Grant amount
NIS 425,000
Advancing Gender Awareness in High-Level Mathematics Across 70 National Religious Schools
Raising Awareness of the Importance of Female Students Learning Mathematics at a High Level in 70 National Religious Schools
Raising Awareness of the Importance of Female Students Learning Mathematics at a High Level in 70 National Religious Schools
The 2022 PISA results in mathematics for Israel’s Jewish national religious schools were very surprising. Male students reached a peak level of performance, with 18.5% excelling in mathematics, whereas female students dropped dramatically by 50% to a very low rate of 4.3%. The foundation published the results in national religious media, which triggered an overwhelming response. Consequently, we organized conferences and workshops for religious educators, during which they analyzed the results and offered explanations.
At the March 2024 meeting of the Board of Directors, two small grants were approved to address this gap, targeting two of the national religious school networks. Now, we approached the Ministry of Education’s National Religious Directorate, which oversees this education stream. Together, we turned to Bar-Ilan University, a national religious academic institution, to prepare a program for religious mathematics teachers in state schools that are not affiliated with a school network.
Bar-Ilan is proposing a gender awareness program for 70 out of the 340 schools in the national religious stream. The principals of these 70 schools will be invited to attend two workshops where they will be presented with the PISA results and encouraged to take action. They will then participate in designated simulations that confront traditional tendencies favoring boys and holding lower expectations for girls. In parallel, six learning communities will be organized for 150 homeroom teachers where they will learn how to reduce gender stereotypes and encourage girls to excel in their studies.
The 70 mathematics teachers from these schools’ high-ability groups will join the national program on applied mathematics (operated by the University of Haifa) and learn how to implement PISA mathematics tasks in classes. Towards the 2025 cycle of PISA, all the teachers and principals will convene in a joint conference, at which they will brainstorm on how to better prepare their female students. The Ministry of Education will coordinate and evaluate the program aiming to change gender perceptions regarding female students’ abilities to excel in high-level mathematics among principals and teachers.
Bar-Ilan will invite some of Israel’s most renowned religious female scientists to take part in the program and serve as role models for success. They will include Sarit Kraus, Dean of their Faculty of Exact Sciences; Talia Yeshua of their Physics Department; Shulamit Levenberg from the Biomedical Engineering Faculty at the Technion; and Yonina Eldar from the Center for Biomedical Engineering at the Weizmann Institute. The foundation suggested that high-tech leaders of a similar background also be invited.
* The text above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation’s Board of Directors / Grant 575