This project engages pre-college Latinx, Black, and Indigenous learners, educators, and collaborating undergraduates in an international, project-based learning and media-making community in areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The project addresses key challenges including broadening participation in informal STEM learning, developing capacity for leading informal STEM programs, and building stronger connections between STEM learning and personal and social identity formation during adolescence. The project’s community of participants is an asset-based learning environment that treats each participant, their background, skills, and interests as uniquely beneficial to the whole. Led by mentors at each hub (teachers, leaders from science organizations, or other out-of-school learning environments), participants collaborate with peers from the US and from other countries. The collaborations encompass a broad spectrum of STEM projects. Participants also create digital media to communicate their projects. The project activities reflect a focus on STEM content, collaboration, and communication, in a global context that includes school-age learners from the US and peers from Central and South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Sub-Sahara. The combination of the sophisticated STEM competencies skills for collaborating across international and cultural boundaries, and media-savvy communication abilities are essential to the nation’s future STEM workforce and to building a scientifically vibrant citizenry.
The project addresses two primary research questions co-developed with teachers and other informal science providers. The first research question involves understanding and optimizing conditions for broadening participation through this type of distributed or virtual collaboration across boundaries of culture, race, gender, ability, nationality, and socioeconomic status. The project features a design experiment by which the overall community of participants comprises four separate hubs, each hosted by the different project partners (primarily teachers). Educators devise, test, and revise alternative designs for organizing STEM collaborations. Publication of these teacher-led designs and their evaluation are among the primary outputs of the project. The designs modify and improve a template developed under this project’s proof-of-concept precursor (NSF1612824). The second research question addresses how growth in STEM abilities, collaboration, and communication mutually reinforce adolescent personal and social identity formation. Participating students in the US will intentionally reflect heterogeneous backgrounds. The project analysis will focus on whether cultural and national cross-boundary collaboration can strengthen the development of learners' personal identity and academic performance. The project methodology relies heavily on quantitative ethnography and epistemic network analysis. This approach enables the creation of visual models that highlight the presence or absence of connections between constructs relevant to each research question, along with changes between and within groups. The constructs include variations of autonomy, competence, and connection (pillars of self-determination theory) in tracing identity formation and STEM abilities. The quantitative ethnography approach provides statistically reliable scaffolding and insights about the hub designs and their efficacy in promoting goals of broadening participation and fostering mutually reinforcing STEM competencies and identity formation. This type of virtual collaboration, crossing boundaries of culture, nationality, ethnicity, age, gender, economic strata, or ability, can realistically be expected to play a significant role in next-generation learning environments, especially through out-of-school activities. The project is expected to reach 120 U.S. and 80 non-U.S. students annually. Research findings, design principles and curricula will be widely disseminated to researchers, designers, program developers, informal science institutions and community organizations.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Eric HamiltonNastassia JonesDanielle EspinoSeung Lee
Science identity has been shown to be a necessary precondition to academic success and persistence in science trajectories. Further, science identities are formed, in large part, due to the kinds of access, real or perceived, that (racialized) learners have to science spaces. For Black and Latinx youth, in particular, mainstream ideas of science as a discipline and as a culture in the US recognize and support certain learners and marginalize others. Without developing identities as learners who can do science, or can become future scientists, these young people are not likely to pursue careers in any scientific field. There are demonstrable links between positive science identities and the material and social resources provided by particular places. Thus, whether young people can see themselves as scientists, or even feel that they have access to science practices, also depends on where they are learning it. The overarching goal of this project is to broaden participation of Black and Latinx youth in science by deepening our understanding of both science identities and how science learning spaces may be better designed to support the development of positive science identities of these learners. By deepening the field’s knowledge of how science learning spaces shape science identities, science educators can design more equitable learning spaces that leverage the spatial aspects of program location, culturally relevant curriculum, and participants’ lived experiences. A more expansive understanding of positive science identities allows educators to recognize these in Black and Latinx learners, and direct their continued science engagements accordingly, as positive identities lead to greater persistence in science. This project is a collaboration between researchers at New York University and those at a New York City informal science organization, BioBus. It 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 participatory design research project will compare three different formats, in different settings, of afterschool science programming for middle schoolers: one located in a lab space on the campus of a nearby university, one located in the public middle school building of participating students, and one aboard a mobile science lab. For purposes of this study, the construct of “setting” refers to the dimensions of geographic location, built physical environment, and material resources. Setting is not static, but instead social and relational: it is dynamically (co)constructed and experienced in activity by individuals and in interaction by groups of individuals. Therefore, the three BioBus programming types allow for productive comparison not only because of their different geographic locations, built environments, and material resources (e.g., scientific tools), but also the existing relationships learners may have with these places, as well as the instructional designs and pedagogical practices that BioBus teaching scientists use in each. This project uses a design-based research approach to answer the following research questions: (1) How do the settings of science learning shape science identity development? What are different positive science identities that may emerge from these relationships? And (2) What are ways to leverage different spatial aspects of informal science programming and instruction to support positive science identities? The study uses ethnographic and micro-analytic methods to develop better understandings of the relationships between setting and science identity development, uncover a broad range of types of positive science identities taken up by our Black and Latinx students, and inform informal science education to design for and leverage spatial aspects of programming and instruction. Findings will contribute to a systematic knowledge base bringing together spatial aspects of informal science education and science identity and identity development, and provide new tools for informal science educators, including design principles for incorporating spatial factors into program and lesson planning.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jasmine MaLatasha WrightRoya Heydari