This study collected data from seven planetarium email lists (one per planetarium regional organization in the United States), as well as online survey panel data from residents in each area, to describe and compare those who do and do not visit planetariums.
This conference project will bring together Black children's media creators with climate scientists and developmental psychologists to promote climate science story making that speak to the concerns, circumstances, and experiences of Black audiences.
Texas Southern University, in partnership with the Innovation Collaborative, will convene a two-year five-phase working conference project to address these issues. This conference project is housed on an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) campus that has a museum studies program and a university museum.
This project aims to (1) advance understanding of sociotechnical ecosystems involving AI to support diasporic urban farming; (2) collaboratively develop AI-based technologies that better integrates and sustains technological gains with diasporic knowledge, and (3) systematically assess the impact of AI-based farming technologies on diasporic communities and industrial partners.
Structural inequities contribute to the disproportionate incarceration of Black and African American women, as well as women from the working class. This project will work toward redressing these inequities through developing and researching an ecosystem designed to support formerly incarcerated women's transition into careers that require technology-based skills or computational thinking.
This project seeks to broaden the mathematical imagination and aspirations of Black and other underserved mathematics students in both in-school and out-of-school environments.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Erica WalkerRobin WilsonLalitha Vasudevan
This white paper describes outcomes from a conference about using non-science art in science education. Art and science are often combined for entertainment, education (STEAM) and inspirational value. However, in almost all cases the art is science-themed (scientific visualizations, science-inspired art, art about scientific topics, etc.). This conference asks the question “what about art for arts-sake?”. That is, what is the impact of non-scientific art in science education? Can non-science themed art be used to broaden perspectives about science? Can it cue people to think about science more
Explora Science Center and Children's Museum of Albuquerque will conduct “Roots: supporting Black scholars in STEAM,” a project to increase Explora’s relationships with and relevance to Albuquerque’s Black communities and increase opportunities for Black students in Albuquerque to pursue STEAM. The project is designed to foster a holistic, place-based approach to K–16 STEAM learning that incorporates a growth mindset and highlights the contributions of community members, particularly Black STEAM professionals. The museum will collaborate on project activities with the Mexico Black Leadership Council, the Greater Albuquerque Housing Partnership/Casa Feliz, the Community School at Emerson Elementary, and Sandia National Laboratories’ Black Leadership Committee.
The Adler Planetarium will expand access to STEM programs for African American and Latinx Chicago teens through a progressive series of entry-point, introductory, intermediate, and advanced level programs. Students in grades 7–12 will be invited to join teams of scientists, engineers, and educators to undertake authentic scientific research and solve real engineering challenges. In collaboration with schools and community-based organizations, Adler will develop and implement new participant recruitment and retention strategies to reach teens in specific neighborhoods. The initiative will help address the underrepresentation of Latinx and African Americans in engineering.
The McWane Science Center (MWSC) will create a new exhibition experience entitled “Dropping Science: Hip-Hop Interactive” that will capture the elements of the popular music genre using interpretive experiences. Project activities include exhibit content development; development of a formal evaluation plan; exhibit prototyping; remedial evaluation, and a final exhibit design plan. An important project goal is to develop the process for creating lasting, reciprocal relationships with the local African American community and throughout the region, thus creating an exhibit space that connects underrepresented audiences to STEM and establishes MWSC as a true community partner. The outcome of this project will be a new interactive experience that was co-developed with and representative of MWSC’s local community that helps MWSC connect with and engage local visitors in science through a more culturally and personally relevant lens.
This project engages pre-college Latinx, Black, and Indigenous learners, educators, and collaborating undergraduates in an international, project-based learning and media-making community in areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The project addresses key challenges including broadening participation in informal STEM learning, developing capacity for leading informal STEM programs, and building stronger connections between STEM learning and personal and social identity formation during adolescence. The project’s community of participants is an asset-based learning environment that treats each participant, their background, skills, and interests as uniquely beneficial to the whole. Led by mentors at each hub (teachers, leaders from science organizations, or other out-of-school learning environments), participants collaborate with peers from the US and from other countries. The collaborations encompass a broad spectrum of STEM projects. Participants also create digital media to communicate their projects. The project activities reflect a focus on STEM content, collaboration, and communication, in a global context that includes school-age learners from the US and peers from Central and South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Sub-Sahara. The combination of the sophisticated STEM competencies skills for collaborating across international and cultural boundaries, and media-savvy communication abilities are essential to the nation’s future STEM workforce and to building a scientifically vibrant citizenry.
The project addresses two primary research questions co-developed with teachers and other informal science providers. The first research question involves understanding and optimizing conditions for broadening participation through this type of distributed or virtual collaboration across boundaries of culture, race, gender, ability, nationality, and socioeconomic status. The project features a design experiment by which the overall community of participants comprises four separate hubs, each hosted by the different project partners (primarily teachers). Educators devise, test, and revise alternative designs for organizing STEM collaborations. Publication of these teacher-led designs and their evaluation are among the primary outputs of the project. The designs modify and improve a template developed under this project’s proof-of-concept precursor (NSF1612824). The second research question addresses how growth in STEM abilities, collaboration, and communication mutually reinforce adolescent personal and social identity formation. Participating students in the US will intentionally reflect heterogeneous backgrounds. The project analysis will focus on whether cultural and national cross-boundary collaboration can strengthen the development of learners' personal identity and academic performance. The project methodology relies heavily on quantitative ethnography and epistemic network analysis. This approach enables the creation of visual models that highlight the presence or absence of connections between constructs relevant to each research question, along with changes between and within groups. The constructs include variations of autonomy, competence, and connection (pillars of self-determination theory) in tracing identity formation and STEM abilities. The quantitative ethnography approach provides statistically reliable scaffolding and insights about the hub designs and their efficacy in promoting goals of broadening participation and fostering mutually reinforcing STEM competencies and identity formation. This type of virtual collaboration, crossing boundaries of culture, nationality, ethnicity, age, gender, economic strata, or ability, can realistically be expected to play a significant role in next-generation learning environments, especially through out-of-school activities. The project is expected to reach 120 U.S. and 80 non-U.S. students annually. Research findings, design principles and curricula will be widely disseminated to researchers, designers, program developers, informal science institutions and community organizations.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Eric HamiltonNastassia JonesDanielle EspinoSeung Lee