer do you think the band B2K will be around? Do boys affect the decisions you make for the future? Do you plan to work in college?

"We are trying to show girls that you can use numbers not just to talk about abstract problems or building fences, that we can use them to address different questions," said Reid....

To learn more about the GO-GIRL program, visit the program website at http://www.umich.edu/~gogirls/.

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The Detroit News Website