In this collaborative project, a university research lab and children's science museum work together to design, implement, study, and revise a week-long data science camp for middle school age students, data science learning assessment items and a facilitator training curriculum.
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.
Although approximately one-quarter of U.S. students reside in rural communities, rural youth are fifty percent less likely to receive and engage in out-of-school STEM experiences than their urban counterparts. In addition, there has been significantly more investment in understanding and improving informal experiences in urban settings than in rural settings. As a result, there is less known about the characteristics of learning ecosystems and programs that support STEM learning for youth in informal contexts within rural communities. This Research in Service to Practice project aims to address this challenge by exploring the feasibility of a culturally relevant and sustaining STEM program designed specifically for rural youth and their families. Parents and caregivers play a critical role in fostering youths’ interests and persistence in STEM through their own engagement and by connecting them to STEM opportunities and STEM-related fields and career pathways. Through a partnership between the High Desert Museum in Oregon, the Institute for Learning Innovation, Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance, JKS Consulting, and three informal science education institutions, a year-long series of STEM-based workshops and experiences for youth and their families will be co-designed by members of the rural community, informal STEM educators, and STEM professionals and implemented within the rural communities of the participating informal science education institutions—Caddo Mounds State Historic Site Weeping Mary (TX), High Desert Museum (OR), Oregon Coast Aquarium, and The Wild Center (NY). Each series will reflect the cultural knowledge, connections, and resources specific to each rural community. In addition, the informal STEM educators and STEM professionals will receive training on facilitating the culturally sustaining workshops and experiences. Researchers at the Institution for Learning Innovation and the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance together with the evaluator at JKS Consulting will employ a collaborative design-based research approach to identify and study the STEM learning practices and supports that occur within the program to promote youths’ interests and persistence in STEM. The findings will offer evidence-based insights to the field on how to better engage, reflect, and provide opportunities for diverse rural communities. Ultimately, this research has the potential to advance the current understanding thereby, strengthening rural STEM learning ecosystems and broadening STEM participation among youth in rural communities.
Over a four-year project duration, a collaborative design-based research approach will be employed to address the following research questions: (1) How does culturally sustaining informal STEM programming for families in rural communities contribute to increases in youth STEM persistence? (1a) How might this vary in relation to family and community factors? (2) How does culturally sustaining informal family STEM programming increase community connectivity between STEM-related resources and institutions across informal and formal learning contexts in rural communities leading to a more robust and inclusive STEM learning ecosystem? (2a) To what extent do participating families, informal STEM educators, STEM professionals, and community partners each play a role in increasing this connectivity? The research sample will include 300 families with youth ages 8-11, informal science educators, and STEM professionals across all four sites. Surveys, interviews and observations will be the primary data sources. Analysis of Variance and simple descriptive statistical analysis will be used to analyze the quantitative data. The qualitative data will be analyzed using thematic coding through NVivo. In addition, to complement the research data, JKS Consulting will conduct the formative and summative evaluations of the project to hone effective practices for training informal science learning practitioners in developing and implementing place-based, inquiry-based family learning in rural communities and effective and sustainable practices for engaging rural families in place-based STEM. Findings from the research will be made available and widely distributed in publications, conference presentations, and a multi-part Research to Practice Toolkit designed for parents and caregivers, informal science educators, STEM professionals, and the informal education field at large.
This Research in Service to Practice project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program.
The employment demands in STEM fields grew twice as fast as employment in non-STEM fields in the last decade, making it a matter of national importance to educate the next generation about science, engineering and the scientific process. The need to educate students about STEM is particularly pronounced in low-income, rural communities where: i) students may perceive that STEM learning has little relevance to their lives; ii) there are little, if any, STEM-related resources and infrastructure available at their schools or in their immediate areas; and iii) STEM teachers, usually one per school, often teach out of their area expertise, and lack a network from which they can learn and with which they can share experiences. Through the proposed project, middle school teachers in low-income, rural communities will partner with Dartmouth faculty and graduate students and professional science educators at the Montshire Museum of Science to develop sustainable STEM curricular units for their schools. These crosscutting units will include a series of hands-on, investigative, active learning, and standards-aligned lessons based in part on engineering design principles that may be used annually for the betterment of student learning. Once developed and tested in a classroom setting in our four pilot schools, the units will be made available to other partner schools in NH and VT and finally to any school wishing to adopt them. In addition, A STEM rural educator network, through which crosscutting units may be disseminated and teachers may share and support each other, will be created to enhance the teachers’ ability to network, seek advice, share information, etc.
American Indian and Alaska Native communities continue to disproportionately face significant environmental challenges and concerns as a predominately place-based people whose health, culture, community, and livelihood are often directly linked to the state of their local environment. With increasing threats to Native lands and traditions, there is an urgent need to promote ecological sustainability awareness and opportunities among all stakeholders within and beyond the impacted areas. This is especially true among the dozens of tribes and over 50,000 members of the Coast Salish Nations in the Pacific Northwest United States. The youth within these communities are particularly vulnerable. This Innovations in Development project endeavors to address this serious concern by implementing a multidimensional, multigenerational model aimed at intersecting traditional ecological knowledge with contemporary knowledge to promote: (a) environmental sustainability awareness, (b) increased STEM knowledge and skills across various scientific domains, and (c) STEM fields and workforce opportunities within Coast Salish communities. Building on results from a prior pilot study, the project will be grounded on eight guiding principles. These principles will be reflected in all aspects of the project including an innovative, culturally responsive toolkit, curriculum, museum exhibit and programming, workshops, and a newly established community of practice. If successful, this project could provide new insights on effective mechanisms for not only promoting STEM knowledge and skills within informal contexts among Coast Salish communities but also awareness and social change around issues of environmental sustainability in the Pacific Northwest.
Over a five-year period, the project will build upon an extant curriculum and findings codified in a pilot study. Each aspect of the pilot work will be refined to ensure that the model established in this Innovations and Development project is coherent, comprehensive, and replicable. Workshops and internships will prepare up to 200 Coast Salish Nation informal community educators to implement the model within their communities. Over 2,500 Coast Salish Nation and Swinomish youth, adults, educators, and elders are expected to be directly impacted by the workshops, internships, curriculum and online toolkit. Another 300 learners of diverse ages are expected to benefit from portable teaching collections developed by the project. Through a partnership with the Washington State Burke Natural History Museum, an exhibit and museum programming based on the model will be developed and accessible in the Museum, potentially reaching another 35,000 people each year. The project evaluation will assess the extent to which the following expected outcomes are achieved: (a) increased awareness and understanding of Indigenous environmental sustainability challenges; (b) increased skills in developing and implementing education programs through an Indigenous lens; (c) increased interest in and awareness of the environmental sciences and other STEM disciplines and fields; and (d) sustainable relationships among the Coast Salish Nations. A process evaluation will be conducted to formatively monitor and assess the work. A cross cultural team, including a recognized Coast Salish Indigenous evaluator, will lead the summative evaluation. The project team is experienced and led by representatives from the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Oregon State University, Garden Raised Bounty, the Center for Lifelong STEM Learning, the Urban Indian Research Institute, Feed Seven Generations, and the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.
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.