Presenting the Capacity Building for Youth Civic Leadership for Issues in Science and Society (CYCLIST) toolkit! Here on the CYCLIST leadership team, it is our hope that this toolkit will help educators incorporate civic engagement into their programming.
CYCLIST’S leadership organizations include the New England Aquarium, The Wild Center, and Action for the Climate Emergency (ACE). Partner organizations include the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, the Audubon Nature Institute, the Saint Louis Zoo, and the Woodland Park Zoo. This diverse group of organizations collaborated to provide
The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), in collaboration with neuroscientists at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), museum professionals, and community partners, proposes to create a 1,000 to 1,500-square-foot traveling exhibition, accompanying website, and complementary programming to promote public understanding of neuroscience research and its relevance to healthy brain development in early childhood. The exhibition and programs will focus on current research on the developing brain, up to age 5, and will reach a national audience of adult caregivers of young children and their families, with a special emphasis on Latino families. The project will be developed bi-culturally and bilingually (English/Spanish) in order to better engage underrepresented Latino audiences. The exhibition and programs will be designed and tested with family audiences.
The exhibition project, Interactive Family Learning in Support of Early Brain Development, has four goals that primarily target adult caregivers of children up to age 5:
Foster engagement with and interest in neurodevelopment during early childhood
Enhance awareness of how neuroscience research leads to knowledge about healthy development in early childhood
Inform and empower adult caregivers to enrich their children’s early learning experiences
Reach diverse family audiences, especially Latino caregivers and their families
A collaborative, multidisciplinary team of neuroscience researchers, experts in early childhood education, museum educators, and OMSI personnel with expertise in informal science education and bilingual exhibit development will work together to ensure that current science is accurately interpreted and effectively presented to reach the target audiences. The project will foster better public understanding of early brain development and awareness and confidence in caregivers in using play to enrich their children’s experiences and support healthy brain development. Visitors will explore neuroscience and early childhood development through a variety of forms—multi-sensory, hands-on interactive exhibits, graphic panels, real objects, facilitated experiences, and an accompanying website.
Following the five-year development process, the exhibition will begin an eight-year national tour, during which it will reach more than one million people.
This pilot study will examine the effectiveness of an innovative applied social change, community and technology based program on marginalized youths' access, interest, efficacy and motivation to learn and engage in digital technology applications. Using stratified near-peer and peer-to-peer mentoring approaches, the pilot builds on extant literature that indicates that peer-supported hands-on mentoring and experiences can alleviate some barriers to youth engagement in digital technologies, particularly among underrepresented groups. In this project, undergraduate students will mentor and work collaboratively with high school youth primarily of Hispanic descent and community-based organizations to develop creative technology-based solutions to address social issues and challenges within their local communities, culminating in events called Impactathons. These community-hosted local and state-wide events set this pilot project apart from similar work in the field. The Impactathons not only provide a space for intellectual discourse and problem-solving among the undergraduate-youth-community partners but the Impactathons will also codify expertise from scientists, social scientists, technologists, community leaders, and other stakeholders to develop technology-based solutions with real world application. If successful, a distal outcome will be increased youth interest in digital technologies and related fields. In the short term, favorable findings will provide preliminary evidence of success and lay the foundation for a more extensive study in the future.
This pilot project is a collaboration between the Everett Program, a student-led program for Technology and Social Change at the University of California Santa Cruz - a Hispanic Serving Institution - and the Digital NEST, a non-profit, high-tech youth career development and collaboration space for young people ages 14-24. Through this partnership and other recruitment efforts, an estimated 70-90 individuals will participate in the Impactathon pilot program over two years. Nearly two-thirds of the participants are expected to be undergraduate students. They will receive extensive training in near-peer and peer-to-peer mentoring and serve as mentors for and co-innovation developers with the high school youth participants. The undergraduates and youth will partner with local community organizations to identify a local social challenge that can be addressed through a technology-based solution. The emergent challenges will vary and could span the spectrum of STEM and applied social science topics of interest. Working in informal contexts (i.e., afterschool. weekend), the undergraduate-youth-community partner teams will work collaboratively to develop practical technology-based solutions to real world challenges. The teams will convene three times per year, locally and statewide, at student and community led Impactathons to share their work and glean insights from other teams to refine their innovations. In parallel, the research team will examine the effectiveness of the Impactathon model in increasing the undergraduate and youths' interest, motivation, excitement, engagement and learning of digital technologies. In addition to the research, the formative and summative evaluations should provide valuable insights on the effectiveness of the model and its potential for expansion and replication.
The project is co-funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) Program and STEM +C. The AISL program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. STEM + C focuses on research and development of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to the integration of computing within STEM teaching and learning for preK-12 students in both formal and informal 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.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program 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 pilot study, Akeakamai (Hawaiian, literally lover of wisdom, scientist, scholar), will explore the convergence of contemporary Western science topics with indigenous Hawaiian culture-based science experiences as a mechanism to strengthen STEM perceptions, cross-cultural science collaboration, and multi-generational community engagement with STEM. The work is grounded in the notion that STEM learning within the context of local informal indigenous community settings should be culturally responsive and culturally sustaining, and should privilege indigenous epistemologies. If successful, the results of this pilot could provide valuable insights on effective approaches to developing and implementing culturally consistent and sustainable multigenerational STEM engagement among Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and across the Pacific region.
Over a two-year duration, the study will address three research questions. (1) To what extent does inclusion of culture into curriculum designed for informal Culture-Science Explorations mitigate perceived barriers to participation in science? (2) What barriers do community members perceive to limit their participation in science? (3) What are the areas of consonance between Native Hawaiian and Western scientific approaches to knowledge and learning? Approximately 200 predominantly Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders, ranging in age from 8 - 85 years old, will participate in the pilot. The research team will collect participant data during all phases of the social intervention, a suite of culture-science exploration experiences held at the Halau Inana, a Native Hawaiian community collaboration space. The intervention will employ pedagogical methods that are responsive to Hawaiian cultural norms to deliver content that integrates across the interfaces of Western science and technology and indigenous knowledge, and incorporates Hawaiian language. A rigorous external evaluation will also be conducted. The results of the research and evaluation will be broadly disseminated. Ultimately, the project aims to develop a conceptual and practical cross-cultural, multi-generational framework for community-based science learning in Hawai'i that can serve as a model for future research and programs that extend into and beyond indigenous communities of the Pacific region.
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:
Helen TurnerJonathan BakerChrystie Naeole
In this NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot the institutions of "Building on Strengths" propose to build and pilot the infrastructure, induction process, and early implementation of the Mathematician Affiliates of Color network. This network will consist of mathematicians of color from across academia and industry who want to invest time in, share their expertise with, and learn from students of color and their teachers. Building on Strengths will draw on basic needs cognitive theory to support these interactions and will focus narrowly on short and moderate term collaborations (from one month to a semester) between visiting mathematicians, students, and collaborating teachers that will involve three specific types of interactions: doing mathematics together as a habits-of-mind practice, talking about the discipline of mathematics and the experiences of mathematicians of color in that discipline, and relationship-building activities. The foundational infrastructure developed in the project will include systems for recruitment, selection and induction, a process for pairing affiliate mathematicians with classrooms, and support structures for the collaborations. To support the goals of the network a prototype virtual space will be developed in which real-time artifacts can be collected and shared from the classroom interactions. While Building on Strengths will pilot this program in the secondary context, once a viable model is established, scaling to K-16, as well as to other STEM fields, will be possible.
The research study in the project uses an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design and will be conducted in two phases. In the first, quantitative, phase of the study the following questions will be addressed: (1) Is the teacher-mathematician collaboration associated with a change for students in perception of basic human needs being met, mathematical or racial identities, or beliefs about mathematics or who can do mathematics? (2) Is the teacher-mathematician collaboration associated with a change for adults in perceptions of the role of basic needs or in adults' identities or beliefs about mathematics or who can do mathematics? In the second, qualitative, phase of the study, two types of interactions will be selected for in-depth qualitative study, identifying cases where groups of students experienced changes in their needs, identity, and beliefs. In this qualitative case-centered phase, the following questions will be explored: (1) What is the nature of the mentor-student interaction? (2) What aspects of the intervention do students feel are most relevant to them? (3) How did the implementation of the intervention differ from the anticipated intervention? The results of the study will help improve the infrastructure for, and better support the interactions between, mathematicians of color, students of color and their mathematics teachers; the outcomes will also shed light on how students experience their interactions.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Michael YoungMaisha MosesAlbert CuocoEden Badertscher
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This is a project to offer the Forum on Inclusive STEMM Entrepreneurship (FISE), a novel effort to broaden the participation of underrepresented minority women in STEMM entrepreneurship and to enhance the diversity of the science and engineering workforce. Through a convening of educators, entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, industry leaders, investors and policy experts, entrepreneurial education thought leaders, and intersectionality scholars the PI proposes to use this conference as a platform for building capacity in the preparation and development of future entrepreneurs from underrepresented groups. The PI also seeks to contribute to the emerging field of research that bridges tech entrepreneurship and education policy.
The proposed forum has the potential to advance knowledge in the field of entrepreneurship education and engineering education. Given the dearth of research-based interventions to broaden participation in tech entrepreneurship, this conference offers an opportunity for participants to contribute to the leading edge of research and interventions in this field.
The convening and associated activities will leverage the social capital of knowledgeable experts in the academy and industry, investors, entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs to address critical needs of the nation that relate to enhanced global competitiveness, an improved national economy, and the participation of underrepresented cohorts in entrepreneurship and commercialization.
The University of California, Irvine will lead this Design and Development Launch Pilot to engage with collaborators from the Orange County CA STEM Initiative, the Orange County CA Department of Education, the Orange County CA Workforce Investment Board, the Jamboree Affordable Housing Communities, the Orangewood Foundation for Foster and Community Youth Services, OCTANE-Technology Incubator, Project Tomorrow and Growth Section. This project was created in response to the Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (NSF INCLUDES) program solicitation (NSF 16-544). The INCLUDES program is a comprehensive national initiative designed to enhance U.S. leadership in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) discoveries and innovations focused on NSF's commitment to diversity, inclusion, and broadening participation in these fields. The INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilots represent bold, innovative ways for solving a broadening participation challenge in STEM.
The full participation of all of America's STEM talent is critical to the advancement of science and engineering for national security, health and prosperity. Our nation is advancing knowledge and practices to address the computing technology education practices for recruiting, better educating, retaining and graduating a productive STEM workforce. However women who are members of underrepresented minority groups, with low socioeconomic status, historically underperform in STEM and specifically in computing technology. This project, NSF INCLUDES: Supporting Women Advancing Through Technology, has the potential to significantly advance a collaborative approach by a group of organizations to improve the success of poor, underrepresented minority women who are learning computing technology and transitioning to the STEM workforce.
The project will demonstrate the outcomes of computer science training for women, particular disenfranchised and underrepresented minority women that may be exiting foster youth services, living in low income housing, and/or having been denied access to programs particularly in technology due to their socioeconomic status. Partnering organizations will design, develop and launch a short-term, intensive training opportunity in computer science for women ages 16 to 34 who are unemployed or underemployed, and who desire to engage in upward career mobility. The program will include a replicable, custom curriculum and an educational approach that will be scalable. A boot camp will teach the fundamentals of Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, SQL, JavaScript, and AngularJS, and prepare participants for a career in web development while enabling them to keep their day jobs and have childcare provided. Educating a randomized sample treatment group of up to 150 women in this launch pilot, the partners will also offer internships and/or job shadows, where participants gain client experience, learn from more experienced developers, and continue to build their portfolios. All of the women in the program will receive information, coaching and exposure to college and career opportunities. Job placement in STEM careers is the outcome goal of this design and development launch pilot.
This project will coordinate and focus existing educational elements with the common goal of increasing the participation of underrepresented minorities in STEM degree programs and the STEM workforce. This goal will help the US maintain its leadership in science and engineering innovation while supporting the expansion of the talent pool needed to fuel economic growth in technical areas. The program will feature an assessment system that addresses both social influence factors and the transfer of STEM skills with the aim of identifying the reasons that underrepresented minorities leave the STEM pipeline. By including both curricular and extracurricular elements of the STEM pipeline, ranging from middle school through college, the program will be able to respond quickly to findings from the assessment component and take proactive steps to retain STEM students and maintain their self perception as future scientists or engineers.
The program proposes to assess, unite and coordinate elements in the New Mexico STEM pipeline with the ultimate goal of increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in the STEM workforce. The need to grow a diverse science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce is recognized throughout the State of New Mexico, and beyond, by both the public and private sectors. The project develops a crosscutting assessment system that addresses both social influence factors and the skills component of STEM education. The project develops a collective impact framework aimed at increasing the participation of underrepresented minorities in the STEM workforce and implements a common assessment system for students in the 6-20+ STEM pipeline. This assessment system will address both social influence factors and the transfer of STEM related skills with the aim of building a research base to investigate why students from underrepresented minorities leave the STEM pipeline. The output from this research will drive the development of a set of best practices for increasing retention and a scheme for improving the integration of minority students into the STEM community. The retention model developed as part of the program will be shared with the STEM partners through a series of workshops with the goal of developing a more coordinated approach to the retention of underrepresented minorities. The program focuses on a small set of STEM programs with existing connections to the College of Engineering.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Steven StochajPatricia SullivanLuis Vazquez
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 innovative research project promotes the progress of science, enhances the national STEM workforce, and benefits society by helping to overcome the challenge of broadening participation of those who are underrepresented in STEM fields. Although many programs designed to broaden participation exist, few individuals in "STEM-disenfranchised" populations -- individuals who feel alienated, marginalized, or incapable of participating in STEM -- choose to make use of these opportunities, due mainly to their own self-identities. This project's focus is on three STEM-disenfranchised groups: 1) adults who have been recently released from incarceration; 2) youth who have been released from juvenile custody; and 3) refugee youth, and builds on existing science education programs. The research team will establish the "Alliance to Strengthen the STEM Tapestry (ASSiST)" -- with members from academia, workforce agencies, NGOs, and government agencies -- to explore how individuals who have an identity prematurely tied to failure in science might benefit from novel interventions that promote a shift of self-identity to becoming science learners, which will then lead them to explore STEM education and job training resources that already exist. Three novel interventions will involve drama activities, story- telling, and ecological restoration projects. This bold approach is designed to help these populations interweave their diverse ways of knowing with STEM workforce, higher education, and to become science-aware citizens, which will enhance U.S. leadership in STEM. ASSisT will create a strategic plan that can be interwoven with those of other NSF INCLUDES Alliances, and identify pathways to distribute outcomes to a national level. This work will provide pathways to bring other groups that are disenfranchised and who -- if motivated and directed -- could strengthen the STEM workforce and education tapestry.
Investments to broaden participation in science in the USA have supported abundant programs and resources, but few individual in "STEM-disenfranchised" populations -- individuals who feel alienated, marginalized, or incapable of participating in STEM -- choose to make use of these opportunities, due most significantly to their own self-identities. The proposed "Alliance to Strengthen the STEM Tapestry (ASSisT)" will carry out research on novel interventions that are designed to lead these individuals to avail themselves of the science education and training resources that already exist. The initial focus is on: 1) adults who have been recently released from incarceration; 2) youth who have been released from juvenile custody; and 3) refugee youth. Using a collective impact approach, ASSisT will carry out early-exploratory research to investigate how the project's novel interventions -- 1) ecological restoration, 2) story-telling/autoethnography, and 3) devised theater -- might shift participants towards self-identification and subsequent involvement with the STEM community. The Intellectual Merit of our approach is grounded in social science research, specifically, identity theory, social cognitive theory, and resilience theory. Using a one-group pretest-posttest design, qualitative research techniques will identify which elements are most critical to foster change, e.g., perceived competence in STEM subjects, congruence of self-perception with those in STEM, mastery of STEM workforce skills, and/or the importance of being a STEM-aware citizen. Broader impacts relate directly to NSF's call for greater STEM participation of women and underrepresented ethnic and socioeconomic minorities with impacts on the initial 30 cohort members for this pilot project. ASSisT will: create a common agenda; recruit cohorts of each STEM-disenfranchised group; design and implement research to test novel interventions; populate a STEM opportunities map; evaluate and analyze outcomes; articulate a strategic plan that can be interwoven with those of other NSF INCLUDES Alliances; and identify pathways to disseminate outcomes and benchmarks to a national level.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Nalini NadkarniJordan GertonDiane PatakiSydney Cheek-O'DonnellRussell Isabella
This NSF INCLUDES Launch Pilot project, STEPs to STEM, will create a statewide STEM pipeline within an integrated program of community college education throughout the state prisons of New Jersey. The Pilot leverages a long-standing collaboration among education, government, and volunteer sectors including NJ-Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (STEP), all of whom commit to work together to accredit and ensure articulation (transferability) of the required STEM courses. The broadening participation challenge that will be addressed by this Pilot is to extend college-level STEM education to incarcerated persons, who are overwhelmingly minorities from the lowest socioeconomic levels of American society. Education in general and STEM education in particular equips students for high-level workforce readiness, offering improved quality of life for formerly incarcerated persons and their families and contributing to American economic success.
Technical Abstract:
Four major goals of the Pilot are: 1. consolidate and ensure articulation of STEM A.A. courses in NJ state prisons with a seamless path to B.A. study at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; 2. begin teaching new accredited STEM courses and offering REU and internship opportunities to released students; 3. implement tracking of students in STEM courses while incarcerated and beyond, enabling a supplementary research goal to evaluate student and teacher performance in comparison with mainstream educational settings; 4. work with partners in business, government, non-profit, development, and public sectors to build a complete STEM pipeline with a long-term goal of enabling formerly incarcerated students to clear their records through education and workforce participation in STEM. Implementation of the goals will proceed as follows. Senior personnel from each of the cooperating institutions and a jointly-supervised postdoctoral trainee will negotiate the terms of accreditation and articulation across the state system with our partner, the lead accreditation institution, Raritan Valley Community College. Teaching of STEM courses by our established team of volunteers will commence as each course is accredited. Our industry and research partners will begin offering REU and training internships in the first summer. Educational research professional on the team will guide the design, implementation, and analysis of student and teacher performance. New partners will be brought in to the collective from the non-profit, business, and public sectors to extend the reach and impact of this initiative.
The overall goal of this project is to develop and evaluate a community model of informal genomic education that is culturally and educationally appropriate for low-literacy Latino adults born in Mexico and Central America (MCA). The community engagement strategy and materials created will be designed to lead to three learning outcomes: increased interest and engagement with genomics, change in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) attitudes and self-identity, and increased understanding about gene function and the human genome. The model created in this project will have the potential to inform other educational efforts, nationally. Semi-structured in-depth interviews will be conducted in Spanish with 60 MCA Latinos to delineate beliefs and knowledge about genetic and genomic concepts and transmission of traits. Interview transcripts will be systematically analyzed to identify explanations about trait transmission, and familiarity with genetic and genomic concepts. Variation in responses across geographic and cultural regions will be noted. Knowledge from this analysis will be used to develop a meaningful community-based learning program about genomics. Lay community educators will facilitate informal learning with MCA adults about genetics and genomics, including gene-environment interactions. This project will use information about environmental exposures (e.g., residential pesticides) as a vehicle to pique participants' interest and illustrate genetic and genomic content. It will compare outcomes for 100 participants who receive practical strategies only to reduce negative and increase positive environmental exposures, respectively, to 100 participants who also receive genetic and genomic content. The strategy and materials will be disseminated through journal articles and presentations at meetings that focus on informal STEM education. The process and content will be rigorously evaluated throughout the project. 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 understandings of deeper learning by participants.