Oregon State University (OSU) will facilitate a Polar STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) program that aims to increase the impact and visibility of polar science by integrating arts- and education-based elements into the polar science research setting.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Julie RisienKim BernardSusan Roberta RowePeter Betjemann
The University of Montana will create “Transforming Spaces” to foster a more inclusive, culturally responsive space for Missoula’s urban Indian population and to better meet the community’s needs. The project will explore cross-cultural, collaborative approaches to STEM and Native Science. In collaboration with Montana’s tribal communities, the museum’s education team and advisory groups will design and implement hands-on activities that engage visitors with Native Science. The project will engage tribal role models and partner with tribal elders to create a library of videos for tribal partners, K–12 schools, and organizations. The project will offer teachers professional development designed to fulfill the statewide mandate of Indian Education for All. The exhibit will connect Native and non-Native museum visitors, close opportunity and achievement gaps, and ensure that all Missoula children feel a sense of belonging in museums, higher education, and STEM.
The Michigan Science Center will purchase a portable planetarium that will bring planetarium shows to more than 2,000 children through its Traveling Science Program. The museum plans to take the programs to 10 schools and 8 libraries in Metro Detroit and 6 libraries in northern Michigan. They will deliver the portable planetarium shows in coordination with the museum’s long-standing “Scopes in the City” program, which allows people to use telescopes to see the night sky. The program also will expose students to Michigan’s growing aerospace industry and help increase their interest in earth and space science.
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.
The Green Bank Observatory organized a community workshop on research experiences for high school students in disciplines supported by NSF’s Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS). The workshop was intended as a forum for sharing, gathering community input, and illuminating best practices in providing research experiences to high school students and organizing such research activities across universities, labs, and observatories. The input gathered from the workshop may be useful to others wanting to support K-12 research activities.
It is often stated that solving the global challenges presented by the 21st century requires a United States workforce with training in STEM fields, and that the STEM workforce may be insufficient to fill that need. Education research literature in STEM suggests that engaging students early and often in authentic research experiences enhances STEM identity, STEM self-efficacy, and STEM career interest: three personal attributes that are linked to entry into and persistence on a STEM career pathway. Much of this literature is focused on college students, however. This workshop convened people and organizations who have designed and implemented research experiences for high school students, and who will examine the role such experiences can play in the development of a student’s interest and STEM identity.
The Hollister Herbarium at Tennessee Tech University will implement “Rooting Students in their Botanical History” — an educational module targeted for 11th and 12th grade biology students. The module will address “plant blindness,” a phenomenon defined as the failure to notice or appreciate plants. The herbarium will collaborate with three Tennessee high school biology teachers, a videographer, and a graduate research assistant to increase knowledge, awareness, and appreciation of plants over the three-year project. Students also will get to know herbarium specimens as an essential resource for information about the natural world.
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 Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum will partner with the Flowing Wells Unified School District on “We Bee Scientists,” a program to engage students in grades K–6 in real-world science by learning about bees—the most important group of pollinators. They plan to create a curriculum and related activities aligned with the Arizona science standards. The program is an expansion of the Tucson Bee Collaborative, which empowers community scientists from “K to grey” to contribute to ecosystem health and understanding through the study of native bees. The museum also will partner with Pima Community College and the University of Arizona on the program, which will involve volunteers and high school, college, and university students in documenting the abundance and diversity of native bees.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Debra Colodner
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Growth in the US Latinx population has outpaced the Latinx growth in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degrees and occupation, further widening the ethnic gap in STEM. Mathematics has often identified as a bottleneck keeping many youth, especially minoritized youth, from pursuing STEM studies. Unequal opportunities to develop powerful math assets explain differences in math skills and understanding often experienced by minoritized youth. Implementing culturally responsive practices (CRP) in afterschool programs has the potential to promote math skills and motivation for youth from minoritized groups. However, extensive research is needed to understand which culturally responsive informal pedagogical practices (CIPPs) are most impactful and why. This project aims to identify and document such practices, shed light on the challenges faced by afterschool staff in implementing them, and develop training resources for afterschool staff to address these challenges. 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.
The fundamental research questions addressed by the project focus on (1) which CIPPs matter most in the context of a STEM university-community partnership engaging Latinx youth, and (2) in what context(s) and under what conditions do these CIPPs relate to positive outcomes for both youth participants and college mentor/facilitator. A third aim is to build capacity of afterschool staff for implementing CIPPs in informal STEM afterschool programs. The first two aims are addressed through a mixed-methods research study which includes quantitative surveys and qualitative in-depth interviews with five cohorts of adolescent participants, parents, and undergraduate mentors. Each year, surveys will be collected from adolescents and mentors at four time points during the year; the in-depth interviews will be collected from adolescents, parents, and mentors in the spring. In total, 840 adolescents and 210 mentors will be surveyed; and 87 adolescents, 87 parents, and 87 mentors will be interviewed. The third aim will be addressed by leveraging the research findings and the collective knowledge developed by practitioners and researchers to create a public archive containing documentation of CIPPs for informal STEM afterschool programs and training modules for afterschool staff. The team will disseminate these resources extensively with informal afterschool practitioners in California and beyond. Ultimately, this project will lead to improved outcomes for minoritized youth in informal STEM afterschool programs across the nation, and increased representation of minoritized youth in STEM pursuits.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alessandra PantanoSandra SimpkinsCynthia Sanchez Tapia
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
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.
The Northwest Passage Project explored the changing Arctic through an innovative expedition aboard the Swedish Icebreaker Oden to conduct groundbreaking ocean science research, while it actively engaged 22 undergraduate and graduate students from the project’s five Minority Serving Institution (MSI) partners and 2 early career Inuit researchers in the research at sea. Over 35 hours of training in Arctic research techniques, polar science, and science communication was provided to these participants, who were engaged in the Northwest Passage expedition and worked with the onboard science team