In this participatory research project, a partnership between the Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center (KAYSC) and the Department of Evaluation and Research in Learning at the Science Museum of Minnesota, participants are working to rename and reclaim theory and research methods so as to foster relevance and equity. We have renamed the theory of science capital: "science capitxl" signals its roots in equity work and invites questioning. We are using what we have called "embedded research practices" for data generation and analysis. This poster was shared at the 2019 AISL PI meeting.
This NSF INCUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot will increase the recruitment, retention, and matriculation of racial and ethnic minorities in STEM Ph.D. programs contributing to hazards and disaster research. Increasing STEM focused minorities on hazards mitigation, and disaster research areas will benefit society and contribute to the achievements of specific, desired societal outcomes following disasters. The Minority SURGE Capacity in Disasters (SURGE) launch pilot will provide the empirical research to identify substantial ways to increase the underrepresentation of minorities in STEM disciplines interested in hazards mitigation and disaster research. Increasing the involvement of qualified minorities will help solve the broader vulnerability concerns in these communities and help advance the body of knowledge through the diversity of thought and creative problem solving in scholarship and practice. Utilizing workshops and a multifaceted mentorship program SURGE creates a new model that addresses the diversity concerns in both STEM and disaster fields, and make American communities more resilient following natural disasters. This project will be of interest to policymakers, educators and the general public.
The Minority SURGE Capacity in Disasters (SURGE) NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot will enhance the social capital of racial and ethnic minority communities by increasing their networks, connections, and access to disaster management decision-making among members of their community from STEM fields. The four-fold goals of SURGE are to: (1) increase the number of minority graduate researchers in STEM fields with a disaster focus; (2) develop and guide well-trained, qualified disaster scholars from STEM fields; (3) provide academic and professional mentorship for next generation minority STEM scholars in hazards mitigation and disaster research; and (4) develop professional and research opportunities that involve outreach and problem solving for vulnerable communities in the U.S. The SURGE project is organized as a lead-organization network through the University of Nebraska at Omaha and includes community partners. As a pilot project, SURGE participation is limited to graduate students from research-intensive universities across the country. Each student will attend workshops and training programs developed by the project leads. SURGE investigators will conduct project evaluation and assessment of their workshops, training, and mentorship projects. Results from evaluations and assessments will be presented at STEM and disaster-related conferences and published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
DeeDee BennettLori PeekTerri NortonHans Louis-Charles
The Sustainability Teams Empower and Amplify Membership in STEM (S-TEAMS), an NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot project, will tackle the problem of persistent underrepresentation by low-income, minority, and women students in STEM disciplines and careers through transdisciplinary teamwork. As science is increasingly done in teams, collaborations bring diversity to research. Diverse interactions can support critical thinking, problem-solving, and is a priority among STEM disciplines. By exploring a set of individual contributors that can be effect change through collective impact, this project will explore alternative approaches to broadly enhance diversity in STEM, such as sense of community and perceived program benefit. The S-TEAMS project relies on the use of sustainability as the organizing frame for the deployment of learning communities (teams) that engage deeply with active learning. Studies on the issue of underrepresentation often cite a feeling of isolation and lack of academically supportive networks with other students like themselves as major reasons for a disinclination to pursue education and careers in STEM, even as the numbers of underrepresented groups are increasing in colleges and universities across the country. The growth of sustainability science provides an excellent opportunity to include students from underrepresented groups in supportive teams working together on problems that require expertise in multiple disciplines. Participating students will develop professional skills and strengthen STEM- and sustainability-specific skills through real-world experience in problem solving and team science. Ultimately this project is expected to help increase the number of qualified professionals in the field of sustainability and the number of minorities in the STEM professions.
While there is certainly a clear need to improve engagement and retention of underrepresented groups across the entire spectrum of STEM education - from K-12 through graduate education, and on through career choices - the explicit focus here is on the undergraduate piece of this critical issue. This approach to teamwork makes STEM socialization integral to the active learning process. Five-member transdisciplinary teams, from disciplines such as biology, chemistry, computer and information sciences, geography, geology, mathematics, physics, and sustainability science, will work together for ten weeks in summer 2018 on real-world projects with corporations, government organizations, and nongovernment organizations. Sustainability teams with low participation by underrepresented groups will be compared to those with high representation to gather insights regarding individual and collective engagement, productivity, and ongoing interest in STEM. Such insights will be used to scale up the effort through partnership with New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability (NJHEPS).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Amy TuiningaAshwani VasishthPankaj Lai
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This Change Makers project will establish Food Justice Ambassador corps across three cities in Massachusetts where youth will install, manage and learn the science and technology underlying hydroponics. The project takes a near-peer mentoring approach that empowers high school youth to take the lead in improving ethnic minority and low-income residents' access to healthy produce and to help educate middle school youth regarding the value of fresh produce in one's diet by learning the science of hydroponics. Youth will create story maps to visualize food accessibility in their communities. High school youth will work with their communities to establish hydroponic farms in middle school after-school settings. The food that is grown will be provided to the community through farmers' markets. Youth will share their work with a larger community of urban farmers at the Massachusetts Urban Farming Conference. This project seeks to understand the contribution on youth development by the model's three components: (1) STEM learning embedded in a social justice framework, (2) near-peer mentoring, and (3) youth purpose and career development. This will enable researchers to better understand how the project enables youth to learn STEM skills; apply them to a real life problem; learn the relevance of STEM skills for addressing personal, career aspiration, and social justice issues; develop a sense of purpose and aspirations related to STEM fields; and mentor other youth through the same process. The project will use a mixed-method, multi-site longitudinal study utilizing quantitative surveys, structural equation modeling, and qualitative interviews to study the intersections of the components of the project. As such, the study will address three key questions: 1) How do youth and mentors perceive and experience their roles as participants in the pedagogy? 2) What is the impact of the intervention on youth' sense of purpose, identity, career adaptability, work volition, critical consciousness, school engagement, STEM interests, and STEM intentionality? 3) What is the contribution of relational/mentoring and psychosocial/career adaptability aspects of the youths' contexts on their capacity to benefit from this program and to develop and sustain purpose and engagement in school and STEM? Most urban youth (and adults) have little knowledge of where their food comes from and have limited opportunities to learn how to grow produce as well as develop related skills that can lead to a career in a STEM field. This is particularly disconcerting as 55% of African Americans live inside central cities (90% in metropolitan areas) and over half of all Latino/as live in central cities (United States Census Bureau, 2011). This project entails the recruitment of low-income youth from populations underrepresented in science into a program where social justice concerns (food justice, food security) are illuminated, analyzed, and acted upon through the development of STEM knowledge and skills. Specifically, this project recognizes the potential for urban youth to become deeply knowledgeable citizens who can mobilize their STEM knowledge and skills to resolve social injustices such as food deserts. If successful, this project will provide a model that should be transferable to similar contexts to help broaden participation in STEM.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
George BarnettBelle LiangDavid Blustein
In the United States, African Americans are underrepresented in science careers and underserved in pre-collegiate science education. This project engaged African American elementary students in culturally relevant science education through archaeology and thereby increased positive dispositions toward science. While imagining what the lives of their ancestors were like, students practiced scientific inquiry and used natural sciences to analyze archaeological sites. The project helped to improve science literacy among African American elementary students through archaeological inquiry and
In this article, Jacksonville State University's Stephen Bitgood and Don Thompson address the issue of how museums can appeal to multicultural audiences and assess the impact of their attempts to attract new audiences. Bitgood and Thompson outline a four-step process for addressing problems of multicultural audiences.
In this article, Susan Fisher of the Harn Museum of Art and John J. Koran, Jr. of the Florida Museum of Natural History discuss their study designed to demonstrate the feasibility of conducting evaluations at archeological sites. Specifically, the researchers conducted a summative evaluation of epistemic curiosity and knowledge of Spanish speaking and non-Spanish speaking visitors to the Maya site of Uxmal in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.
This bilingual study for the Against All Odds: Rescue at the Chilean Mine exhibition was conducted by the Institute for Learning Innovation (ILI) for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). The Against All Odds exhibition was a partnership between NMNH, the Chilean Embassy in Washington, DC, and the U.S. State Department, and tells the story of the 69-day saga that ended when 33 miners were lifted to the surface as heroes. Against All Odds was one of the first bilingual exhibitions at NMNH, and the interpretive team chose to use bilingual graphics for three
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) contracted Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. (RK&A) to conduct a formative evaluation of two prototypes Mexican Era section and Model Table for the Becoming Los Angeles exhibition. RK&A designed this study, which was preceded by a front-end and earlier formative evaluation, to help NHM further refine the development of the exhibition. How did we approach this study? RK&A utilized open-ended interviews to evaluate visitors' responses to the two prototypes. In order to accurately assess these responses, the prototypes were evaluated separately
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Randi Korn & Associates, Inc.Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
The NISE Network Forums were created to provide an in-depth learning experience that would (1) enhance participants' understanding of nano and its potential impacts; (2) increase participants' confidence in participating in public discourse about nanotechnologies; and (3) build informal science educators' knowledge and ability to conduct this type of programming at their institution (NISE Network Public Forums Manual, 2007). In an effort to reach out to a more diverse audience, the NISE Network Forums Team translated into Spanish the existing NISE Net forum "Nanomedicine in Healthcare" to
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Elizabeth KollmannJane MorganNanoscale Informal Science Education NetworkRoxana del Campo
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County contracted Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. (RK&A) to conduct a front-end evaluation to inform the reinstallation of the Ancient Latin America Hall. The study was conducted to examine visitors' experiences in the current exhibition, the nature of their connection with the objects on view, and their needs and preferences for interpretation. In-depth interviews were conducted with 20 English-speaking and 20 Spanish-speaking visitor groups, using a quota sampling method. Visitors were intercepted as they exited the current Ancient Latin America Hall
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Randi Korn & Associates, Inc.Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
This project, WALKING ON WATER, chronicals the success of Jaime Escalante's nationally acclaimed mathematics program at Garfield High School in Los Angeles. Overcoming crime, poverty and a 50% drop-out rate, Mr. Escalante transformed Hispanic students with deficient scholastic backgrounds into the top calculus students in the country. As a result of this success, Garfield High School is now a magnet school for math and science in the Los Angeles School District. Mr. Escalante's story will be told in a 90 minute film docudrama which will air nationally on public television's American Playhouse series, the 14th most popular program on PBS reaching 1.2 million homes. The film is designed for general theatrical release, for educational distribution on cable, for videocassette release and will be dubbed into Spanish for airing in Spanish theaters. In addition, Eddie Olmas, the Emmy award winning star of Miami Vice who portrays Mr. Escalanate in the film, will use the film in personal appearances. Reviewers all agree that this story will inspire and motivate students and teachers alike. They also agreed that it is equally important to reach other significant audiences such as parents, school administrators and opinion leaders so that they will understand and support these types of education efforts.