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resource evaluation Public Programs
The Wayne State University Math Corps is a mathematics enrichment and mentoring program that operates during summers and on Saturdays. The curriculum and the pedagogies in this informal learning program have documented success of supporting youths' mathematics learning as well as raising achievement levels in school. Through rigorous research and evaluation, this project seeked to analyze and understand the nature, extent, and reasons for Math Corps' success with youth learning in Detroit as well as the processes of program replication in three sites: Cleveland, OH; Utica, NY; and Philadelphia
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TEAM MEMBERS: Lindsay Fox Barbara Harris
resource research Exhibitions
This poster presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting describes the goals of a five-year CAREER AISL project that brings together researchers, educators, designers, and facilitators to investigate how families exercise their agency in museum settings, and how science center exhibits can give families greater authority as STEM learners. The project involves 1) research studies exploring how family groups express agency through their perceptions and actions at a range of STEM exhibits; and 2) a collaborative working group made up of staff across departments at the New York Hall of
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TEAM MEMBERS: Susan Letourneau
resource research Public Programs
Trauma infiltrates all of society – including museums. For guests, the trauma may lie in the context of the visit or what they bring with them from their everyday lives. Staff can develop trauma through daily interaction with stressful content or secondary trauma through interaction with traumatized guests. During the COVID19 pandemic, trauma also developed from workplace issues regarding personal health safety and job security. This is a case study about how one museum educated itself about the presence and impact of trauma through exploration of a framework developed by the Trauma Responsive
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TEAM MEMBERS: Aaron Price Leila Makdisi Gail Hutchinson Daniel Lancaster Micere Keels
resource research Public Programs
Empathy is a critical part of the engineering design process. It allows engineers to more deeply understand their clients’ perspectives and design solutions that meet the needs of diverse stakeholders. Studies also show that reframing engineering education to prioritize empathy for others can counteract stereotypes of engineering as impersonal and invite a wider range of identities into the field. This approach can help to address persistent gender disparities in engineering, which reflect a need for engineering education to increase its efforts to include girls’ perspectives. Informal
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TEAM MEMBERS: Susan Letourneau Dorothy Bennett ChangChia James Liu Yessenia Argudo Kylie Peppler Anna Keune Maggie Dahn Katherine McMillan Culp
resource research Public Programs
The ICBOs (Independent Community-based Organizations), a group of fifteen community representatives from communities historically excluded from the sciences, share results from eight years of community-led de-colonial participatory action research. We wrote this white paper to share our findings and recommendations with funders like the National Science Foundation. These findings, recently published in BioScience (https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biac001), along with preliminary results from our current research, and our lived experiences point towards a critical need to change the existing
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TEAM MEMBERS: Karen Purcell Bobby Wilson Makeda Cheatom John Annoni Tanya Schuh
resource research Public Programs
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting. Our overarching goal is to better understand the particulars of how and why youth co-make in life-based and STEM-rich ways with families and communities, such that we can better infrastructure community-based maker programs in support of youth learning and well-being.
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TEAM MEMBERS: Edna Tan Angela Calabrese Barton Day Greenberg Ti’Era Worsley Carmen Turner Grace Thompson Diya Abdo
resource research Public Programs
Two critical challenges in science education are how to engage students in the practices of science and how to develop and sustain interest. The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which high school youth, the majority of whom are members of racial and ethnic groups historically underrepresented in STEM, learn the skills and practices of science and in turn develop interest in conducting scientific research as part of their career pursuits. To accomplish this goal, we applied Hidi and Renninger’s well-tested theoretical framework for studying interest development in the context of
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resource project Public Programs
This is an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, under the program Broadening Participation of Groups Under-represented in Biology. The fellow, Robert Habig, is conducting research and receiving training that is increasing the participation of groups underrepresented in biology. The fellow is being mentored by David Lahti at Queens College, City University of New York. The goal of the fellow's project is to perform a comparative evolutionary analysis of nest construction in the weaverbirds (Ploceus spp.). The evolutionary history of behavior can be nearly intractable and resistant to quantitative analysis. One strategy for illuminating our understanding of behavioral evolution is to conduct comparative studies of animal architectures, such as nests. Unlike behaviors themselves, nests persist through time, and have structures that can be disassociated into several quantitative features, which permits easy and comparable measurements and allows scientists to address questions about evolutionary history and functional relevance. The fellow's research addresses two major questions: (1) How do patterns of nest construction vary within and between species? (2) How do interrelated evolutionary processes shape variation in nest structure? This project is important for advancing foundational scientific knowledge, and will be the first study of weavers incorporating both molecular data and nest morphology to better understand the evolutionary underpinnings of a complex behavioral process. The fellow is also broadening participation in science by mentoring students underrepresented in biology.

The Fellow will reconstruct the evolution of nest construction in Ploceus weaverbirds incorporating advanced phylogenetic and morphological techniques including bioinformatics, computer modeling, X-ray computed tomography, and image processing. The Fellow will also conduct fieldwork in two hotspots of weaverbird diversity, the Awash Valley in Ethiopia and the Limpopo Province of South Africa, and collect behavioral data (e.g. rates of predation and brood parasitism; mating and parental behavior) and morphological data (e.g. nest structure) to test hypotheses of how distinct types of evolutionary selection shape the evolution of nest construction. The proposed comparative study can thus address questions such as how rapidly certain nest structural features evolve, which features are ancestral versus derived, which tend to exhibit phylogenetic signal, and which evolve in response to environmental features. The Fellow is receiving training in three-dimensional morphological analyses, phylogenetic tree construction, bioinformatics, computer modeling, and mentoring skills. The plan to broaden participation includes (1) recruitment, training, and mentoring of Queens College students from underrepresented groups in biology; (2) designing an evolutionary biology curriculum that ties in the research of the fellowship; (3) teaching an evolutionary biology class to underrepresented middle and high school students at the American Museum of Natural History; and (4) facilitating a research team for middle school and high school students.
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TEAM MEMBERS: Bobby Habig
resource evaluation Media and Technology
PocketMacro is a mobile app designed by The Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University to help users better identify benthic macroinvertebrates commonly found in streams and other waterways. In Summer 2021, the app and other supplemental materials were highlighted during trainings for educators held at the Stroud Water Research Center. The evaluation team from Rockman et al Cooperative (REA) surveyed and interviewed educators who participated in the summer trainings to determine what they took away from the experience and to gather feedback about the PocketMacro app
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resource evaluation Exhibitions
This is the summative evaluation report for the “Understanding the Physics of Collaborative Design and Play,” a collaboration between researchers and children’s museum practitioners to design and build a physics-based children’s museum exhibit to provide opportunities for children and their caregivers to tinker with play related to the STEM concepts of momentum, mass, velocity, friction, and balance in the context of informal learning related to skateboarding. The exhibit, “The Science of Skateboarding” at the Iowa Children’s Museum, was designed and fabricated as a result of this grant. In
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TEAM MEMBERS: Deb Dunkhase Kristen Missall Benjamin DeVane
resource research Media and Technology
The KQED science news team began a study with Texas Tech University to find out whether stories aimed at generating “awe” would drive deeper engagement with news features. From a preliminary study the team learned people can feel experiences like connectedness and vastness, not only through images but through a written story. The team intended to write their own science stories through an "awe" framework, but the pandemic redirected the team's work, and halted testing of participants’ response to the articles, which would have required the use of Texas Tech's Psychophysiology Lab. Here are
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TEAM MEMBERS: Sue Ellen McCann Sevda Eris Asheley Landrum Sarah Mohamad Jon Brooks
resource evaluation Media and Technology
KQED, the Northern California PBS and NPR member station, and the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University have recently completed a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the project Cracking the Code (CTC): Influencing Millennial Science Engagement. The three-year grant provided funding for an unprecedented science media research initiative between science media professionals and science communication academics with the goal of identifying how best to engage younger, more diverse audiences with science media. This report is the final process
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TEAM MEMBERS: Sue Ellen McCann Sevda Eris Asheley Landrum Sarah Mohamad Scott Burg