One way to motivate young people from diverse backgrounds to pursue engineering careers is to enlist them as educators who can help the general public understand how engineers help respond to the challenges of everyday life. The New York Hall of Science, which serves a large and diverse audience, is an ideal setting for testing the promise of this strategy. Youth educators and curators of public programs at the Hall of Science will mentor two groups of high school- and early college-aged youth, who will contribute to the design and facilitation of engineering-focused events and activities for museum visitors. They will work together to develop engineering programming for the public that emphasizes the cultural and interpersonal dimensions of engineering practices. This group of young people will be recruited from the Hall of Science's more than 100 Explainers, a very diverse group of young people who work part-time at the Hall of Science and engage with visitors as they explore the museum. Researchers will track participants' experiences and document their impact on museum visitors' perceptions of engineering. The expectation is that creating and delivering these experiences for visitors will have a positive impact on the youth participants' understanding of the engineering disciplines, and on visitors' perceptions of engineering and its relationship to everyday life.
The project will use observations, interviews, journaling, and the Engineering Professional Skills Assessment to explore youth experience, and visitor exit surveys and interviews to probe visitor perceptions. Both the skills assessment and visitor surveys are NSF-funded instruments. Data coding will be grounded in the engineering habits of mind defined by the National Research Council's Committee on Understanding and Improving K-12 Engineering Education in the United States (2009). The project will capture evidence regarding which habits of mind the Fellows are most frequently engaged with. The effort will also explore how interactions with peers (as colleagues), with experts (as learners, such as with Designers in Residence) and with visitors (as teachers and leaders) may be associated with different combinations of the habits of mind over the course of the project. Visitor data and assessment data will allow the project to begin to make analytic connections between participating young people's increased understanding of culturally-situated engineering challenges, and their impact on the experiences of museum visitors who engage with engineering programming at the Hall of Science.
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.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches and resources for use in a variety of settings. This AISL project investigates how informal programs can broaden participation by building social capital in STEM for youth from underrepresented groups. The project integrates social network analysis with research on informal learning, and draws on a framework to connect learning across a variety of sectors. It builds on evidence that sponsorship of youth interest, affinity-based mentorship, and brokering connections to other settings and opportunities can build social capital and support interest and persistence in STEM. It represents a strategic and timely investment into research that solidifies these emerging insights from research and practice, conducting focused investigation into relational supports for STEM interests that are particularly well suited to informal programs.
The project is guided by two research questions: (1) What forms of social capital are tied to persistence in and connecting across informal STEM programs for youth from underrepresented groups? (2) What program features--specifically sponsorship, mentorship, and brokering--grow these social supports for persistence in and connecting across informal STEM programs for underserved youth? These questions are addressed through a mixed methods 18-month cross-sectional study of 200 students in three informal programs in Orange County, California that offer project-based engineering and coding programs, support mentorship, and focus on groups underrepresented in STEM. The sample will include three age categories, capturing the transition to high school, persistence during high school, and transition to college and career. Teens will be interviewed three times at 6-month intervals, spanning these transitions. The goal of this research and effort is to determine if social capital plays an extra ordinary role in learning by this group.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Mizuko Ito
resourceprojectProfessional Development and Workshops
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches and resources for use in a variety of settings. Blind youth are generally excluded from STEM learning and careers because materials for their education are often composed for sighted individuals. In this proposed Innovations in Development project, the PIs suggest that spatial acuity is an important element in order for blind persons to understand physical and mental structures. Thus, in this investigation, efforts will be made to educated blind youth in the discipline of engineering. A total of 200 blind students, ages 12-20 along with 30 informal STEM educators will participate in the program. This effort is shared with the National Federation of the Blind, Utah State University, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the Lifelong Learning Group.
The National Federation of the Blind, in partnership with scholars from Utah State University and educators from the Science Museum of Minnesota will develop a five-year Innovations in Development project in order to broaden the participation of blind students in STEM fields through the development of instruction and accessible tools that assess and improve the spatial ability of blind youth. The partnership with the Science Museum will facilitate the creation of informal science content for students and professional development opportunities for informal educators. Evaluation will be conducted by Lifelong Learning Group of the Columbus Center of Science and Industry. Activities will begin in year one with a week-long, engineering design program for thirty blind high-school students at the Federation of the blind headquarters in Baltimore. Year two will feature two similarly sized programs, taking place at the Science Museum. While spatial ability is linked to performance in science, research has not been pursued as to how that ability can be assessed, developed, and improved in blind youth. Further, educators are often unaware of ways to deliver science concepts to blind students in a spatially enhanced manner, and students do not know how to advocate for these accommodations, leading blind youth to abandon science directions. Literature on the influences of a community of practice on youth with disabilities, as well as nonvisual tools for experiencing engineering, is lacking. This project will advance understanding of how blind people can participate in science, and how spatial ability can be developed and bolstered through informal engineering activities and an existing community of practice.
This project by California State University San Marcos and their collaborators will expand and continue to innovate on a pilot Mobile Making program with the goal of developing a sustainable, regional model for serving underserved, middle-school aged youth in twelve after-school programs in the San Diego region. Evaluation of the current Mobile Making program has documented positive impacts on participants' interest, self-efficacy, and perception of the relevance of Making/STEM in everyday life, and led to a model for engaging underserved youth in Making. The work will focus on implementing the program model sustainably at greater capacity by increasing the number of undergraduate activity leaders, after-school sites, and level of community engagement. The expanded Mobile Making program is expected to engage ~1800 middle school youth at 12 local school sites, with activities facilitated by ~1020 undergraduate CSU-SM STEM majors. The sites are in ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, with as many as 90% of students at some sites qualifying for free or reduced price lunch. The undergraduate facilitators are drawn from CSU-SM's diverse student body, which includes 44% underrepresented minorities. Outcomes are expected to include increases in the youth participants' interest, self-efficacy, and perception of the relevance of Making/STEM in everyday life. Positive impacts on the undergraduate facilitators will include broadened technical skills, increased leadership and 21st century skills, and increased lifelong interest in STEM outreach/informal science education. The program is designed to achieve sustainability through innovative means such as involving undergraduate facilitators via Community Service Learning (rather than paid positions), and increased community engagement via development and support of a community of practice including local after-school providers, teachers, Makers, and University members. Evaluation of the program outcomes and lessons learned are expected to result in a comprehensive model for a sustainable, university-based after-school Making program with regional impact in underserved communities. Dissemination to other regions will be leveraged via CSU-SM's membership in the California State University (CSU) system, yielding a potential statewide impact. The support of the CSU Chancellor's Office and input from a CSU implementation group will ensure the applicability of the model to other regional university settings, identify common structural barriers and solutions, and increase the probability of secondary implementations. This work 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.