Designing Our World (DOW) was a four-year NSF-funded initiative in which the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) sought to promote girls’ pursuit of engineering careers through community-based programming, exhibition development, and identity research. The overarching aim of DOW was to engage girls ages 9–14 with experiences that illuminate the social, personally relevant, and altruistic nature of engineering. In addition to programming for girls, the project also included workshops for parents/caregivers, professional development for staff from community partners; and an exhibition
Designing Our World (DOW) was a four-year NSF-funded initiative in which the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) sought to promote girls’ pursuit of engineering careers through community-based programming, exhibition development, and identity research. The overarching aim of DOW was to engage girls ages 9–14 with experiences that illuminate the social, personally relevant, and altruistic nature of engineering. In addition to programming for girls, the project also included workshops for parents/caregivers, professional development for staff from community partners; and an exhibition
EvaluATE is a national resource center dedicated to supporting and improving the evaluation practices of approximately 250 ATE grantees across the country. EvaluATE conducts webinars and workshops, publishes a quarterly newsletter, maintains a website with a digital resource library, develops materials to guide evaluation work, and conducts an annual survey of ATE grantees. EvaluATE's mission is to promote the goals of the ATE program by partnering with projects and centers to strengthen the program's evaluation knowledge base, expand the use of exemplary evaluation practices, and support the continuous improvement of technician education throughout the nation. EvaluATE's goals associated with this proposal are to: (1) Ensure that all ATE Principal Investigators and evaluators know the essential elements of a credible and useful evaluation; (2) Maintain a comprehensive collection of online resources for ATE evaluation; (3) Strengthen and expand the network of ATE evaluation stakeholders; and (4) Gather, synthesize, and disseminate data about the ATE program activities to advance knowledge about ATE/technician education. The Center plans to produce a comprehensive set of evaluation resources to complement other services, engaging several community college-based Principal Investigators and evaluators in that process.
EvaluATE's products are informed by current research on evaluation, the National Science Foundation's priorities for the evaluation of ATE grants, and the needs of ATE PIs and evaluators for sound guidance that is immediately relevant and usable in their contexts. The fundamental nature of EvaluATE's work is geared toward supporting ATE grantees to use evaluation regularly to improve their work and demonstrate their impacts. All of EvaluATE's products are available to the public. EvaluATE's findings from the annual survey of ATE grantees aid in advancing understanding of the status of technician education and illuminate areas for additional research. The new survey investigates ATE grantees' work to serve underrepresented and special populations, including women, people of color, and veterans. Survey data are available upon request for research and evaluation purposes.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Lori WingateArlen GullicksonEmma PerkKelly RobertsonLyssa Becho
resourceprojectWebsites, Mobile Apps, and Online Media
The intent of this five-year project is to design, deliver, and study professional development for Informal Science Learning (ISL) educators in the arena of equity-focused STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) teaching and learning. While the strategy of integrating art and science to promote interest, identity, and other STEM-related learning has grown in recent years, this domain is still nascent with respect to a guiding set of best practices. Through prior work, the team has developed and implemented a set of design principles that incorporate effective practices for broadening participation of girls in science via science-art integration on the topic of the biology, chemistry and optics of "Colors in Nature." The continued initiative would impact the ISL field by providing a mechanism for ISL educators in museums, libraries and after-school programs to adopt and implement these STEAM design principles into their work. The team will lead long-term (12-18 months) professional development activities for ISL educators, including: 1) in-person workshops that leverage their four previously developed kits; 2) online, asynchronous learning activities featuring interactive instructional videos around their STEAM design principles; 3) synchronous sessions to debrief content and foster communities of practice; and 4) guided design work around the development or redesign of STEAM activities. In the first four years of the project, the team will work with four core institutional partners (Sitka Sound Science Center, Sno-Isle Libraries, the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District after-school program, and the Pima County Public Library system) across three states (Alaska, Washington, and Arizona). In the project's later stages, they will disseminate their learning tools to a broad, national audience. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.
The project has three main goals: (1) To support ISL educators in offering meaningful STEAM activities, (2) To create institutional change among the partner organizations, and (3) To advance the ISL field with respect to professional development and designing for STEAM Programming. The research questions associated with the professional development activities address the ways in which change occurs and focus on all three levels: individual, institutional, and the ISL field. The methods are qualitative and quantitative, including videotaped observations, pre and post interviews, surveys and analysis of online and offline artifacts. In addition, the project evaluation will assess the implementation of the project's professional development model for effectiveness. Methods will include observations, interviews, surveys and Website analytics and program data.
Women continue to be underrepresented in computer science professions. In 2015, while 57% of professional occupations in the U.S. were held by women, only 25% of computing occupations were held by women. Furthermore, the share of computer science degrees going to women is smaller than any STEM field, even though technology careers are the most promising in terms of salaries and future growth. Research suggests that issues contributing to this lack of computer science participation begin early and involve complex social and environmental factors, including girls' perception that they do not belong in computer science classes or careers. Computer science instruction often alienates girls with irrelevant curriculum; non-collaborative pedagogies; a lack of opportunities to take risks or make mistakes; and a heavy reliance on lecture instead of hands-on, project-based learning. Computer science experiences that employ research-based gender equitable best practices, particularly role modeling, can help diminish the gender gap in participation. In response to this challenge, Twin Cities PBS (TPT), the National Girls Collaborative (NGC) and Code.org will lead Code: SciGirls! Media for Engaging Girls in Computing Pathways, a three-year project designed to engage 8-13 year-old girls in coding through transmedia programming which inspires and prepares them for future computer science studies and career paths. The project includes five new PBS SciGirls episodes featuring girls and female coding professionals using coding to solve real problems; a new interactive PBSKids.org game that allows children to develop coding skills; nationwide outreach programming, including professional development for informal educators and female coding professionals to facilitate activities for girls and families in diverse STEM learning environments; a research study that will advance understanding of how the transmedia components build girls' motivation to pursue additional coding experiences; and a third-party summative evaluation.
Code: SciGirls! will foster greater awareness of and engagement in computer science studies and career paths for girls. The PBS SciGirls episodes will feature girls and female computer science professionals using coding to solve real-world challenges. The project's transmedia component will leverage the television content into the online space in which much of 21st century learning takes place. The new interactive PBSKids.org game will use a narrative framework to help children develop coding skills. Drawing on narrative transportation theory and character identification theory, TPT will commission two exploratory knowledge-building studies to investigate: To what extent and how do the narrative formats of the Code: SciGirls! online media affect girls' interest, beliefs, and behavioral intent towards coding and code-related careers? The studies aim to advance understanding of how media builds girls' motivation to pursue computer science experiences, a skill set critical to building tomorrow's workforce. The project team will also raise educators' awareness about the importance of gender equitable computer science instruction, and empower them with best practices to welcome, prepare and retain girls in coding. The Code: SciGirls! Activity Guide will provide educators with a relevant resource for engaging aspiring computer scientists. The new media and guide will also reside on PBSLearningMedia.org, reaching 1.2 million teachers, and will be shared with thousands of educators across the SciGirls CONNECT and National Girls Collaborative networks. The new episodes are anticipated to reach 92% of U.S. TV households via PBS, and the game at PBSKids.org will introduce millions of children to coding. The summative evaluation will examine the reach and impact of the episodes, game and new activities. PIs will share research findings and project resources at national conferences and will submit to relevant publications. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.
SciGirls Strategies is a National Science Foundation–funded project led by Twin Cities PBS (TPT) in partnership with St. Catherine University, the National Girls Collaborative, and XSci (The Experiential Science Education Research Collaborative) at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for STEM Learning. This three-year initiative aims to increase the number of high school girls recruited to and retained in fields where females are traditionally underrepresented: technical science, engineering, technology, and math (STEM) pathways. We seek to accomplish this goal by providing career and
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Rita KarlBradley McLainAlicia Santiago
Northern Michigan University's Center for Native American Studies and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion will lead this Design and Development Launch Pilot about culturally inclusive K-16 STEM education for American Indian and Native Alaskan (AIAN) students. This project was created in response to the NSF Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (NSF INCLUDES) program solicitation (NSF 16-544). The INCLUDES program is a comprehensive national initiative designed to enhance U.S. leadership in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) discoveries and innovations focused on NSF's commitment to diversity, inclusion, and broadening participation in these fields. The INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilots represent bold, innovative ways for solving a broadening participation challenge in STEM.
The full participation of all of America's STEM talent is critical to the advancement of science and engineering for national security, health and prosperity. Our nation is advancing knowledge and practices to address the undergraduate STEM achievement and the graduation gap between NAAIs and non-native Americans. This project, the NSF INCLUDES: Indigenous Women Working Within the Sciences (IWWS), has the potential to advance knowledge, instructional pedagogy and practices to improve the performance of NAAI high school students and undergraduate students in STEM.
This project team will work to: (1) pilot activities and coursework to train K-16 STEM educators about American Indian inclusive methods and materials, (2) to provide AIAN high school students with STEM college preparatory experience using inclusive STEM practices, and (3) to provide a cohort of female AIAN high school students additional university experiences and mentors as these students transition to postsecondary education. Activities include a five-day summer educators institute for 40 K-16 STEM educators, an additional weekend workshop for 20 K-16 STEM educators, a summer STEM academy for 96 AIAN high school students, a STEM weekend workshop for female AIAN high school students, and a mentoring program for AIAN high school students.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
April LindalaJessica CruzMartin Reinhardt
The Mississippi Alliance for Women in Computing (MAWC) project will identify factors that influence and motivate female students and female African American students in Mississippi to enroll and persist in an undergraduate engineering- or science-based computing major. There is a particular need for programming that is inclusive of women and women of color who are from the southern region of the United States. These students typically have less access to extracurricular activities that encourage computing, and are less likely to visualize themselves in a computing major or career. This proposed research is to help girls to know that computer science exists and what jobs in computer science are available with a degree in computer science. A rich environment exists in Mississippi for an alliance focused on building co-curricular and mentorship opportunities. A scalable pipeline model, expandable to a Southern Alliance for Women in Computing (SAWC), will be developed with three major objectives: to attract women and women of color to computing, to improve retention rates of women in undergraduate computing majors, and to help postsecondary women make the transition to the computing workforce. Activities to support these objectives include: scaling the National Center for Women and Information Technology Aspirations in Computing award program in Mississippi, expanding scholarships for Aspirations winners, expanding student-led computing outreach programs, establishing a Mississippi Black Girls Code chapter, informing and collaborating with the Computer Science for Mississippi initiative, creating a summer bridge and living-learning community for women in computing majors, and increasing professional development opportunities for women in computing through conferences, lunch and learn meetings, job shadowing, and internships.
The project will analyze whether the co-curricular activities of MAWC lead to computing self-efficacy and ultimately female students selecting to pursue and persist in computing majors and careers. In order to understand student participation and efficacy changes, data collection for this research will be through demographic and background surveys administered to women entering an undergraduate engineering- or science-based computing major at a university in Mississippi and student surveys and evaluations in MAWC-sponsored programs. Using discriminate analysis methods, specific research questions to be addressed are: 1) Which pre-collegiate experiences influenced them to enroll, 2) Which stakeholders influenced these girls in their decision-making process, and 3) What programs are effective in impacting their persistence in the major. Predictor variables for each respective research question are: pre-collegiate experiences, stakeholders, and programs. Outcome variables are: (a) a female undergraduate student with no involvement with MAWC programming, (b) MAWC activity participant, or (c) a MAWC participant having graduated with a bachelor?s degree in a STEM major. Results will complement published longitudinal research on the gendered and raced dimensions of computing literacy acquisition in Mississippi as well as research on effective CS role model programming.
This project formed a partnership between a research team with experience in computer science (CS) education and learning sciences research and a newly fashioned practitioner team focused on building a grassroots, informal, volunteer group created to help women help themselves and others learn to write computer code. This research-practitioner partnership had a two-pronged focus, first on improving the program offered to learners through making adjustments based on research findings, and second on investigating the phenomenon of how women in the workforce informally learn CS skills that enable them to rewrite their career paths to contribute to what we know from research. The context of the study was situated in the virtual community that has formed around the phenomenally successful Salesforce Customer Relationship Management software platform.
This Exploratory Pathways project aimed to fill a gap in the research; we know little about the phenomenon of adult women in the workforce who are patching together resources to learn CS skills with a goal of job enhancement or job change. This project took an ethnographic approach to studying the informal learning (both through online, written resources and through sharing of knowledge with others) of the women involved in a 10-week, virtual Women’s Coaching and Learning group. The organization of this group consisted of learners—novice coders in the Apex language that is used on the Salesforce software platform, of coaches—more knowledgeable coders, and of a steering committee that ran the group and created the informal curriculum followed in the 10-week course.
Our overarching research question in this study was: In what ways are informal CS learning opportunities being used and created by adult women, what are their experiences with those opportunities, and how does this suggest ways to enhance those opportunities in the future to increase effectiveness in broadening access to and engagement in informal CS learning experiences for women?
We broke the question down into a number of sub questions, including:
Sociocultural context: What past gendered interactions do women report that discouraged (or encouraged) them from learning to code? What do interactions look like in female-only coaching and learning groups? In what ways does a coaching and learning group support persistence? What social barriers and supports outside the group affect persistence?
Personal context: What are the characteristics and backgrounds of female administrators who seek out resources to teach themselves to code? What are the motivations for these women to teach themselves to code? What motivates them to seek out and join all-women coding groups?
Physical context: How are women learning to code both through written resources and in virtual, informal coaching and learning classes? What are the conceptual barriers and supports that they encounter, and what works for women in these classes to overcome barriers? What conceptual barriers and supports affect persistence?
Persistence and identity: In what ways does participating in a learning group with female coaching motivate (or not) women to persist in learning to code? How do their goals or reasons for learning to code change through their participation? How does their identity as a “coder” change or shift as they participate?
Our findings for these subquestions are summarized in the “project products” linked to below.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative resources for use in a variety of settings. The National Association of Math Circles (NAMC) will convene the Math Circle-Mentor and Partnership (MC-MAP) Workshop in late 2016. The proposed MC-MAP workshop will build the field's understanding of the training content and mechanisms that enhance the knowledge and skill development of participants in Math Circles. The workshop will bring mentors from experienced Math Circle leaders together with novice Math Circle leaders to develop the expertise of the notice leaders and their group to develop their expertise in facilitating math circle activities and in organizing related events. The approximately 180 Math Circles currently operating across the nation enlist mathematics professionals to share their passion for mathematics with K-12 students, teachers, and the general public in contexts that emphasize exploration, problem solving and discovery. This initial conference and Math Circle trainings informed by this conference will help build a community of practice around Math Circles through which novice and existing leaders are connected, encouraged and inspired.
The MC-MAP workshop will include structured planning as well as guided observation and structured debriefing of a demonstration Math Circle sessions. The workshop design will be grounded in research related to effective adult learning and to discovery-based mathematics. The workshop will serve as a training prototype that will assist the National Association of Math Circles to identify effective training formats and materials for both experienced and novice Math Circle leaders. Pre- and post- conference surveys of Math Circle leaders will produce data to be used in planning and designing future trainings. The NAMC will share key findings from the workshop evaluation and workshop resources not only with its membership, but also with other mathematics K-12 outreach programs. Workshop materials will address recruiting and serving diverse participants in Math Circles, including girls and women, persons with disabilities, students from varied socioeconomic backgrounds and underrepresented minorities in STEM.
Games that help players develop an understanding of computer science concepts are a promising alternative to the current emphasis on programming. This workshop will introduce participants to digital and analog games that demonstrate how CS concepts can be integrated with game play and engaging story contexts. Relevant issues such as the use of player data for assessment of learning, the role of narrative in educational games, and the challenges of identifying appropriate concepts for game-based learning will also be addressed.
Throughout the five year SciGirls CONNECT grant the independent evaluation firm Knight Williams assisted Twin Cities PBS (TPT) in a wide range of program evaluation activities. Given the project’s emphasis on a Train-the-Trainer model, the evaluation prioritized two goals: (i) assessing the various levels of CONNECT trainings from different vantage and time points, and (ii) capturing information on the implementation of SciGirls programs led by those who completed a training. This evaluation approach allowed the team to collect ongoing data over the course of the grant and share this