In this paper, we take an in-depth look at the physics faculty and student volunteers, which we will refer to as the program personnel, involved in informal physics programs to better understand their roles and responsibilities, their interactions with audiences, and their connectedness with content and activities. Understanding the complexities between programs, personnel, and audiences allows us to look for areas to improve informal physics programs in being inclusive, in being equitable and accessible, in supporting physics students who participate, and in connecting more strongly to the
This resource presents a catalog of 25 unique projects, with short descriptions and details about how each project integrates imagination. To support practitioner use, the projects are indexed by title, contributor, project context and format, project audiences, and imaginative ways of thinking. Projects in this resource were selected from works shared by Unpacking the STEM Imagination Convening participants, and works reviewed as part of a comprehensive literature review on imagination in STEM.
Abstract STEM education programs are often formulated with a "hands-on activities" focus across a wide array of topics from robotics to rockets to ecology. Traditionally, the impact of these programs is based on surveys of youth on program-specific experiences or the youths’ interest and impressions of science in general. In this manuscript, we offer a new approach to analyzing science programming design and youth participant impact. The conceptual framework discussed here concentrates on the organization and analysis of common learning activities and instructional strategies. We establish
Background: Capturing measures of students’ attitudes toward science has long been a focus within the field of science education. The resulting interest has led to the development of many instruments over the years. There is considerable disagreement about how attitudes should be measured, and especially whether students’ attitudes toward science can or should be measured unidimensionally, or whether separate attitude dimensions or subscales should be considered. When it is agreed upon that the attitudes toward science construct should be measured along separate subscales, there is no
Many youth programs seek to understand their influence over time on participant outcomes. This paper offers a methodology for measuring a participant’s perception of a program’s contribution amid their perception of other youth influences such as those from family, school, peer groups, hobbies, and other organized activities. The instrument built on the large body of work on youth influences in order to capture the dominant factors in development of the item bank. In addition to item development, the paper documents face validity followed by content assessment of items using a research panel
In collaboration with Metropolitan Family Service (MFS), we conducted a three-year design-based research study to better understand how the characteristics of hands-on, home-based family engineering activities influence how preschool-age children and their parents engage in the engineering design process. Four themes emerged from the study: (1) Families used their imagination and activity narrative elements to set the design context, (2) Families evaluated and revised their solutions based on imagination-driven constraints, (3) Families creatively modified the design space, and (4) Imaginative
In this paper, we report ethnicity trends in student participation and experience in high school science and engineering fair (SEFs). SEF participation showed significant ethnic diversity. For survey students, the approximate distribution was Asian-32%; Black-11%; Hispanic-20%; White-33%; Other-3%. Comparing the SEF level at which students competed from school to district to region to state levels, we observed that black students made up only 4.5% of the students who participated in SEF beyond the school level, whereas students from other ethnic groups were more equally represented at all