This project will teach foundational computational thinking (CT) concepts to preschoolers by creating a mobile app to guide families through sequenced sets of videos and hands-on activities, building on the popular PBS KIDS series Work It Out Wombats!
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Marisa WolskyJanna KookJessica Andrews
The Discovery Center at Murfree Spring, in partnership with six science centers and museums, will promote and invest in science education in rural communities with limited museum access. This coalition will work with two cohorts of rural school communities (12 total) and focus on engaging, learning from, and supporting rural school districts, teachers, families, and communities through relationship building, asset mapping, and the collaborative integration and implementation of museum resources. Additional activities include the production of publications, virtual presentations, and a virtual tool kit. The project will illustrate the ways in which museums can collaborate to support STEM and literacy at the K-2 level, enhance teacher self-efficacy, attitudes and beliefs, and engage family and community, strengthening services for Americans who live in the most rural areas.
The University of Montana spectrUM Discovery Area will implement “Making Across Montana” —a project to engage K–12 students and teachers in rural and tribal communities with making and tinkering. In collaboration with K–12 education partners in the rural Bitterroot Valley and on the Flathead Indian Reservation, the museum will develop a mobile making and tinkering exhibition and education program. The exhibition will be able to travel to K–12 schools statewide. The project team will develop a K–12 teacher professional development workshop, along with accompanying curriculum resources and supplies. The traveling program and related materials will build schools’ capacity to incorporate making and tinkering—and informal STEM experiences more broadly—into their teaching.
ECHO, Leahy Center for Lake Champlain will increase its capacity to serve rural schools through programming opportunities under its STEM in Motion 2.0 program. In partnership with rural schools, they will conduct two year-long teacher institutes blending in-person and virtual professional development. They plan to develop a total of 270 in-person and virtual classroom STEM programs and produce 18 classroom curriculum kits and standard-activity aligned guides. As a result of STEM in Motion 2.0’s activities, the museum anticipate that 54 teachers will have additional capacity to deliver high-quality STEM learning experiences to K–5th grade students in underserved, rural communities.
The Dunes Center will provide in-class instruction and field trip activities focused on coastal restoration and community education on water quality for over 300 5th-graders at Guadalupe’s Kermit McKenzie Intermediate School. Through science experiments and hands-on experiences, students will learn how ecosystems function and explore watershed characteristics. Intended to supplement current local science education and reach underserved, rural, Latinx students, the “Explore the Coast” program will help students understand how human actions can affect the environment, promote pollution prevention in the community, and aspire to higher education in the field of science.
Science Mill will pilot an expansion of its STEM Equity Initiative for urban communities by introducing summer STEM career immersion camps for students in grades 3 to 8 in rural, underserved Texas communities. Developed by the museum's educators and taught by science teachers, the camps introduce students to real-world STEM careers and teach what it means to be a STEM professional. The project team will create new curriculum to support the week-long camps. Reaching up to 120 students, the camps feature team challenges, project-based designing and building, and daily hands-on content engagement through inquiry-based activities. Students will focus on different STEM fields each day with a goal to build their confidence and spark lifelong curiosity in STEM. During the school year, campers will participate in local STEM clubs, engaging in hands-on activities that continue to reinforce excitement in STEM learning.
The Harvard Museums of Science and Culture will improve the ability of middle school teachers to use museum-based digital resources to support classroom instruction aligned with state and national science standards. Working with advisory teachers from five collaborating school districts, the museum will co-create classroom activities, based on digital resources from its collections, along with associated teacher professional development programs at three sites across urban and rural Massachusetts. The project will provide schools with access to classroom-ready resources that successfully support student learning. Teachers will learn how to use these materials, integrate them into their teaching, and enhance their skills to teach science content and practice. External evaluators will assess the project's effectiveness by measuring teacher implementation of the digital resources in the classroom, requests for information and assistance, and changes in teachers' confidence and comfort levels.
Researchers and practitioners have identified numerous outcomes of place-based environmental action (PBEA) programs at both individual and community levels (e.g., promoting positive youth development, fostering science identity, building social capital, and contributing to environmental quality improvement). In many cases, the primary audience of PBEA programs are youth, with less attention given to lifelong learners or intergenerational (e.g., youth and adult) partnerships. However, there is a need for PBEA programs for lifelong learners as local conservation decisions in the United States
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
The project is building a nationwide online coaching/mentoring program for out of school educators in rural settings.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
The project scales up an award-winning coaching model:
Informal educators come together in small groups to share videos of their own interactions with youth
A coach helps them share feedback based on their use of key skills (e.g. how to ask youth purposeful questions).
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
The archaeology after-school program, geared towards rural middle school students, explores the ability to teach STEM through archaeology. The multidisciplinary nature of archaeology makes it a useful vehicle for teaching a variety of STEM disciplines (e.g., biology, geology, ecology, zoology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, etc.). Its compatibility with hands-on activities, deep thinking skills, and scientific reasoning matches STEM learning goals.
Many Black youth in both urban and rural areas lack engaging opportunities to learn mathematics in a manner that leads to full participation in STEM. The Young People’s Project (YPP), the Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP), and the Education for Liberation Network (EdLib) each have over two decades of experience working on this issue. In the city of Baltimore, where 90% of youth in poverty are Black, and only 5% of these students meet or exceed expectations in math, BAP, a youth led organization, develops and employs high school and college age youth to provide after-school tutoring in Algebra 1, and to advocate for a more just education for themselves and their peers. YPP works in urban or rural low income communities that span the country developing Math Literacy Worker programs that employ young people ages 14-22 to create spaces to help their younger peers learn math. Building on these deep and rich experiences, this Innovations in Development project studies how Black students see themselves as mathematicians in the context of paid peer-to-peer math teaching--a combined social, pedagogical, and economic strategy. Focusing primarily in Baltimore, the project studies how young people grow into new self-definitions through their work in informal, student-determined math learning spaces, structured collaboratively with adults who are experts in both mathematics and youth development. The project seeks to demonstrate the benefits of investing in young people as learners, teachers, and educational collaborators as part of a core strategy to improve math learning outcomes for all students.
The project uses a mixed methods approach to describe how mathematical identity develops over time in young people employed in a Youth-Directed Mathematics Collaboratory. 60 high school aged students with varying mathematical backgrounds (first in Baltimore and later in Boston) will learn how to develop peer- and near-peer led math activities with local young people in informal settings, after-school programs, camps, and community centers, reaching approximately 600 youth/children. The high school aged youth employed in this project will develop their own math skills and their own pedagogical skills through the already existing YPP and BAP structures, made up largely of peers and near-peers just like themselves. They will also participate in on-going conversations within the Collaboratory and with the community about the cultural significance of doing mathematics, which for YPP and BAP is a part of the ongoing Civil Rights/Human Rights movement. Mathematical identity will be studied along four dimensions: (a) students’ sequencing and interpretation of past mathematical experiences (autobiographical identity); (b) other people’s talk to them and their talk about themselves as learners, doers, and teachers of mathematics (discoursal identity); (c) the development of their own voices in descriptions and uses of mathematical knowledge and ideas (authorial identity); and (d) their acceptance or rejection of available selfhoods (socio-culturally available identity). Intended outcomes from the project include a clear description of how mathematical identity develops in paid peer-teaching contexts, and growing recognition from both local communities and policy-makers that young people have a key role to play, not only as learners, but also as teachers and as co-researchers of mathematics education.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jay GillenMaisha MosesThomas NikundiweNaama LewisAlice Cook