This poster was presented at the 2020 American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Virutal Conference. The Informal STEM Learning (ISL) Professional Competency Framework was developed and validated through research with professionals across the field.
Informal STEM Learning (ISL) organizations such as science centers, aquariums, and natural history museums play a vital role in stimulating public interest and engagement in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). That work is largely dependent on the competencies of the individuals who work within the ISL field. The ISL Professional Competency Framework is a robust and flexible tool for understanding and advancing the skills, knowledge, and capabilities of those individuals. This guide was developed to support the use of the online version of the framework.
The competencies
In 2017, the Education Development Center (EDC) received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to bring together PIs of STEM Program Resource Centers (PRC) funded under NSF’s Education and Human Resources (EHR), evaluators of NSF STEM projects and programs, and evaluation advisors to address concerns about the quality and consistency of STEM evaluations. According to the grant proposal, the goal was “to increase the capacity of evaluators to produce high quality, conceptually sound, methodologically appropriate evaluations of NSF programs and projects, specifically in the area of
This CAREER proposal focuses on the development of teachers' identities, which are operationalized as beliefs and practices, behaviors, and pedagogical knowledge. The PI uses a qualitative approach, occurring over two phases, to investigate the impact of formal-informal collaborations on identity development over time. The study is grounded in an ecological theoretical approach that incorporates a view of informal learning settings as learner-driven and unique in providing opportunities for interaction with objects during meaning-making experiences among groups of learners. The longitudinal research design includes collection of an array of data, including observations of teaching and learning activities, interviews, survey responses, and archival documents such as student work and videos of classroom experiences. The PI uses a narrative analysis and a grounded theoretical approach to generate themes about beliefs and practices around behaviors and pedagogical knowledge informed by informal science education experiences.
Research findings and related educational activities inform the field's understanding of best practices of integrating informal science activities into science teacher education, including determining appropriate kinds of support for STEM teachers who learn to teach in informal learning environments (ILE). The PI is integrating research findings in the revision of existing courses and the development of new courses and experiences for both new and experienced teachers. The project addresses the need for empirical evidence of impacts of ILE experiences on professional development, and will build capacity of informal science institution and university professionals to provide effective teacher education experiences and new teacher support.
Engaging with Tinkering is a highly stimulating and complex experience and invites rich reflections from museum practitioners and teachers. "Tinkering as an inclusive approach for building STEM identity and supporting students facing disadvantage or with low science capital” presents the reflective practice process and tools designed by the "Tinkering EU: Building Science Capital for All" project aiming to understand in more depth the potential impact of using a Tinkering approach with students facing disadvantage. Using tools specifically designed to help teachers observe their students
A short literature review and personal essay on Massive Science about the history of colonialism and racism within informal science education's history in the United States.
In this virtual conference, The PEAR Institute convened over 40 practitioners and researchers to explore the power of an integrated vision of STEM and social-emotional development (SED). This conference aimed to 1) create a collaboration of out-of-school time (OST) leaders, practitioners, and researchers to map the overlays of STEM and SED; 2) identify best practices for integrated STEM-SED programming; 3) explore common existing and potential measures; and 4) identify how data is measured, communicated, and used for skills that are important to both STEM and SED. Through this collaboration, we aimed to initiate the conversations, establish partnerships, and build the capacity for assessment of STEM and SED in informal STEM learning programs.
Rather than seeking consensus, this conference sought to unearth questions and generate new ideas to lay a foundation for future research and practice, a way to inform the field about high-quality research and practice to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration and synergy between STEM and SED.
Conference deliverables include a conference report, an informal key findings webinar, and conference website (https://www.thepearinstitute.org/stem-sed-conference-2020). The website includes links to a participant directory, conference at-a-glance overview, agendas, readings, and additional resources identified during the conference.
This webinar was presented by the NSF Education and Human Research (EHR) Department to describe a current funding opportunity, the EHR Core Research (ECR) program.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Earnestine EasterGregg SolomonJolene Jesse
Few would argue that the national parks provide significant value to both the nation and the world. The question remains though, What is that value and how to measure it? Increasingly, a key indicator of this value is the learning that parks support. However, as we will discuss, even defining what is meant by educational value is challenging, let alone coming up with a park-specific set of metrics to measure this dimension of value of national parks.
Background. STEM identity has emerged as an important research topic and a predictor of how youth engage with STEM inside and outside of school. Although there is a growing body of literature in this area, less work has been done specific to engineering, especially in out-of-school learning contexts.
Methods. To address this need, we conducted a qualitative investigation of five adolescent youth participating in a four-month afterschool engineering program. The study focused on how participants negotiated engineering-related identities through ongoing interactions with activities, peers
Informal STEM field trip programming is a large, yet under-researched area of the education landscape. Informal STEM education providers are often serving a more privileged section of society, leading to a risk of perpetuating inequalities seen throughout the education landscape. In an attempt to address the lack of research, this thesis explores the relationship between educational equity and informal STEM field trips. The intention was to collect data using a critical ethnography approach to the methods of qualitative questionnaire and interviews of informal STEM educators. A change in
For the SciGirls Strategies supplemental activity, ten educators were trained to be SciGirls Strategies trainers during June 2019. During that time, they developed action plans for their local teacher training. The goal was for each Trainer to train ten or more teachers in their local schools/districts. Trainers could plan and schedule their workshops to fit their local context in order to accomplish the objectives of building teacher’s confidence and skills in using gender equitable and culturally responsive teaching strategies.
After the training workshop, the trainers met once a month