This four-year research study will investigate families' joint media engagement (JME) and informal STEM learning while listening to the child-focused STEM podcast, Brains On! Prior research has shown that the setting where families most often listen to this podcast together is the family automobile as children are being driven to school, on road trips, or other activities. Brains On! is rooted in the mission-driven principle of public radio to educate and inspire. The target audience is children 5-12 years old and their parents or caregivers. Each episode ranges from 20-45 minutes in length and presents ideas from a variety of STEM disciplines such as physics, chemistry, biology and engineering featuring sound-rich explanations of concepts through fun skits, original songs and interviews with scientists. The episodes use a light-hearted, humorous approach to share oftentimes complex STEM information. To provide an interactive experience, hosts encourage the audience to participate with the show by sending in drawings, emailing photos of plants and animals, or posing questions to be answered in future episodes. Every episode is co-hosted by a different child who interviews top scientists about their work. The scientists are selected to be representative of the range of topics presented and are meant to serve as role models for the listeners and demonstrating a wide range of career options in the STEM field.
The research adds to the social learning theory of joint media engagement (JME) which has shown that interactions between people sharing a media experience can result in learning together. Recent work on Joint Media Engagement has focused on parent/child interactions with television/video in the home. But little is known about how families engage with children's STEM podcasts together and what learning interactions occur as a result. Even less is known about this engagement within an automobile setting. This research project will build new knowledge filling a gap in the informal STEM learning field. It will use a mixed-methods research design with three phases of research to answer these questions: 1) How does the Brains On! podcast mediate STEM-based joint media engagement and family learning in an automobile setting? 2) What does STEM based joint media engagement and family learning look and sound like in this setting? 3) How do "in-automobile" factors foster or impede STEM-based joint media engagement and family learning? Phase 1 is a listener experience video study of 30 families listening to the Brains On! episodes. Phase 2 is video-based case studies of the natural automobile-based listening behaviors of eight Phase 1 families. Phase 3 is an online survey of Brains On! listeners to understand how representative the findings from Phases 1 and 2 are to the larger Brains On! Research. Results will be shared widely with key audiences that can use the findings (media developers, ISE practitioners, ISE evaluators and researchers, and families). It will also make an important contribution to the Joint Media Engagement literature and the ISE field.
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.
This exploratory learning research and design project will study how to use emerging technologies to help document practices in maker-based learning experiences. Despite its established potential for consolidating learning and sense-making, project documentation is often overlooked, not prioritized or seen as burdensome and therefore not integrated into the learning experiences. The project team seeks to understand and address with practice partners the barriers to documentation by systematically exploring how to physically embed and incorporate smart tools and documentation practices into learning environments, specifically creative hands-on learning spaces, like makerspaces. The goal is to understand how to scaffold learners to become more aware, reflective and attentive to their progress towards learning outcomes by embedding supportive tools physically in space as the actions unfold. Making and maker-based learning experiences offer tremendous opportunities to more fully engage diverse learners in STEM education and build a workforce prepared for innovation. Documentation of these learning experiences, both as an authentic practice that professionals engage in as well as an assessment practice for instruction, is often not supported. The project will create open source documentation for solutions and develop supporting case studies, web resources and guides to facilitate easy uptake and adoption of promising approaches.
This proposal will make significant research contributions in three ways: (1) develop and iteratively test a suite of embedded "smart" tools designed to scaffold, manage and trace process documentation practices; (2) study the integration of these tools in formal and informal activities and programs settings and characterize their influence on instruction and the assessment of learning outcomes; (3) establish a set of rubrics based on learner data streams to aid instruction and mark learner progress. Improving documentation practices and the assessment of learning outcomes will advance making as a core STEM educational activity. Through a better understanding of why and how to place networked documentation tools sensitive to space, time and context cues, the threshold for enactment and scaffolded usage can be lowered in a broader range of settings. Ultimately, this exploratory project will not only develop an integrated set of situated documentation tools, but also help us develop hypotheses for how documentation as a mediating process productively supports learning.
The Discovery Research K-12 program (DRK-12) 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. The Multimedia Immersion (MI) project is will develop, pilot, and evaluate a nine-week STEM-rich multimedia production course for high school students. MI will make important contributions to the field through its efforts to design and evaluate the promises and challenges of a nine-week multimedia curriculum in multiple urban high schools. The MI course will engage teams of students to develop a personally and socially relevant storyline that guides their use of accessible audio and video technologies to create a five-minute animated video. To develop student STEM experience and provide technical support, the project will provide guidance and learning experiences in engineering (e.g., criteria, constraints, optimization, tradeoffs), science (e.g. sound, light, energy, mechanics) and multimedia technologies (e.g., computer based audio production, video editing and visualizations through animatics (i.e., shooting a succession of storyboards with a soundtrack). animatics).
Because the curriculum situates engineering and science learning in the context of multimedia production, there are natural synergies with several existing high school courses including engineering design, audio/video media production, and multimedia technology. Although these courses are typically electives in high school, developing a 5-minute animated short on a topic of interest may encourage girls and students from underrepresented groups to select this course over other electives. MI will impact 10 teachers and approximately 250 high school students per year. The project will result in the following resources: nine-week curricular unit (multimedia, science, engineering); assessments to monitor student learning of science, engineering and technology (design logs); and research on changes in student knowledge, interest, and a nine-week curricular unit (multimedia, science, engineering). Project resources will be disseminated to teachers, researchers, and curriculum and professional development providers via conference presentations, publications, and online webinars.
The MI project builds on student familiarity and interest in music, video and technology to promote an: (1) understanding of engineering design and physics and an (2) an appreciation of the fundamental role of STEM in popular culture. Project evaluation will be conducted using student surveys and an examination of work products in conjunction with implementation challenges and successes to generate evidence for the feasibility and utility of a high school multimedia course that explicitly addresses science and engineering learning. Project evaluation will use student design logs as a window into student design processes and conceptual understanding. Student design logs are an essential feature of MI curriculum design. With an appropriate structure, these design logs can inform teaching, afford an opportunity for students to reflect on their own work, and provide evidence of student thinking and learning for assessment purposes. Using student design logs as a window into students? design process and conceptual understanding is an important contribution to the engineering education community which has few options for measuring student knowledge in ways that are consistent with the hands-on, iterative nature of the design process.
The Sustainability Teams Empower and Amplify Membership in STEM (S-TEAMS), an NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot project, will tackle the problem of persistent underrepresentation by low-income, minority, and women students in STEM disciplines and careers through transdisciplinary teamwork. As science is increasingly done in teams, collaborations bring diversity to research. Diverse interactions can support critical thinking, problem-solving, and is a priority among STEM disciplines. By exploring a set of individual contributors that can be effect change through collective impact, this project will explore alternative approaches to broadly enhance diversity in STEM, such as sense of community and perceived program benefit. The S-TEAMS project relies on the use of sustainability as the organizing frame for the deployment of learning communities (teams) that engage deeply with active learning. Studies on the issue of underrepresentation often cite a feeling of isolation and lack of academically supportive networks with other students like themselves as major reasons for a disinclination to pursue education and careers in STEM, even as the numbers of underrepresented groups are increasing in colleges and universities across the country. The growth of sustainability science provides an excellent opportunity to include students from underrepresented groups in supportive teams working together on problems that require expertise in multiple disciplines. Participating students will develop professional skills and strengthen STEM- and sustainability-specific skills through real-world experience in problem solving and team science. Ultimately this project is expected to help increase the number of qualified professionals in the field of sustainability and the number of minorities in the STEM professions.
While there is certainly a clear need to improve engagement and retention of underrepresented groups across the entire spectrum of STEM education - from K-12 through graduate education, and on through career choices - the explicit focus here is on the undergraduate piece of this critical issue. This approach to teamwork makes STEM socialization integral to the active learning process. Five-member transdisciplinary teams, from disciplines such as biology, chemistry, computer and information sciences, geography, geology, mathematics, physics, and sustainability science, will work together for ten weeks in summer 2018 on real-world projects with corporations, government organizations, and nongovernment organizations. Sustainability teams with low participation by underrepresented groups will be compared to those with high representation to gather insights regarding individual and collective engagement, productivity, and ongoing interest in STEM. Such insights will be used to scale up the effort through partnership with New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability (NJHEPS).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Amy TuiningaAshwani VasishthPankaj Lai
Physical science and engineering remain the least diverse of all STEM fields---with regard to women, underrepresented minorities, and persons with disabilities---across all levels of STEM education and training. SCI-STEPS is an NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot that will address this persistent challenge by developing a complete end-to-end pipeline (or system of pathways) from the beginning of college to the PhD, and then into the workforce. Many isolated efforts to broaden participation have shown promise, but they have not produced big enough impact. SCI-STEPS represents a concerted set of coordinated interventions---consciously facilitated, systemically linked, and purposefully disseminated. SCI-STEPS represents a broad regional network among major research universities, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, comprehensive universities, community colleges, national labs, and major scientific organizations. The goal of the network is to ensure that underrepresented individuals in the physical sciences and engineering can get from their starting point in STEM higher education---freshmen at 2-year or 4-year college---through the higher education pathways leading to an appropriate terminal degree and employment in the STEM workforce.
Women, underrepresented minorities, and persons with disabilities collectively represent the majority of college-age individuals entering higher education with an expressed interest in physical science and engineering. A growing body of research indicates that academic and social integration may be even more influential than academic abilities for retention of students. Thus, interventions aimed at stemming the losses of these individuals must ultimately be aimed at changing the system---including unwelcoming institutional climates, racial/ethnic/gender stereotyping, a lack of mentors with whom to identify, and evaluation methods that emphasize conformity over individual capabilities---rather than changing the individual. The SCI-STEPS pilot focuses effort on institutional readiness for implementation of best practice interventions at four key junctures: (i) college freshman to sophomore; (ii) undergraduate to graduate; (iii) PhD to postdoc; and (iv) postdoc to workforce.The pilot will proceed in three steps: (1) a planning phase, (2) development of an initial end-to-end pathways model with four Juncture Transition teams, and (3) scale-up of the SCI-STEPS "network of networks" with all initial partners. By addressing these objectives through a collective impact framework and embedded research, this pilot will demonstrate how best-practice interventions at each pathway juncture can be dovetailed and scaled up across a broad range of institutional types and across a large but distinct geographical area. Addressing these objectives will thus also serve to advance Broadening Participation efforts at a national scale, by suggesting the forms of institutional partnerships and best-practices that may inform other alliances in other STEM disciplines and/or different regional areas.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Keivan StassunNicole JosephKelly Holley-BockelmannWilliam RobinsonRoger Chalkley
Discover NASA is the Discovery Museum’s endeavor to engage students in grades K through 12 as well as members of the general public in innovative space science and STEM-focused learning through the implementation of two modules: upgrades to the Challenger Learning Center, and the creation of K through 12 amateur rocketry and spacecraft design programming. The programming will be piloted at the Discovery Museum and Planetarium, and at the Inter-district Discovery Magnet School and the Fairchild-Wheeler Multi-Magnet High School, with an additional strategic partnership with the University of Bridgeport, which will provide faculty mentors to high school seniors participating in the rocketry program. Through these two modules, the Discovery Museum and Planetarium aims to foster an early interest in STEM, increase public awareness about NASA, promote workforce development, and stimulate an interest in the future of human space exploration. Both modules emphasize design methodologies and integration of more advanced space science into the STEM curriculum currently offered by Discovery Museum to visitors and public schools. The Challenger Learning Center upgrades will enable the Museum to deliver simulated human exploration experiences related to exploration of the space environment in Low Earth Orbit and simulated human exploration of Moon, Mars, and beyond, which will increase public and student awareness about NASA and the future of human space exploration. The development of an amateur rocketry and spacecraft development incubator for education, the general public, and commercial space will stimulate the development of key STEM concepts.