"A number of studies, like one from CMU, have shown that people perform better in math and sciences if fifty percent of the participants are women" (Berson, B).

The full article can be found by following the link below:

Read more: http://firstround.com/article/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-Female-Engineers-by-500-in-One-Year?goback=%2Egde_3391879_member_5801183046854000642#%21#ixzz2jFuocIuP

The use of backwards design is an effective way to structure lesson planning for standards based learning and assessment. I have distilled the info from Wiggins and Mctighe to my understanding of a brief outline of the process. I use the acronym: SAL.

1. Standards- Identify and isolate the standards you would like to address in a lesson or unit.
2. Assessment- Write the assessment you believe will clearly demonstrate that students have learned the desired standards you are addressing in the lesson.
3. Lesson- After identifying standards and the assessment of those standards you write a lesson plan that will help students understand those standards based goals and be successful on that assessment.

The at times counterintuitive part of this concept could be that interesting activities and problems don't necessarily address specific standard requirements. By making the lesson tailored to the standards and assessment, students will be better prepared to succeed.

Questions are an extremely valuable tool to help students gain access to information. By scaffolding the question asking process for students, they will have a better chance to gain access to important information (Payne, 2008).

This is an extremely truncated version of some info from Jo Boaler.