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.
The NIH Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) program of Emory University endeavors to use an over-arching theme of citizen science principles to:
develop an innovative curriculum based on citizen science and experiential learning to evaluate the efficacy of informal science education in after-school settings;
promote biomedical scientific careers in under-represented groups targeting females for Girls for Science summer research experiences;
train teachers in Title I schools to implement this citizen science based curriculum; and
disseminate the citizen science principles through outreach.
This novel, experiential science and engineering program, termed Experiential Citizen Science Training for the Next Generation (ExCiTNG), encompasses community-identified topics reflecting NIH research priorities. The curriculum is mapped to Next Generation Science Standards.
A comprehensive evaluation plan accompanies each program component, composed of short- and/or longer-term outcome measures. We will use our existing outreach program (Students for Science) along with scientific community partnerships (Atlanta Science Festival) to implement key aspects of the program throughout the state of Georgia. These efforts will be overseen by a central Steering Committee composed of leadership of the Community Education Research Program of the Emory/Morehouse/Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta Clinical Translational Science Institute (NIH CTSA), the Principal Investigators, representatives of each program component, and an independent K–12 STEM evaluator from the Georgia Department of Education.
The Community Advisory Board, including educators, parents, and community members, will help guide the program’s implementation and monitor progress. A committee of NIH-funded investigators, representing multiple NIH institutes along with experienced science writers, will lead the effort for dissemination and assure that on-going and new NIH research priorities are integrated into the program’s curriculum over time.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Adam MarcusTheresa Gillespie
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This NSF INCUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot will increase the recruitment, retention, and matriculation of racial and ethnic minorities in STEM Ph.D. programs contributing to hazards and disaster research. Increasing STEM focused minorities on hazards mitigation, and disaster research areas will benefit society and contribute to the achievements of specific, desired societal outcomes following disasters. The Minority SURGE Capacity in Disasters (SURGE) launch pilot will provide the empirical research to identify substantial ways to increase the underrepresentation of minorities in STEM disciplines interested in hazards mitigation and disaster research. Increasing the involvement of qualified minorities will help solve the broader vulnerability concerns in these communities and help advance the body of knowledge through the diversity of thought and creative problem solving in scholarship and practice. Utilizing workshops and a multifaceted mentorship program SURGE creates a new model that addresses the diversity concerns in both STEM and disaster fields, and make American communities more resilient following natural disasters. This project will be of interest to policymakers, educators and the general public.
The Minority SURGE Capacity in Disasters (SURGE) NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot will enhance the social capital of racial and ethnic minority communities by increasing their networks, connections, and access to disaster management decision-making among members of their community from STEM fields. The four-fold goals of SURGE are to: (1) increase the number of minority graduate researchers in STEM fields with a disaster focus; (2) develop and guide well-trained, qualified disaster scholars from STEM fields; (3) provide academic and professional mentorship for next generation minority STEM scholars in hazards mitigation and disaster research; and (4) develop professional and research opportunities that involve outreach and problem solving for vulnerable communities in the U.S. The SURGE project is organized as a lead-organization network through the University of Nebraska at Omaha and includes community partners. As a pilot project, SURGE participation is limited to graduate students from research-intensive universities across the country. Each student will attend workshops and training programs developed by the project leads. SURGE investigators will conduct project evaluation and assessment of their workshops, training, and mentorship projects. Results from evaluations and assessments will be presented at STEM and disaster-related conferences and published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
DeeDee BennettLori PeekTerri NortonHans Louis-Charles
resourceresearchGames, Simulations, and Interactives
We describe a game and teachers’ experiences using it in their middle and high school science courses. The game, which is called “Luck of the Draw,” was designed to engage middle, high school, and college students in genetics and encourage critical thinking about issues, such as genetic engineering. We introduced the game to high school science teachers attending a summer workshop and asked them to describe their initial impressions of the game and how they might use it in their classes; later, during the academic year, we asked them whether they used the game in their classrooms and, if so
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alicia BowerKami L. TsaiCarey S. RyanRebecca AndersonAndrew JametonMaurice Godfrey
As part of a grant from the National Science Foundation, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) developed, implemented, and evaluated the National Center for Blind Youth in Science (NCBYS), a three-year full-scale development project to increase informal learning opportunities for blind youth in STEM. Through this grant, the NCBYS extended opportunities for informal science learning for the direct benefit of blind students by conducting six NFB STEM2U regional programs included programs for blind youth, their parents/caregivers, blind teen mentors (apprentices), and museum educators.
This brochure provides overview of work accomplished during the one-year planning grant period, and includes a proposed research agenda related to whole body interaction. The Move2Learn planning effort was a collaboration between museum practitioners and researchers in the United States and the United Kingdom, who represented the spectrum of science education, embodied learning, interactive exhibit designers and technology specialists. The overall goal was to begin the process of identifying relevant research questions related to the design of physical and digital exhibits for young children
In spring 2009, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (Museum) contracted with JVA Consulting, LLC (JVA) to conduct a comprehensive process and outcome evaluation of the Passport to Health (P2H) program. The Museum designed P2H, originally a three-year program funded by the Colorado Health Foundation (the Foundation), to improve health outcomes for fifth-grade students as well as their families and teachers throughout the Denver metro area. Appendix includes survey.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
JVA Consulting, LLC
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This is a Science Learning+ planning project that will develop a research plan for investigating how applying the principles of embodied cognition to the design of informal learning environments can support young children's (ages 2-6) engagement with, and understanding of, science topics and concepts. While it has been fairly well established that cognition is intertwined with the body's interaction in the physical world, the precise means of applying these ideas to the design of effective learning environments is still emerging. Experimenting with various embodied cognition activities and physical learning configurations to understand what conditions are optimal for informal learning environments for early learners is a major objective of this project. During the planning grant period, the project will identity additional practitioner/research collaborations and will develop research plans for a suite of studies to be enacted by multiple teams of informal learning practitioners and cognitive scientists across the US and UK and that will be submitted as a Phase 2 research. The primary activities of this planning period include organizing a series of workshops that bring together informal learning educators and embodied cognition researchers to engage in deep discussion and design experimentation that will inform the development and refinement of research questions, protocols, and measurement tools. These discussions will be informed by observations of young children as they interact with the River of Grass, an exhibit prototype in which principles of embodied cognition are embedded in its design. The planning period will be led by a collaborative team of informal learning practitioners and cognitive scientists from the US and UK. This group will also oversee plans for the development of a new model for informal STEM research in which a constellation of practitioner/research teams across multiple organizations investigates topics of importance to informal learning practice and research that have the potential to result in a robust body of research that informs the design of informal learning spaces.
A working group of the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director was tasked with developing a model for a sustainable and diverse U.S. biomedical research workforce that can inform decisions about training the optimal number of people for the appropriate types of positions that will advance science and promote health. Based on this analysis and recognizing that there are limits to NIH’s ability to control aspects of the training pipeline, the working group was asked to make recommendations for actions that NIH should take to support a future sustainable biomedical research infrastructure. This
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TEAM MEMBERS:
National Institute of HealthDorit Zuk
resourceevaluationProfessional Development and Workshops
This professional development event was held on November 6 and 7, 2006, at the Museum of Science, Boston, under the direction of the Museum’s Director for Strategic Projects, Carol Lynn Alpert. This event was sponsored by the Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) headquartered at Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts – Lowell, and by the “Science of Nanoscale Systems and their Device Applications” NSF NSEC headquartered at Harvard University. Research and evaluation of the Symposium was funded independently by the
This professional development event was held on November 6 and 7, 2005 at the Museum of Science, Boston, under the direction of the Museum’s Director for Strategic Projects, Carol Lynn Alpert. This event was sponsored by the Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) headquartered at Northeastern University, the University of Massachusetts – Lowell, and by the “Science of Nanoscale Systems and their Device Applications” NSF NSEC headquartered at Harvard University. The Symposium was intended to provide educators from middle schools, high schools