RISES (Re-energize and Invigorate Student Engagement through Science) is a coordinated suite of resources including 42 interactive English and Spanish STEM videos produced by Children's Museum Houston in coordination with the science curriculum department at Houston ISD. The videos are aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, and each come with a bilingual Activity Guide and Parent Prompt sheet, which includes guiding questions and other extension activities.
This project addresses the urgent need for the development of equitable approaches to early childhood STEM education that honor the diverse cultural practices through which caregivers (such as parents, grandparents, and other adults in children’s lives) support young children’s learning. Recent studies suggest that both formal and informal educational institutions often privilege Western or Eurocentric parenting practices, neglecting many families’ cultural practices and ways of learning. This study will bring together a group of caregivers, pre-K educators, researchers, and museum staff to investigate how families with young children negotiate among their own cultural practices and the types of STEM learning they encounter in museums, schools, and other community settings. The project team will work together to identify opportunities for informal STEM learning institutions to strengthen their roles as places that can bridge home and school environments and open up new possibilities for building on caregivers’ knowledge and cultural practices within this larger community context. The project will directly benefit the 330 families whose children attend the partnering public school each year, as well as hundreds of families who attend family events at the New York Hall of Science annually. Finally, by considering nuances in caregivers’ perspectives and experiences based on multiple facets of their identities, the research will reveal how structures in educational settings might be changed to become more inclusive and culturally responsive for the broadest possible audience of families.
This Pilots and Feasibility project seeks to 1) conduct exploratory research to understand caregiver engagement, defined as caregivers’ expectations, values, and practices related to their roles in children’s learning, from the perspectives of caregivers, and 2) engage in co-design efforts with caregivers and pre-K educators to explore how the museum can be leveraged as a material and creative resource to support caregiver engagement in STEM learning. This work will be carried out in the context of a long-term partnership between the New York Hall of Science and the New York City Department of Education. Methods will include in-depth interviews with caregivers, using narrative and intersectional research methods to extend existing studies on caregiver engagement in informal STEM learning, while taking into account multiple aspects of families’ social and cultural identities. This work will be carried out in Corona — a neighborhood in Queens, NY, largely made up of low-income and first-generation immigrant families. The project team will collaboratively interpret findings and engage in the initial phases of co-design work, which will include: reflecting on the systems currently in place to support caregivers’ involvement in children’s learning across settings; collaboratively generating new, culturally responsive strategies for leveraging the museum as a material and creative resource for families with young children; and choosing promising directions for further development and testing. Products from this work will include directions for new caregiver engagement initiatives that can be developed and refined as the partnership continues, and strategies for supporting equitable participation by caregivers, pre-K educators, and other community stakeholders in future research-practice partnerships.
The New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) will convene a two-day participatory design conference of to identify research and education opportunities in informal settings for supporting literacy concerning Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially for diverse and underserved youth whose communities are impacted by the bias in some AI processes. AI uses computer systems that simulate human intelligence. AI systems impact nearly every aspect of daily living, performing tasks underlying navigation apps, facial recognition, e-payments, and social media. AI can perpetuate inequities and biased outcomes in the culture at large. The conference will explore how to promote engagement and conceptual learning among youth about how AI works and what skills are needed to critically use and apply AI. The conference will also explore ways to support the interests of diverse and underserved children and youth in shaping AI and joining the growing STEM workforce that will use AI in their professions.
The conference will identify key features and needs with respect to AI literacy and explore the specific roles that informal learning can play in advancing AI literacy for youth in diverse and underserved communities. Participants in the conference will include designers, learning scientists, researchers, informal and formal educators, and science center professionals. Attendees will work in separate teams and as a group to explore and critique existing AI tools and learning frameworks, discuss lessons learned from promising AI literacy programs, and identify design principles and future directions for research. Specific attention will be paid to informal mechanisms of engagement, promising networks, and research-practice partnerships that take advantage of the unique affordances of informal learning and community services to accelerate AI literacy for historically excluded youth. The insights gained from this work will result in a set of research and programmatic priorities for informal institutions to promote AI literacy in culturally responsive ways. The resulting published guide and community events will broadly disseminate priorities and design principles generated by this convening to help informal learning institutions and community learning organizations identify both assets and priorities for addressing diversity, equity, access, and inclusion issues related to AI literacy.
This project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances fundamental research on STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development. It responds to continuing concerns about racial and social inequities in STEM fields that begin to emerge in the early childhood years. The overarching goal of the project is to identify cultural strengths that support early science learning opportunities among Spanish-speaking children from immigrant Latin American communities, a population that is traditionally underrepresented in STEM educational and career pursuits. Building on a growing interest in the ways stories can promote early engagement in and understanding of science, this project will investigate the role of oral and written stories as culturally relevant and potentially powerful tools for making scientific ideas and inquiry practices meaningful and accessible for young Latinx children. Findings will reveal ways that family storytelling practices can provide accessible entry points for Latinx children's early science learning, and recommend methods that parents and educators can use to foster learning about scientific practices that can, in turn, increase interest and participation in science education and fields.
The project will advance knowledge on the socio-cultural and familial experience of Latinx children that can contribute to their early science learning and skills. The project team will examine the oral story and reading practices of 330 Latinx families with 3- to 5-year-old children recruited from three geographic locations in the United States: New York, Chicago, and San Jose. Combining interviews and observations, the project team will investigate: (1) how conversations about science and nature occur in Latinx children's daily lives, and (2) whether and to what extent narrative and expository books, family personal narratives, and adivinanzas (riddles) engender family conversations about scientific ideas and science practices. Across- and within-site comparisons will allow the project team to consider the immediate ecology and broader factors that shape Latinx families’ science-related views and practices. Although developmental science has long acknowledged that early learning is culturally situated, most research on early STEM is still informed by mainstream experiences that largely exclude the lived experiences of children from groups underrepresented in STEM, especially those who speak languages other than English. The proposed work will advance understanding of stories as cultural resources to support early science engagement and learning among Latinx children and inform the development of high quality, equitable informal and formal science educational opportunities for young children.
This project will host a workshop in order to identify and synthesize research findings from NSF awards that addressed the unanticipated effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on STEM teaching and learning. The interruptions from the pandemic had dramatic, widespread effects in education. Across the nation, teachers, students, parents, staff, and school administrators experienced extended school closures and a rapid and unexpected shift to virtual instruction. Although long-term consequences are unknown, early observations revealed deeper disparities in access and opportunity for many students of color. These inequities extend beyond STEM education and include challenges to student’s mental health and wellbeing. In spring 2020, NSF invited researchers to submit educational research proposals in response to this national crisis. Each award has its own dissemination and plans for broader impacts, yet the public is underserved by separate reports published in many different venues. To enable stakeholders to find and discern the most important insights, our research team will aggregate and organize major findings across these projects via a workshop, synthesize key findings, identify unresolved issues, and communicate overall insights to broader audiences.
To synthesize findings, Digital Promise will organize and convene a workshop with NSF awardees who conducted research on the educational impacts of the pandemic. Workshop attendees will participate in answering four questions: (1) What are the major themes and topics across the different NSF awards? (2) How were imperatives to address emerging inequities related to STEM education addressed in research plans and findings? (3) Within each topic or theme, what are the major findings, insights and recommendations for teaching and learning in STEM? (4) Across awardees, what was learned about doing RAPID research during a pandemic, and what are recommendations for improvement when subsequent needs for RAPID research in education arise? Data sources for the synthesis will be collected from project artifacts (e.g., reports, journal articles, practitioner resources, etc.), pre/post-workshop surveys, and workshop outputs from workshop presentations, panel discussions, and small group discussions. Interviews with a subset of workshop attendees will provide insight into what was learned about conducting research during a global pandemic. Data will be codified, categorized, and coded using established qualitative methods. Digital Promise’s broad network of partners and collaborators will achieve broad dissemination and outreach to education stakeholders at both the K-12 and postsecondary levels. This project is jointly funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, the Discovery Research PreK-12 program (DRK-12) program, the EHR Core Research (ECR:Core) program, and the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program.
This project addresses a longstanding problem in informal science education: how to increase the likelihood of consequential science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning from short duration experiences such as field trips. Although informal learning experiences can greatly contribute to interest in and knowledge of science, there is a shared concern among educators and researchers that students may have difficulty recalling and using scientific information and practices emphasized during these experiences, even though doing so would further their science learning. Nonetheless, science learning is rarely, if ever, a "one-shot deal." Children acquire knowledge about science cumulatively across different contexts and activities. Therefore, it is important that informal science learning institutions identify effective practices that support the consolidation of learning and memory from exhibit experiences to foster portable, usable knowledge across contexts, such as from informal science learning institutions, to classrooms, and homes. To this end, this Research in Service to Practice project seeks to harness the power and potential of visual representations (e.g., graphs, drawings, charts, maps, etc.) for enhancing learning and encouraging effective reflection during and after science learning experiences. The project promises to increase learning for the 9,000+ 5th and 6th grade students from across the rurality and growing diversity of the state of Maine who annually participate in LabVenture, a 2.5-hour exploration of the Gulf of Maine ecosystem at Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The research will provide new and actionable informal science learning practices that promote engagement with visual representations and reflection, and science understandings that can be applied broadly by informal science institutions. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) and the Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12) programs. It supports the AISL program goals to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. It supports the DRK-12 program goal of enhancing the learning and teaching of STEM by preK-12 students and teachers.
The project is grounded in the idea that visual representations, including drawings, can both enhance science learning and encourage reflection on doing science that can support extension of that learning beyond a singular informal science experience. The project uses design-based research to address the following research questions: (1) Does reflection during an informal science learning experience promote students’ retention and subsequent use of science information and practices that are part of the experience? (2) Does interpreting and constructing visual representations, such as drawings, improve students’ understanding and retention of information, and if so, how and when? and (3) Does combining visual representations and narrative reflections confer benefits on students’ science learning and engagement in science practices both during the informal learning experience, and later in their classrooms and at home? These questions will be pursued in collaboration with practitioners (both informal educators and classroom teachers) and a diverse team of graduate and undergraduate student researchers. Approximately 600 student groups (roughly 3000 individual students) will be observed during the LabVenture experience, with further data collection involving a portion of these students at school and at home. The project will yield resources and video demonstrations of field-tested, empirically based practices that promote engagement with visual representations and reflection, and science understandings that can travel within students' learning ecosystem. In support of broadening participation, the undergraduate/graduate student researchers will gain wide understanding and experience connecting research to practice and communicating science to academic and nonacademic audiences.
This project will scale up fully virtual or face-to-face STEM professional development to afterschool educators in both urban and rural settings. Given that many afterschool educators have little or no background in STEM education, there is demand for professional development that is effective, inexpensive, and accessible. This project will build national capacity in STEM education by developing the STEM skills of over 1,500 educators across multiple states and will ultimately impact over 31,000 under-represented youth in these areas. The project will also deliver robust materials through a free open-source mechanism, for use by educators anywhere and anytime. The project will broaden participation in STEM by engaging community educators in the rural parts of the nation, a critically under-represented group in STEM. It will also reach educators from low-income urban communities across three states and seven cities, targeted through strategic networks and partnerships, including organizations such as the YMCA, 4-H, and the National Afterschool Association.
This collaborative project is scaling the ACRES model (Afterschool Coaching for Reflective Educators in STEM). The model humanizes the virtual experience, making it social and engaging, and allows educators to learn, share, and practice essential STEM facilitation skills with a focus on making STEM relevant and introducing STEM careers to youth. In addition to enhancing the professional STEM skills of rural and urban educators, the project will create a national cohort of coaches with deep expertise in (i) converting in-person activities for youth into a highly engaging, choice-rich online format, (ii) engaging isolated informal educators in supportive professional learning communities, and (iii) coaching foundational research-based STEM facilitation skills that ensure these activities are pedagogically sound. A key part of this broad implementation project involves studying how to integrate an effective professional development program into afterschool organizations, including the ways afterschool programs adapt the materials to be culturally responsive to their local communities. The researchers will also study factors contributing to the longer-term sustainability of the program. The research will use surveys, interviews, direct observations, and case studies of participants to provide the field with valuable insights into scaling a program in the afterschool world.
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 extending 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.
HBCUs are critical to producing a diverse and inclusive workforce as they graduate a disproportionate number of African American future STEM workers and STEM leaders. Although the National Science Foundation is fully committed to diversity and inclusion, there has been little research to determine why Historically Black Colleges and Universities are not fully participating in the NSF STEM educational research opportunities. The project will investigate the challenges, needs and support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to succeed in applying for educational research support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Participants will be recruited from 96 HBCUs that are eligible to apply for such funding and will include the wide range of college and university administration and faculty that are involved in the preparation of research projects and related applications for research funding. The investigation will focus primarily on the Division of Research on Learning in Informal and Formal Settings (DRL) within NSF. The investigation will: 1) determine the submission rate and funding success rate of HBCUs within the DRL funding mechanisms; 2) determine why a greater proportion of HBCUs are not successful in their applications of research or do not apply; and 3) determine what factors, such as institutional support, research expertise, and professional development, could lead to a larger number of research proposals from HBCUs and greater success in obtaining funding. The project has the potential to have significant influence on the national educational and research agenda by providing empirical findings on the best approach to support and encourage HBCU participation in DRL educational research funding programs.
This exploratory research project will investigate what changes and/or supports would contribute to significantly increasing the number of applications and successful grant awards for STEM educational research project proposed by HBCUs. The project has the following research questions: (1) What factors discourage participation of HBCUs in the DRL funding mechanisms and what are the best practices to encourage participation? (2) What approaches have been successful for HBCUs to obtain DRL funding? (3) What dynamic capabilities are necessary for HBCU researchers to successfully submit STEM proposals to NSF? (4) What changes would be helpful to reduce or eliminate any barriers for HBCU applications for DRL educational research funding and what supports, such as professional development, would contribute to greater success in obtaining funding? Participants will be recruited from the 96 eligible HBCUs and will include both individuals from within the administration (e.g., Office Sponsored Programs, Deans, VP, etc.) as well as from within the faculty. The research will collect variety of quantitative and qualitative data designed to support a comprehensive analysis of factors addressing the research questions. The project will develop research findings and recommendations that are relevant to faculty, administrators, and policymakers for improving HBCU participation in research funding opportunities. Results of project research will be widely disseminated to HBCUs and other Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) through a project website, peer reviewed journals, newsletters, and conference presentations.
This project is funded by the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST), the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL), and the Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12) programs. These programs which supports projects that build understandings of practices, program elements, contexts and processes contributing to increasing students' and general public knowledge and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Cynthia TrawickJohn HaynesTriscia HendricksonTerry Mills
Research suggests that when both science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and social-emotional development (SED) are supported in afterschool, summer, and other informal settings, young people can better develop skills for the future such as leadership, decision-making, and relationship-building so they could have successful careers/participation in STEM. However, researchers and practitioners working in the out-of-school time (OST) sector often do so without connections across these fields. The appeal for more integration of STEM and SED in OST program delivery and data collection has remained abstract and aspirational. This Literature Review and Synthesis project is the next step needed to move the OST field toward the intentional, explicit, and evidence-based integration of STEM and SED in research and practice. The project will create shared understanding necessary to improve program content, staff training, and evaluation. This synthesis will support future research on unified STEM+SED that can lead to more effective, equitable, and developmentally appropriate programming. Improved programming will contribute to talent development, address STEM workforce needs, and promote socioeconomic mobility to benefit children, youth, educators, and society. 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 project will systematically examine what domains and skills at the interface of STEM+SED are most researched among K-12 youth in informal STEM learning environments, compared to formal STEM educational environments. The team will further explore how gender, race, and other intersectional forms of equity can be added to the STEM+SED equation. The project team will search and appraise empirical and gray literature (2001-2020) to identify the most commonly researched domains and skills at the interface of STEM+SED in informal environments serving K-12 youth. The review and synthesis process will include four steps: search, appraisal, synthesis, and analysis. The search will begin with STEM+SED skills in four foundational domains (agency, belonging, engagement, and reflection) identified previously with experts from the fields of STEM and SED. The search will include all existing, eligible references from formal K-12 settings to contrast commonly studied domains and skills (e.g., perseverance, self-regulation, teamwork, complex problem-solving, self-awareness) in formal versus informal learning environments. The study approach will then compare these domains and skills by the demographics variables noted above. Following the creation of a strong catalog of evidence, information will be synthesized using three “pillars” for building coherence in STEM+SED integration: phenomenon (the knowing), implementation (the doing) and assessment (the result). These pillars will be used to organize and critically analyze the literature. Building conceptual coherence through a systematic review and synthesis of literature from the fields of STEM and SED will lead to greater understanding of STEM+SED in OST practice, highlight the most important content and skills to learn in informal environments, and identify when and how youth should learn specific content and skills at the interface of STEM+SED. Applying coherence to the integration of STEM+SED ensures that the principles and practices are layered carefully, in ways that avoid superficial checklists or duplication of effort and build meaningfully upon young people’s knowledge and skills. The long-term goal is to broker connections and alignment of STEM+SED across schools and OST programs. Recommendations and a roadmap to guide equitable, effective STEM+SED research, practice, and policy will result from this research.
Informal STEM learning environments, programs, and policies can be designed to support and promote neurodiversity through inclusive practices. This project will explore the benefits of informal STEM learning for K-12 neurodiverse learners through a systematic review and meta-analysis of extant literature and research grounded in the theory of social model of ability. This framework is an asset-based approach and aims to promote social, cognitive, and physical inclusion, leading to positive outcomes. Using various quantitative and qualitative methodologies, this project endeavors to collect and synthesize the evidence for supporting and enhancing accessibility and inclusiveness in informal STEM learning for K-12 neurodiverse learners. It will explore key features of informal STEM learning and effective, evidence-based strategies to effectively engage children and youth with neurological conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, and dyspraxia, in informal STEM learning environments. The findings of this complex synthesis will provide a timely contribution to deeper understanding of supports for neurodiversity while also highlighting areas that inform further research, shifts in practice, and policy.
The systematic review will occur over a two-year period. It will focus on identifying program elements that promote inclusion of children and youth with neurodevelopmental disabilities in informal STEM learning contexts. Specifically, the review will explore two overarching research questions and several sub-research questions:
RQ1. What program elements (teaching and learning variables) in informal STEM learning settings facilitate inclusion of K-12 neurodiverse STEM learners? Sub-RQ1a: What are the overlapping and discrete characteristics of the program elements that facilitate social, cognitive, and physical inclusion?
Sub-RQ1b: In what ways do the program elements that facilitate inclusion vary by informal STEM learning setting?
RQ2: What program elements (teaching and learning variables) in informal STEM learning settings are correlated with benefits for K-12 neurodiverse STEM learners? Sub-RQ2a: What are the overlapping and discrete characteristics of the program elements that correlate with increased STEM identity, self- efficacy, interest in STEM, or STEM learning?
Sub-RQ2b: In what ways do the program elements that correlate with positive results for students vary by informal STEM learning setting? The research synthesis will consider several different types of studies, including research and evaluation; experimental and quasi-experimental designs; quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods; and implementation studies.
The research team will (a) review all analyses and organize findings to illustrate patterns, factors, and relationships, (b) identify key distinctions and nuances derived from the contexts represented in the literature, and (c) revisit and confirm the strength of evidence for making overall assertions of what works, why, and with whom. The findings will be disseminated in practice briefs, journal articles, the AISL resource center, as well as presentations and materials for researchers, practitioners, and informal STEM leaders. Ultimately, this work will result in a comprehensive synthesis of effective informal STEM learning practices for neurodiverse K-12 learners and identify opportunities for further research and development.
This literature review and meta-analysis 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.