This Integrating Research and Practice project leverages museum exhibits as unique family learning spaces to promote community engagement in critical climate change conversations.
This white paper examined the process of evaluating a new Growth Mindset youth program developed for youth in Grades 3-5 in the Northwest suburb communities in Dundee Township, IL.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Luci HanstedtDrew Glassford Mike LoPrestiMallory NamoffRobert Tai
This Innovations in Development project supports racially and ethnically diverse youth in learning about climate resilience in informal settings, including community centers, afterschool programs, and museums. The project aims to: (1) build the capacity of community organizations to implement youth programming on climate resilience; (2) increase youth knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy associated with climate resilience (also referred to as environmental health literacy for climate resilience); and (3) explore how collaborating research universities and community organizations engage diverse youth in informal STEM learning. Project partners include the UNC Institute for the Environment, the University of Washington-Interdisciplinary Center for Exposures, Diseases, Genomics and Environment, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Juntos NC, and the Duwamish River Community Coalition (DRCC). Juntos NC and DRCC actively engage Latino and Indigenous youth in their programming and seek to implement resilience-focused programming that supports youth science learning and leadership development.
Together, informal educators and participating youth will develop locally relevant solutions to climate impacts in their communities. Youth will interact with university-based climate scientists and educators to collect and analyze data and will participate in resilience-focused dialogue, planning, and actions in their communities. Youth will share what they learn with their families and peers through family events and teen summits. The project will engage dozens of educators in community organizations and at least 250 youth, who will share what they learn with their families and communities, reaching hundreds more people through communications and local action projects. Mixed-methods assessment will provide insight into the extent participating youth (a) develop environmental health literacy for climate resilience, and (b) take action to address resilience in their home communities. The team will assess how these outcomes vary by location, and the implications of any variation on potential for project replication. A participatory evaluation, led by an external evaluator, will provide insight into empowerment outcomes. Findings will be disseminated to professional audiences at local and national conferences; and curricular materials from this project will be disseminated through the project website.
Presentation slides and narration for the NARST 2022 Annual Conference. In this presentation we summarize findings from our interviewed with undergraduate STEM majors who identify as Latine, homing in on the ways in which they characterize "STEM" and "STEM people" and their descriptions of K-12 experiences that contributed to their characterizations of these concepts.
Awareness of a STEM discipline is a complex construct to operationalize; a learner’s awareness of a discipline is sometimes viewed through the lens of personal identity, use of relevant discourse, or knowledge of career pathways. This research proposes defining engineering awareness through a learner’s associations with engineering practices - fundamental processes involved in engineering such as identifying criteria and constraints, testing designs, diagnosing issues and assessing goal completion. In this study, a learner’s engineering awareness was determined by examining 1) their ability to
This front-end evaluation study is part of Designing Our Tomorrow: Mobilizing the Next Generation of Engineers, a five-year project (2018–2023) led by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF, DRL-1811617) and project partners: Adelante Mujeres, the Biomimicry Institute, and the Fleet Science Center. The Designing Our Tomorrow (DOT) project seeks to promote and strengthen family engagement and engineering learning via compelling exhibit-based design challenges, presented through the lens of sustainable design exemplified by
Research that seeks to understand classroom interactions often relies on video recordings of classrooms so that researchers can document and analyze what teachers and students are doing in the learning environment. When studies are large scale, this analysis is challenging in part because it is time-consuming to review and code large quantities of video. For example, hundreds of hours of videotaped interaction between students working in an after-school program for advancing computational thinking and engineering learning for Latino/a students. This project is exploring the use of computer-assisted methods for video analysis to support manual coding by researchers. The project is adapting procedures used for computer-aided diagnosis systems for medical systems. The computer-assisted process creates summaries that can then be used by researchers to identify critical events and to describe patterns of activities in the classroom such as students talking to each other or writing during a small group project. Creating the summaries requires analyzing video for facial recognition, motion, color and object identification. The project will investigate what parts of student participation and teaching can be analyzed using computer-assisted video analysis. This project is supported by NSF's EHR Core Research (ECR) program, the STEM+C program and the AISL program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. The project is funded by the STEM+Computing program, which seeks to address emerging challenges in computational STEM areas through the applied integration of computational thinking and computing activities within disciplinary STEM teaching and learning in early childhood education through high school (preK-12). 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 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 video analysis systems will provide video summarizations for specific activities which will allow researchers to use these results to quantify student participation and document teaching practices that support student learning. This will support the analysis of large volumes of video data that are often time-consuming to analyze. The video analysis system will identify objects in the scene and then use measures of distances between objects and other tracking methods to code different activities (e.g., typing, talking, interaction between the student and a facilitator). The two groups of research questions are as follows. (1) How can human review of digital videos benefit from computer-assisted video analysis methods? Which aspects of video summarization (e.g., detected activities) can help reduce the time it takes to review the videos? Beyond audio analytics, what types of future research in video summarization can help reduce the time that it takes to review videos? (2) How can we quantify student participation using computer-assisted video analysis methods? What aspects of student participation can be accurately measures by computer-assisted video analysis methods? The video to be used for this study is drawn from a project focused on engineering and computational thinking learning for Latino/a students in an after-school setting. Hundreds of hours of video are available to be reviewed and analyzed to design and refine the system. The resulting coding will also help document patterns of engagement in the learning environment.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Marios PattichisSylvia Celedon-PattichisCarlos LopezLeiva
Libraries can provide unique opportunities for rural youth and communities. Phase III of the STAR Library Network will be a collaboration with 12 rural school districts in largely Latinx communities to address the challenges faced by rural youth, particularly English Language Learners. The project will use a coordinated and tested strategy to establish three learning pathways in public libraries: science learning spaces with exhibits, library programs, and science kits. These resources will provide learners with art-rich STEM learning opportunities.
Partners
Project partners include the Space Science Institute, the American Library Association (ALA), the Institute for Learning Innovation, and Twin Cities Public Television. The project will rely significantly on expertise from the Latinx community.
Project Plan
Building on an established librarian training model, the project will introduce library staff to the STEAM content and guide them in developing their own STEAM Learning Pathways. The project will draw on existing professional infrastructure from the ALA and the Institute for Learning Innovation’s established community of practice. SciGirls digital media, hands-on activities, family resources, and a training network will expand the depth and reach of the project.
The Research
The research team will study the efficacy of each pathway, alone and in tandem, on participant’s interest development and persistence. The research will use a mixed-methods design-based approach that involves questionnaires, interviews, and case studies. The results should yield a model for nationwide application and contribute insights for the formal education sector.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.