Following six semesters of successfully boosting mathematics skills and generating confidence in seventh-grade girls, GO-GIRL (Gaining Options-Girls Investigate Real Life) has now expanded beyond its southeast Michigan roots.

GO-GIRL is inaugurating its “national” status with the launch of a popular 10-week Saturday program in January 2006, hosted at Wayne State University’s College of Education.

The program is designed to help middle school girls develop mathematical confidence, skills and conceptual understanding by integrating mathematics and social science research into a single-sex, technology-rich environment supported by university student mentors. More than 200 seventh-grade girls from public and private schools in the Detroit metropolitan area have participated in the program since the project’s inception in 2002.

Funded by a National Foundation grant, and collaboratively developed by faculty and staff from the University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women and Gender and Wayne State’s College of Education, GO-GIRL was developed in response to research findings suggesting a decline in interest in mathematics among middle school girls and minority youth.

On a nationwide basis, the National Science Foundation dissemination grant awarded to Roosevelt University in Chicago, will support the implementation of sistership programs at Howard University, Washington D.C.; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Roosevelt University; and Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, Ill. during the 2005-2006 academic year.

Sally K. Roberts, assistant professor in Wayne State’s College of Education, will work in collaboration with Pamela Trotman Reid, provost and executive vice president at Roosevelt University, to launch the programs at the new sites. The GO-GIRL curriculum will be implemented at each of the sites in conjunction with service-learning courses modeled after the courses developed by Reid and Roberts. Case study data collected from the new project sites will be used to provide information for extending the program to additional sites nationwide.

Seventh-grade girls interested in participating in the winter 2006 semester project at Wayne State may visit http://www.gogirls.wayne.edu and download the application forms. Registration deadline is Thursday, Dec. 15. Further information about the GO-GIRL project is also available by contacting Noel Kulik, project coordinator, at 313-587-2510; or Prof. Sally Roberts, faculty advisor, at s.k.roberts@wayne.edu.

Wayne State University is a premier institution of higher education offering more than 350 academic programs through 11 schools and colleges to more than 33,000 students.