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.
In this paper, we examine the relationship between participants’ childhood science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) related experiences, their STEM identity (i.e., seeing oneself as a STEM person), and their college career intentions. Whereas some evidence supports the importance of childhood (i.e., K‐4) informal STEM education experiences, like participating in science camps, existing research does not adequately address their relationship to STEM career intention later in life. Grounding our work in identity research, we tested the predictive power of STEM identity on career
Seeking to use narrative as a vehicle for getting more young people interested in STEM, the National Science Foundation supported a WETA/PBS NewsHour initiative to adapt their Student Reporting Labs (SRL) curriculum to feature a focus on STEM content in 2015. NewsHour selected Knology to run a four-year evaluation of the project from 2015 to 2019. Building on earlier research about student-led science journalism (e.g. Polman & Hope, 2014; Nicholas, 2017), this project suggests that having students develop and produce narratives about complex STEM topics may make these topics far less
This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by engaging in hands-on field experience, laboratory/project-based entrepreneurship tasks and mentorship experiences.
Twin Cities Public Television project on Gender Equitable Teaching Practices in Career and Technical Education Pathways for High School Girls is designed to help career and technical education educators and guidance counselors recruit and retain more high school girls from diverse backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) pathways, specifically in technology and engineering. The project's goals are: 1) To increase the number of high school girls, including ethnic minorities, recruited and retained in traditionally male -STEM pathways; 2) To enhance the teaching and coaching practices of Career and Technical Education educators, counselors and role models with gender equitable and culturally responsive strategies; 3) To research the impacts of strategies and role model experiences on girls' interest in STEM careers; 4) To evaluate the effectiveness of training in these strategies for educators, counselors and role models; and 5) To develop training that can easily be scaled up to reach a much larger audience. The research hypothesis is that girls will develop more positive STEM identities and interests when their educators employ research-based, gender-equitable and culturally responsive teaching practices enhanced with female STEM role models. Instructional modules and media-based online resources for Minnesota high school Career and Technical Education programs will be developed in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and piloted in districts with strong community college and industry partnerships. Twin Cities Public Television will partner with STEM and gender equity researchers from St. Catherine University in St. Paul, the National Girls Collaborative, the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-Boulder), the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System.
The project will examine girls' personal experiences with equitable strategies embedded into classroom STEM content and complementary mentoring experiences, both live and video-based. It will explore how these experiences contribute to girls' STEM-related identity construction against gender-based stereotypes. It will also determine the extent girls' exposure to female STEM role models impact their Career and Technical Education studies and STEM career aspirations. The study will employ and examine short-form autobiographical videos created and shared by participating girls to gain insight into their STEM classroom and role model experiences. Empowering girls to respond to the ways their Career and Technical Education educators and guidance counselors guide them toward technology and engineering careers will provide a valuable perspective on educational practice and advance the STEM education field.
The Discovery Research K-12 program (DR-K12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools (RMTs). Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects. This project scales up the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs (SRL), a model that trains teens to produce video reports on important STEM issues from a youth perspective. Participating schools receive a SRL journalism and digital media literacy curriculum, a mentor for students from a local PBS affiliate, professional development for educators, and support from the PBS NewsHour team. The production of news stories and student-oriented instruction in the classroom are designed to increase student learning of STEM content through student-centered inquiry and reflections on metacognition. Students will develop a deep understanding of the material to choose the best strategy to teach or tell the STEM story to others through digital media. Over the 4 years of the project, the model will be expanded from the current 70 schools to 150 in 40 states targeting schools with high populations of underrepresented youth. New components will be added to the model including STEM professional mentors and a social media and media analytics component. Project partners include local PBS stations, Project Lead the Way, and Share My Lesson educators.
The research study conducted by New Knowledge, LLC will add new knowledge about the growing field of youth science journalism and digital media. Front-end evaluation will assess students' understanding of contemporary STEM issues by deploying a web-based survey to crowd-source youth reactions, interest, questions, and thoughts about current science issues. A subset of questions will explore students' tendencies to pass newly-acquired information to members of the larger social networks. Formative evaluation will include qualitative and quantitative studies of multiple stakeholders at the Student Reporting Labs to refine the implementation of the program. Summative evaluation will track learning outcomes/changes such as: How does student reporting on STEM news increase their STEM literacy competencies? How does it affect their interest in STEM careers? Which strategies are most effective with underrepresented students? How do youth communicate with each other about science content, informing news media best practices? The research team will use data from pre/post and post-delayed surveys taken by 1700 students in the STEM Student Reporting Labs and 1700 from control groups. In addition, interviews with teachers will assess the curriculum and impressions of student engagement.
The Sloan Science & Film Teacher's Guide indexes by scientific subject matter over 50 short fiction films funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, that can be streamed for free anytime. The Guide offers an introduction, teaching framework, study questions, and additional resources. Each film is correlated with Next Generation Science Standards as well as New York City Science Standards. The Guide can be viewed online or downloaded as a PDF.
The project team is developing a prototype of a mobile platform, Zaption, to support teachers in using video clips to enrich learning. The product’s user-interface will allow teachers to easily add annotations to videos, make short video clips that align to topics, and enhance videos with time-linked elements and assessments that appear at the top of each video. In Phase I pilot research, the team will examine whether the prototype functions as planned, if teachers are able to use the prototype for different purposes, and whether students are engaged by the prototype.
SciGirls Strategies is a National Science Foundation–funded project led by Twin Cities PBS (TPT) in partnership with St. Catherine University, the National Girls Collaborative, and XSci (The Experiential Science Education Research Collaborative) at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for STEM Learning. This three-year initiative aims to increase the number of high school girls recruited to and retained in fields where females are traditionally underrepresented: technical science, engineering, technology, and math (STEM) pathways. We seek to accomplish this goal by providing career and
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Rita KarlBradley McLainAlicia Santiago
Throughout the five year SciGirls CONNECT grant the independent evaluation firm Knight Williams assisted Twin Cities PBS (TPT) in a wide range of program evaluation activities. Given the project’s emphasis on a Train-the-Trainer model, the evaluation prioritized two goals: (i) assessing the various levels of CONNECT trainings from different vantage and time points, and (ii) capturing information on the implementation of SciGirls programs led by those who completed a training. This evaluation approach allowed the team to collect ongoing data over the course of the grant and share this
SciGirls Reflect: Leveraging Multiple Communities and Networks to Expand Understanding of Professional Development for Informal STEM Educators in Gender Equitable Teaching Strategies was a one-day event that brought together 25 SciGirls Trainers, Educators, and Partner Organization representatives to reflect on their experiences with SciGirls. Data was collected throughout the day via panel presentations, small group discussions, and partner interviews. Nineteen of these participants also conducted follow-up Broadening the Discussion interviews with SciGirls Trainers and Educators to gather
The independent evaluation firm Multimedia Research conducted an evaluation of the television component of SciGirls Season Two, including an experimental study of the impact of the TV series on girls' abilities to take part in science and engineering projects.2 During the same period, the independent evaluation team from Knight Williams Inc. conducted an evaluation of the implementation of the outreach activities among the member institutions of the National Girls Collaborative Project (NGCP) network.
The importance the Brazilian government has given in the last few years to the dissemination of science points out the necessity of a more discerning analysis about the establishment of this subject on the public agenda and the related public policies undertaken. This work tries to contribute to the debate as an inquiry about the policies to popularize and disseminate Science and Technology (S&T) established by the Science and Technology Popularization and Dissemination Department, which was created in 2004. In order to do so, theoretical references from Public Policy Analysis, the Studies of
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Marcia Tait LimaEdnalva Felix das NevesRenato Peixoto Dagnino