Beginning in September 2015, with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) initiated the three-year project Latina SciGirls: Promoting Middle School-Age Hispanic Girls' Positive STEM Identity Development. The cornerstone of the project is a fourth season of the Emmy Award-winning television and transmedia project SciGirls, to premiere in 2017, in this case involving six half-hour SciGirls episodes filmed in Spanish showing groups of Hispanic girls and their Hispanic STEM mentors investigating science and engineering problems. The television
Ideas from social justice can help us understand how equity issues are woven through out-of-school science learning practices. In this paper, I outline how social justice theories, in combination with the concepts of infrastructure access, literacies and community acceptance, can be used to think about equity in out-of-school science learning. I apply these ideas to out-of-school science learning via television, science clubs and maker spaces, looking at research as well as illustrative examples to see how equity challenges are being addressed in practice. I argue that out-of-school science
Utah Valley University (UVU) with partners Weber State University (WSU) and American Indian Services (AIS) are implementing UTAH PREP (PREParation for STEM Careers) to address the need for early preparation in mathematics to strengthen and invigorate the secondary-to-postsecondary-to-career STEM pipeline. As the preliminary groundwork for UTAH PREP, each partner currently hosts a PREP program (UVU PREP, WSU PREP, and AIS PREP) that identifies low-income, under-represented minority, first-generation, and female students entering seventh grade who have interest and aptitude in math and science, and involves them in a seven-week, three-year summer intensive program integrating STEM courses and activities. The course content blends skill-building academics with engaging experiences that promote a clear understanding of how mathematical concepts and procedures are applied in various fields of science and engineering. Courses are enhanced through special projects, field trips, college campus visits, and the annual Sci-Tech EXPO. The purpose of the program is to motivate and prepare participants from diverse backgrounds to complete a rigorous program of mathematics in high school so that they can successfully pursue STEM studies and careers, which are vital to advancing the regional and national welfare.
UTAH PREP is based on the TexPREP program that originated at the University of Texas at San Antonio and which was named as one of the Bright Spots in Hispanic Education by the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics in 2015. TexPREP was adapted by UVU for use in Utah for non-minority serving institutions and in regions with lower minority populations, but with great academic and college participation disparity. With NSF funding for a two-year pilot program, the project partners are building UTAH PREP through a networked improvement community, collective impact approach that, if demonstrably successful, has the ability to scale to a national level. This pilot program's objectives include: 1) creating a UTAH PREP collaboration with commitments to a common set of objectives and common set of plans to achieve them; 2) strengthening existing PREP programs and initiating UTAH PREP at two or three other institutions of higher education in Utah, each building a sustainable local support network; 3) developing a shared measurement system to assess the impact of UTAH PREP programs, adaptations, and mutually reinforcing activities on students, including those from groups that are underrepresented in STEM disciplines; and 4) initiating a backbone organization that will support future scaling of the program's impact.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Daniel HornsAndrew StoneVioleta Vasilevska
This project formed a partnership between a research team with experience in computer science (CS) education and learning sciences research and a newly fashioned practitioner team focused on building a grassroots, informal, volunteer group created to help women help themselves and others learn to write computer code. This research-practitioner partnership had a two-pronged focus, first on improving the program offered to learners through making adjustments based on research findings, and second on investigating the phenomenon of how women in the workforce informally learn CS skills that enable them to rewrite their career paths to contribute to what we know from research. The context of the study was situated in the virtual community that has formed around the phenomenally successful Salesforce Customer Relationship Management software platform.
This Exploratory Pathways project aimed to fill a gap in the research; we know little about the phenomenon of adult women in the workforce who are patching together resources to learn CS skills with a goal of job enhancement or job change. This project took an ethnographic approach to studying the informal learning (both through online, written resources and through sharing of knowledge with others) of the women involved in a 10-week, virtual Women’s Coaching and Learning group. The organization of this group consisted of learners—novice coders in the Apex language that is used on the Salesforce software platform, of coaches—more knowledgeable coders, and of a steering committee that ran the group and created the informal curriculum followed in the 10-week course.
Our overarching research question in this study was: In what ways are informal CS learning opportunities being used and created by adult women, what are their experiences with those opportunities, and how does this suggest ways to enhance those opportunities in the future to increase effectiveness in broadening access to and engagement in informal CS learning experiences for women?
We broke the question down into a number of sub questions, including:
Sociocultural context: What past gendered interactions do women report that discouraged (or encouraged) them from learning to code? What do interactions look like in female-only coaching and learning groups? In what ways does a coaching and learning group support persistence? What social barriers and supports outside the group affect persistence?
Personal context: What are the characteristics and backgrounds of female administrators who seek out resources to teach themselves to code? What are the motivations for these women to teach themselves to code? What motivates them to seek out and join all-women coding groups?
Physical context: How are women learning to code both through written resources and in virtual, informal coaching and learning classes? What are the conceptual barriers and supports that they encounter, and what works for women in these classes to overcome barriers? What conceptual barriers and supports affect persistence?
Persistence and identity: In what ways does participating in a learning group with female coaching motivate (or not) women to persist in learning to code? How do their goals or reasons for learning to code change through their participation? How does their identity as a “coder” change or shift as they participate?
Our findings for these subquestions are summarized in the “project products” linked to below.
As part of a focus group exploratory study into the feasibility of presenting to the public an on-going review of new findings or issues in major fields of science research, 128 adult participants noted which two of ten contemporary science research areas they were most interested in. Of note is the fact that all classification variables (except gender) were unrelated to topic appeal. Interest in each research topic was not influenced by age; educational level; minority/majority grouping; total household income; occupational status; and perceived need for science knowledge in one's employment
The Designing Our World (DOW) project centers on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) equity and addresses the need for more youth, especially girls, to pursue engineering and fill vital workforce gaps. DOW will integrate tested informal science education (ISE) programs and exhibits with current knowledge of engaging diverse youth through activities embedded in a social context. Led by teams of diverse community stakeholders and in partnership with several local girl-serving organizations, DOW will leverage existing exhibits, girls’ groups, and social media to impact girls’
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Oregon Museum of Science and IndustryAnne Sinkey
Much of the work done in the field of tangible interaction has focused on creating tools for learning; however, in many cases, little evidence has been provided that tangible interfaces offer educational benefits compared to more conventional interaction techniques. In this paper, we present a study comparing the use of a tangible and a graphical interface as part of an interactive computer programming and robotics exhibit that we designed for the Boston Museum of Science. In this study, we have collected observations of 260 museum visitors and conducted interviews with 13 family groups. Our
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Michael HornErin SoloveyR. Jordan CrouserRobert Jacob
SciGirls and Citizen Science: Real Data, Real Kids, Real Discoveries SciGirls is showcasing Citizen Science! From their own backyards to a NASA research center, the bright, relatable, real girls featured on the groundbreaking PBS series are seriously into science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM. And Season Three of SciGirls finds these STEM adventurers tracking toads, counting clouds and much more, all in the name of citizen science. The brand-new season of the Emmy-winning show, featuring six stand-out episodes, debuted April 2015 on PBS KIDS (check local listings) and online at http://pbskids.org/scigirls. Citizen science is the newest STEM frontier that engages the general public –and kids – in real science. Scientists worldwide invite ordinary people—like the SciGirls—to observe and record data about everything from birds to beaches, monarch butterflies to maple trees. The data is then shared with scientists, who use it to generate new scientific knowledge. In six exciting new episodes, middle school girls and their female STEM professional mentors hit the great outdoors, cataloging frog calls, tracking the changing seasons, verifying satellite imagery of clouds, monitoring fragile butterfly populations, improving urban bird habitats, and advocating for healthy oceans. In addition, animated characters Izzie and Jake are back and finding themselves in sticky situations that can only be solved by STEM—and the SciGirls. When the SciGirls share their data with professional scientists, they save the day for Izzie and Jake and help save the environment! The new mobile-friendly website at http://pbskids.org/scigirls lets kids play new games, watch episodes and videos, and connect with fellow STEM explorers anywhere, anytime. “Collaboration is the key to successful citizen science,” said SciGirls executive producer Richard Hudson. “Since SciGirls’ beginning, working together—making discoveries, mistakes and friends—is one of the important research-based methods we use to engage girls around STEM. This new season underscores the importance of collaboration within the scientific research community and workforce. SciGirls is fortunate to have powerful partners advising us about citizen science, including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, NASA and SciStarter.” The SciGirls creative team is headed by Twin Cities Public Television’s Director of Science Content Richard Hudson, Executive Producer of the long-running PBS children’s science series Newton's Apple and creator of DragonflyTV and the SciGirls initiative. Animation is created by Soup2Nuts, producers of PBS’ WordGirl. Strategic partners for the new series are the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Rick Bonney co-PI, and the National Girls Collaborative Project, co-PI Karen Peterson. SciGirls is made possible by a major grant from the National Science Foundation. Additional funding is provided by INFOR, Northrop Grumman Foundation, and PPG Industries Foundation.
This study expands our understanding of family learning by looking closely at mother-child interaction with mothers and their preschool aged children (3-5). Conversation between adults and children in museums has historically been the most common indicator of learning. Most of those studies have been conducted with parents and children 6 and older. However, this study demonstrates that mothers of younger children use forms of interaction besides language to support their children's museum experience. Many of these interactions are subtle and non-verbal.
This report presents an evaluation study of Soundprint Media's project, Out of This World (#0741737), which was funded by the National Science Foundation's Informal Science Education Program. The mission of the project was to introduce adult radio listeners and youth participants in museum events to the historical context and challenges faced by African-Americans and women who were involved as professionals in the United States' space program in the 1960's. The project website, capecosmos.com, included an interactive menu of activities set within the context of a NASA mission control center
TERC is partnering with the Toxics Action Center to enhance the capacity of environmental organizations to teach mathematical literacy skills to low-income citizens, mostly women of color. Secondary collaborators include four environmental organizations around the country. The project is (1) developing math- and statistics-rich educational materials that help non-scientists interpret environmental test results, (2) developing training materials that help environmental organization personnel provide quantitative literacy training to citizens, (3) helping environmental organizations institutionalize project resources, and (4) evaluating the impact of project activities on environmental organizers, community members, and the general public. Project deliverables include bilingual, print- and web-based instructional materials (including videos) for environmental organizations to use with staff and community members; training sessions to create a cadre of environmental organization leaders who can conduct environment-focused, math training workshops; a communications toolkit for dissemination to journalists who cover environmental issues; and a resource-rich project web site.