Dive Brief:

• New results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows girls are outscoring boys when it comes to engineering and tech literacy, with 45% of girls and 42% of boys scoring as proficient.
• The test also revealed both racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps exist, with a quarter of low-income students, 18% percent of black students and 28% of Latino students scoring proficient, while 56% of white and Asian students did. 
• ELL learners fared worst, with just 5% scoring proficient.

Dive Insight:

Less than 26% of computer and math jobs are held by women. Fewer than one in five computer science degrees are held by women, despite the fact that women make up more than half of all undergraduate students and half of undergraduate science students. But efforts to help girls advance in tech may finally be paying off.  Girls Who Code courses have been hosted by various schools and universities, in which female students work in groups to fix coding problems and build confidence to enter the male-dominated tech sector. 

Interestingly, 66% of the students surveyed for tech and engineering literacy reported to NAEP that their family members, not educators, were primary teachers on "how to build and fix things." Companies have stepped up to help advance computer science in the classroom, such as Microsoft's planned expansion of its global YouthSpark initiative. Districts are adopting different tactics to try to bring more coding into K-12 classrooms, in support of the federal Computer Science For All initiative (#CSForAll), which calls for $4.2 billion to be spent on teacher training, curriculum development and fostering public-private partnerships in support of computer science instruction.