Think big, start early to close gender gap in science

In the 17 years she spent teaching science to middle and high school students in the Philadelphia area, Phaedra Brown developed an intuition for when her instruction wasn’t landing. More often than not, students could “plug stuff in,” but they lacked the foundational knowledge, not to mention critical reasoning and reading skills, necessary to absorb scientific content on a deeper level, she said. “It’s too overwhelming when you’re already lacking,” Brow