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
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The National Science Teachers Association will convene a conference that will bring together STEM researchers and practitioners to review the growing connected science learning movement. A connected science learning environment has been described as a robust science ecology containing a wide variety of programs, across a range of institutions and places, allowing youth different and multiple ways to engage with STEM. Such environments can include small partnerships, such as a science museum and K-12 schools, or a large, community-wide network of a variety of organizations such as K-12 schools, museums, universities, government agencies, and community organizations. The conference will bring together over forty participants, who will meet in a series of several online meetings. The conference will result in a series of papers, articles in the online Connected Science Learning journal and other publications, a series of webinars and online forums where participants can engage with themes identified in the conference, and conference presentations at the annual meetings of organizations including the National Science Teachers Association, the Association of Science-Technology Centers, and others. This award is funded by the Advanced Informal STEM Learning program which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments.
The conference will: (1) document the research foundation that supports and demonstrates the impact and value of high-quality connected science learning experiences; (2) identify areas for which future research is recommended; and (3) provide effective, practitioner-focused resources that advance connected STEM learning. The conference will include participants that represent a wide range of researchers and practitioners in informal and formal STEM education, as well as representing gender, racial/ethnic and geographical diversity. The results and products of the conference will be instrumental in developing the understanding and appreciation for connecting STEM learning and ultimately improving connected STEM learning for K-12 youth. The importance of emphasizing diversity, equity, and accessibility will be strongly represented in the key evidence identified through the conference and will be reflected in the resources that will be disseminated to a broader audience.
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.
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
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.
This RAPID award is made by the AISL program in the Division of Research on Learning in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, using funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. COVID-19 presents a national threat to the health of children and families, presenting serious implications for the mental and physical health of children. This project addresses two critical aspects of the impact on COVID-19 on families: (a) the large-scale shift to at-home learning based on nationwide school closures and (b) the critical need for families to understand the basic science of virus transmission and prevention. To address these needs, the project team will develop a series of STEM activities for families with children in grades K-6 that make use of items readily available in most households. The activities help children and their families learn about viruses, virus transmission, and virus prevention while also developing other STEM-skills, particularly related to engineering design. Importantly, the project team also considers the emotional well-being of children and families during the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Led by researchers from Indiana University and Binghamton University, and experts in educational resource development from Science Friday (a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the public's access to science and scientific information through podcasts, digital videos, original web articles, and educational resources for teachers and informal educators) the project is further supported by partnerships with the New York Hall of Science, Amazeum (AR), the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (ME), The Tech Museum of Innovation (CA), the Indiana State Museum, and Kopernik Observatory Science Center (NY). The activities will be shared with families through live-streamed web sessions that introduce the activity, give tips to adults for facilitation, share a bit on related STEM careers and engage the audience in dialog about the activity and their current experiences. Versions of the sessions that are recorded will be edited and include closed-captioning and subtitles in multiple languages before being posted on platforms such as YouTube.
This project uses a design-based research approach to investigate strategies for enabling families to actively engage with STEM while home and away from their traditional institutions during a period of crisis. The research components focus on:
Engagement: How do families engage in the activity tasks, in terms of processes, practices, and use of resources? Who participated, why did they choose to participate and how did they engage (including modification of activities)? What barriers prevented interested families from completing activities?
Impact: How did the activities change participants? feelings of: a) efficacy around STEM and b) connectedness/ isolation, during extended school closures?
The Activities: Which activities had the greatest uptake? How many activity ideas were submitted by those outside of the team? What was the age/content focus of each of these activities?
The researchers will analyze social media data (including data on resource downloads and use of tracked links, YouTube and Facebook views, comment threads during livestreams and Likes/Shares/Follows across social media sites) to refine and improve the activities and programming as well as learn about the ways families are engaging in the activities. The researchers will solicit survey responses from website visitors to gather more information on participants, why they participated, how they engaged and how the activities impacted participants? efficacy around STEM and their feelings of connectedness or isolation. The researchers will also ask participants to submit images, videos and text that describes what they are making and their process along the way. Analysis of this data would lead to insights on how children and families use STEM language and practices; how children and families ask questions and use COVID-19-related and other information as part of their design work; and how ideas are formed, shaped and refined as families engage in design and making. While the project focuses on a unique opportunity to collect data on family STEM engagement as families respond to disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, this project and its findings will provide a knowledge base that can be utilized to inform future responses to national emergencies, other work aimed at promoting family learning at home, and approaches to supporting children in open-ended problem solving.
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 Center for Integrated Quantum Materials pursues research and education in quantum science and technology. With our research and industry partners, the Museum of Science, Boston collaborates to produce public engagement resources, museum programs, special events and media. We also provide professional development in professional science communication for the Center's students, post-docs, and interns; and coaching in public engagement. The Museum also sponsors The Quantum Matters(TM) Science Communication Competition (www.mos.org/quantum-matters-competition) and NanoDays with a Quantum Leap. In association with CIQM and IBM Q, the Museum hosted the first U.S. museum exhibit on quantum computing.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Robert WesterveltCarol Lynn AlpertRay AshooriTina Brower-Thomas
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
On behalf of the Interagency Working Group on Workforce, Industry and Infrastructure, under the NSTC Subcommittee on Quantum Information Science (QIS), the National Science Foundation invited 25 researchers and educators to come together to deliberate on defining a core set of key concepts for future QIS learners that could provide a starting point for further curricular and educator development activities. The deliberative group included university and industry researchers, secondary school and college educators, and representatives from educational and professional organizations.
The
At the Ecsite Conference held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in June 2019, a pre-conference workshop was held entitled "Beyond fact-checking: addressing misinformation". This workshop brought together practitioners in science engagement alongside researchers on the topic of misinformation from across Europe and beyond to focus on that topic.
Following this workshop, Ecsite, and The Kavli Foundation who supported it, decided to put together this resource document, for anyone developing or implementing activities or exhibitions working to engage the public in science.
This document has been
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Exploratorium, the self-described "museum of science, art and human perception," in San Francisco, California and the 10th anniversary of the launching of the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places and Pursuits. The moment offered me an opportunity to reflect on my own professional journey, which began at the Exploratorium, coincided with a growth spurt of field knowledge-building and has included experiences that inform how I
Today’s digital and online media demand an approach to learning keyed to a networked and interconnected world. The growth of online communities, social and online media, open educational resources, ubiquitous computing, big data, and digital production tools means young people are coming of age with a growing abundance of access to knowledge, information, and social connection. These shifts are tied to a host of new opportunities for interest-driven learning, creative expression, and diverse forms of contribution to civic, political, and economic life. Even learning of traditional academic
Scientific societies, associations, and professional organizations have unique opportunities to foster a culture of “civic science” — broad public engagement with issues that arise at the many intersections of science and society. As linchpins of the scientific enterprise, these organizations engage in a variety of activities to this end, including programs focused on science communication, public engagement, informal education, outreach, and advocacy. This report includes descriptions and characterizations of such activities and programs, to present the landscape of civic science efforts