The informal science education (ISE) sector has an important role to play in addressing current societal issues, including changes in environmental conditions, systemic poverty, and societal responses to natural and manmade disasters. These complex social problems require engaging all sectors of society in deep discussions around science, engineering, technology, and mathematics (STEM) and inclusion, diversity, equity, and access (IDEA). To do this, ISE professionals need training in how to bring in diverse perspectives, support inclusive learning, and provide equal access to institutional policymaking, practices and systems. People from different backgrounds within informal science institutions (ISIs) and local communities bring new perspectives, identify new needs, and foster innovation. This broadening of perspectives is critical to address the complex social problems of the 21st century. A key part of the needed transformations in informal science institutions is the preparation of change agents within the ISE sector capable of reimagining what just and equitable informal science institutions might look like. iPAGE 2.0 is an NSF Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) Innovations in Development project conducted by the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Garibay Group in concert with 27 ISIs from across the US. The overarching goal of the project is to support transformative change toward IDEA in the ISE sector. The project is based on an extension service model of knowledge diffusion which seeks to bridge the knowledge-to-action gap by creating intermediaries that can translate research into practical innovations that can be used by practitioners in ISIs. The project brings together teams of strategically placed individuals within ISIs and prepares them to work with their colleagues to enact research-based practices and practical organizational changes toward greater equity and diversity. This project is funded by the AISL program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.
This ISE professional development initiative will work with annual first-year cohorts consisting of leadership teams from 4-6 ISIs. Each new cohort will spend 11 days together in a 5-day institute and three 2-day colloquia either virtually or at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Individuals and teams will adapt, implement, and refine ideas, strategies, and tools from the iPAGE 2.0 framework for use within their specific ISI context and broader professional networks and engage in ongoing communication and consultation with the iPAGE 2.0 community. All individuals on the team will develop skills, such as communication and collaboration expertise, to function as change agents acting to transform their organizations with respect to inclusion, diversity, equity, and access (IDEA) in STEM. Participants from previous cohorts will continue their roles as change agents and enhance learning in the iPAGE 2.0 community by sharing what they have learned at iPAGE 2.0 colloquia. The iPAGE 2.0 framework focuses on developing participants' understanding of 1) how structural inequalities function to reproduce social advantage and disadvantage within ISIs and the ISE sector; 2) the barriers, supports, and transmission vectors that contribute to or inhibit a continued shift in the sector toward IDEA within a network of practitioners, organizations, evaluators and researchers; and 3) how to prepare and support diversity change agents within the network. The project will employ a creative evaluation approach that combines developmental, principles-focused, arts-based, and transformative evaluation and an interactive, mixed-methods research study grounded in culturally responsive methodologies to address central questions concerning individual, organizational, and sector change. The project's primary audience is ISE professionals, and the secondary audience is researchers and evaluators working within the ISE sector. The project will work directly with an estimated 122 individuals from 27 ISIs.
This Innovations in Development 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.
In the 1990s, Science Cafes emerged that brought together people from all walks of life with scientists in conversation over science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) topics. The cafes were popular as conversations were informal in casual settings and engendered deep discussions. In 2007, Science Education Solutions received a grant from NSF and began an experiment to see if the adult science café model could be adapted to appeal to high school teens. The program, Café Scientifique New Mexico, became very popular with teens in towns across northern New Mexico. The blend of conversing with scientists about interesting science topics in an out-of-school social setting and digging deeper with hands on activities proved successful. The teen model was refined through trial and error and formal evaluation over several years. Today it continues to provide teens with a new perspective on the nature of science and a picture of scientists as real people leading interesting lives. The Teen Science Café Network (TSCN) was formed in 2012 with NSF funding to allow other individuals and organizations to start their own versions of the Teen Science Café, adapted to their local institutions and demographics. Five founding member organizations around the United States formed the initial Network and each began creating their own Teen Science Café programs. Today the TSCN is a dynamic, growing community of practice spread across the country with the mission of connecting high school teenagers with STEM and STEM experts via the science café model. The network currently has approximately 133 member organizations in 46 states and Canada. This project will move the network to a much larger scale by creating organization and professional support structures to create a strategically growing social movement with distributed leadership, organizational infrastructure, and robust professional development for long-term stability with a goal to increase the number of member organizations to 500 over five years. Building on the literature on professional development for informal science educators and the literature on network capacity building, network sustainability, and scale, the project will also conduct research that will inform the field about successful model diffusion. This project 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. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understanding of deeper learning by participants.
This Innovations in Development project has five objectives. The first is to re-structure the Teen Science Café Network (TSCN) to a more distributed leadership model that will move the network to long-term sustainability. The PI team will identify five experienced individuals already leading strong café programs to become Guides for new sites. These Guides will provide training, support, and mentorship to new network members. Each Guide will have responsibility over a given year for mentoring two cohorts of nine sites, allowing the network to increase in size over the next five years. The second objective is to implement an interactive program of professional development for new network members. The training will involve approximately 15 hours of adult leader training focused on building skills around teen engagement and café management. The third objective will be to strategically engage all members in the network community of practice through opportunities to participate in and lead ongoing learning with their peers. Through webinars, Birds of a Feather groups and annual workshops and a Science Events Summit, café leaders will actively hone professional skills and broaden their personal network. Objective four is to broaden the involvement of organizations and communities not currently in the network through strategic recruitment of STEM professional societies, military youth programs, library networks, and youth-serving organizations, among other organizations. Finally, objective five is to implement a research agenda to contribute to the informal learning knowledge base. The research will focus on how the project's approach to network growth and distributed leadership leads to effective scaling and sustainability.
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.
Potential STEM talent is lost each day for some of the most underserved and underrepresented populations in our nation's incarcerated men, women, and youth. With years devoid of quality STEM education and opportunities while in prison, incarcerated individuals are often significantly underprepared in STEM and for the STEM workforce. This educational debt exacerbates the pattern of marginalization for these vulnerable populations. Their STEM literacy, employability and potential for earning sustainable wages upon release are stifled. This deficit in opportunity is especially stark for underrepresented groups in the United States. Roughly 61% of the prison population is non-white, which far exceeds the national average of 35%. The U.S. also has the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, incarcerating 698 men, women, and youth for every 100,000 people. Equally unsettling, for the first time in American history the population growth rate for incarcerated women has outpaced men by almost 2 to 1 for the past 25 years. While there are many contributing factors to the high rate of incarceration in the U.S., high quality prison STEM education programs have been shown to help counter socio-economic and education debts through greater STEM knowledge attainment, successful societal integration, and increased wage and advancement potential, which increase the likelihood that formerly incarcerated individuals and their children can live productive lives. The NSF INCLUDES STEM Opportunities in Prison Settings (STEM-OPS) Alliance endeavors to build a national network aimed at providing and supporting viable pathways to STEM for the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated. Using a collective impact approach, the Alliance will work collaboratively with key stakeholders and the target population to advance extant and untapped knowledge on high quality prison STEM education and opportunities. This work builds on efforts supported by the National Science Foundation, including exploratory work piloted by two NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilots. If successful, this Alliance has the potential to significantly transform the face of the STEM workforce and the narrative regarding the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated and their potential to succeed in STEM.
The STEM-OPS Alliance is comprised of partner organizations committed to ensuring that STEM preparation during and post incarceration is commonplace and successful. During its first year, the Alliance will focus on establishing its national network through a shared vision and goals and a collective impact approach. It will conduct systems ecology mapping to inform the supports and resources needed for the target population to succeed in STEM. Focus groups and interviews will be conducted with incarcerated middle/high school aged youth to better understand their experiences in K-12 schools and with STEM education prior to and during incarceration. The results of the mapping and youth study will be used to inform the future work of the Alliance. Affordances the network endeavors to achieve include: (a) creating accessible STEM opportunities for the target populations through STEM courses, in-prison laboratories, research experiences for undergraduates (REUs), internships, and mentoring, (b) a culturally responsive platform to connect formerly incarcerated job seekers with STEM employment opportunities, (c) an evidence-based toolkit for effective STEM in-prison program design and implementation, (d) an annual convening of key stakeholders and representatives from the target populations to share learnings, disseminate findings and resources, and support the growth and development of the Alliance, and (d) leveraging connections to the greater NSF INCLUDES National Network. A formative and summative evaluation will be conducted by an external evaluator. Through its network, the STEM OPS Alliance is well poised to directly impact 700-880 incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men and women and reach a significant number of organizations working to improve STEM opportunities and outcomes within prison contexts.
This NSF INCLUDES Alliance is funded by NSF Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (NSF INCLUDES), a comprehensive national initiative to enhance U.S. leadership in discoveries and innovations by focusing on diversity, inclusion and broadening participation in STEM at scale. Significant co-funding has also been provided by the NSF Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program and the NSF Advancing Informal STEM Learning Program (AISL).
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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Eden BadertscherStanley AndrisseJannette CareyRich Milner
Diversity in the STEM workforce is essential for expanding the talent pool and bringing new ideas to bear in solving societal problems, yet entrenched gaps remain. In STEM higher education, students from certain racial and ethnic groups continue to be underrepresented in STEM majors and fields. Colleges and universities have responded by offering precollege STEM programs to high school students from predominantly underrepresented groups. These programs have been shown to positively affect students' analytical and critical thinking skills, STEM content knowledge and exposure, and self-efficacy through STEM-focused enrichment and research experiences. In fact, salient research suggests that out-of-school-time, precollege STEM experiences are key influencers in students' pursuit of STEM majors and careers, and underscore the value of precollege STEM programs in their ability to prepare students in STEM. This NSF INCLUDES Alliance: STEM PUSH - Pathways for Underrepresented Students to Higher Education Network - will form a national network of precollege STEM programs to actualize their value through the creation, spread and scale of an equitable, evidence-based pathway for university admissions - precollege STEM program accreditation. Building on several successful NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilots, this Alliance will use a networked improvement community approach to transform college admissions by establishing an accreditation process for precollege STEM programs in which standards-based credentials serve as indicators of program quality that are recognized by colleges and universities as rigorous and worthy of favorable consideration during undergraduate admissions processes. Given the high enrollment of students from underrepresented groups in precollege STEM programs, the Alliance endeavors to broaden participation in STEM by maximizing college access and STEM outcomes in higher education and beyond.
The STEM PUSH Network is a national alliance of precollege STEM programs, STEM and culturally responsive pedagogy experts, formal and informal education practitioners, college admissions professionals, the accreditation sector, and other higher education representatives. The Alliance will establish a formidable collaborative improvement space using the networked improvement community model and a "next generation" accreditation model that will serve as a mechanism for communicating the power of precollege programs to admissions offices. Framing this work is the notion that the accreditation of precollege STEM programs is an equitable supplemental admissions criterion to the current, often cited as a culturally biased, standardized test score-based system. To achieve its shared vision and goals, the Alliance has four key objectives: (1) establish and support a national precollege STEM program networked community, (2) develop a standards-based precollege STEM program accreditation system to broaden participation in STEM, (3) test and validate the model within the networked improvement community, and (4) spread, scale, and sustain the model through its backbone organization, the STEM Learning Ecosystem Community of Practice. Each objective will be closely monitored and evaluated by an external evaluator. In addition, the data infrastructure developed through this Alliance will provide an unprecedented opportunity to advance scholarship in the fields of networked improvement community design and development, the efficacy of STEM precollege programs, and effective practices for broadening participation pathways from high school to higher education. By the end of five years, the STEM PUSH Network will transform ten urban ecosystems across the country into communities where students from underrepresented groups have increased college access and therefore, entree to STEM opportunities and majors in higher education. The model has the potential to be replicated by another 80 STEM ecosystems that will have access to Alliance materials and strategies through the backbone organization.
This NSF INCLUDES Alliance is funded by NSF Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (NSF INCLUDES), a comprehensive national initiative to enhance U.S. leadership in discoveries and innovations by focusing on diversity, inclusion and broadening participation in STEM at scale. It is also co-funded by the NSF Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers program and the Advancing Informal STEM Learning Program.
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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alison Slinskey LeggJan MorrisonJennifer IritiAlaine AllenDavid Boone
The goal of the National Science Foundation?s Research Coordination Network (RCN) program is to advance a field or create new directions in research or education by supporting groups of investigators to communicate and coordinate their research, training and educational activities across disciplinary, organizational, geographic and international boundaries. This RCN will bring together scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of equity and interdisciplinary making in STEM education. Making is a culture that emphasizes interest-driven learning by doing within an informal, peer-led and creative social environment. Hundreds of maker spaces and maker-oriented classroom pedagogies have developed across the country. Maker spaces often include digital technologies such as computer design, 3-D printers, and laser cutters, but may also include traditional crafts or a variety of artist-driven creations. The driving purpose of the project is to collectively broaden STEM-focused maker participation in the United States through pursuing common research questions, sharing resources, and incubating emergent inquiry and knowledge across multiple working sites of practice. The network aims to build capacity for research and knowledge, building in consequential and far-reaching mechanisms to leverage combined efforts of a core group of scholars, practitioners, and an extended network of formal and informal education partners in urban and rural sites serving people from groups underrepresented in STEM. Maker learning spaces can be particularly fruitful spaces for STEM learning toward equity because they foster interest-driven, collective, and community-oriented learning in making for social and community change. The network will be led by a team of multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary researchers from different geographic regions of the United States and guided by a steering committee of prominent researchers and practitioners in making and equity will convene to facilitate network activities.
Equitable processes are rooted in a commitment to understand and build on the skills, practices, values, and knowledge of communities marginalized in STEM. The research network aims to fill in gaps in current understandings about making and equity, including the many ways different projects define equity and STEM in making. The project will survey the existing research terrain to develop a dynamic and cohesive understanding of making that connects to learners' STEM ideas, communities, and historical ways of making. Additionally, the network will collaboratively develop central research questions for network partners. The network will create a repository for ethical and promising practices in community-based research and aggregate data across sites, among other activities. The network will support collaboration across a multiplicity of making spaces, research institutions, and community organizations throughout the country to share data, methodologies, ways of connecting to local communities and approaches to robust integration of STEM skills and practices. Project impacts will include new research partnerships, a dissemination hub for research related to making and equity, professional development for researchers and practitioners, and leveraging collective research findings about making values and practices to improve approaches to STEM-rich making integration in informal learning environments. The project is funded by NSF's Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of settings. 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 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.
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.