This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Programming includes
Neighborhood Walks led by teams of scientists/engineers and artists
Community Workshops, Local Artist Projects, and Youth Mentorship focused on neighborhood and citywide water issues
Intergenerational participation, from seniors and adult learners to young adults, teens, and middle schoolers
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 understandings of deeper learning by participants. The project aims to understand ways to empower Latinx families (adult caregivers) to feel confident in their ability to support their middle school-aged girls in science and engineering activities. The project involves seven weeks of family programming around rockets or urban farming, as well as separate conversation groups for adult family members and girls. The project is relevant for several reasons: females and Latinx individuals are both underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) coursework and careers; girls tend to lose interest in STEM by middle school age; and adult family members may have an impact on their children's attitudes and interests. The project partners with school districts and nonprofit organizations in Arizona and California.
This multidisciplinary project's priority is broadening participation, with a focus on increasing Latina girls' science and engineering interests through Family Project-Based Learning Activities, Conversation Groups, and a cultivated Community of Learners. It is based on the frameworks of Social Cognitive Career Theory and Community Cultural Wealth. The project aims to empower families (adult caregivers) to feel confident in their ability to support their daughters in science and engineering activities, which is often low especially among Latinx parents. The project will develop and evaluate two out-of-school enrichment methods for aiding families in encouraging and supporting their daughters in science: Family Problem-Based Learning Activities, which focus on rockets and urban farming, and Conversation Groups, which provide information and discussion for separate groups of parents and girls. A series of pilot studies will be conducted with 80 families to iteratively evaluate and improve the materials and procedure prior to the main study with 180 families, featuring a factorial design with a control group.
The materials developed and research findings may inform similar projects, especially those for students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and projects seeking to enhance the role of families in learning. The hypothesis guiding the project is that the greatest gains will be produced with the synergistic combination of enrichment methods. Another component that can potentially have broad impact is working to create environments where Community Cultural Wealth is recognized and enhanced through interactions of different families, creating Communities of Learners. This can inform projects that recognize the importance of community and/or that seek to use culture as an asset. The proposed study will engage three geographically distributed universities and several community partners. It will also provide university students and community leaders opportunities for work on instructional design, implementation, and research. The team will disseminate their findings and methods through multiple avenues to reach researchers, parents, leaders, curators, and educators in informal and K-12 settings.
This Research in Service to Practice 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.
DATE:
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Katherine Short-MeyersonPeter RilleroPeter MeyersonMargarita Jimenez-SilvaChristopher Edwards
As new technologies continue to dominate the world, access to and participation in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM), and computing has become a critical focus of education research, practice, and policy. This issue is exceptionally relevant for American Indians, who remain underrepresented as only 0.2% of the STEM workforce, even though they make up 2% of the U.S. population. In response to this need, this Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) project takes a community-driven design approach, a collaborative design process in which Indigenous partners maintain sovereignty as designers, to collaboratively create three place-based storytelling experiences, stories told in historical and cultural places through location-based media. The place-based storytelling experiences will be digital installations at three culturally, politically, and historically significant sites in the local community where the public can engage with Indigenous science. The work is being done in partnership with the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation (NWBSN).
The principal investigator and the NWBSN will investigate: (a) what are effective strategies and processes to conduct community-driven design with Indigenous partners?; (b) how does designing place-based storytelling experiences develop tribal members' design, technical, and computational skills?; (c) how does designing these experiences impact tribal members' scientific, technological, and cultural identities? The goals are to establish a process of community-driven design, build infrastructure to support this process, and understand how this methodological approach can result in culturally-appropriate ways to engage with science through technology. The principal investigator will work with the tribe to complete three intergenerational design cycles (a design cycle is made up of multiple design iterations). Each design cycle will result in one place-based storytelling experience. The goal is to include roughly 15 youth (ages 6-18), 10 Elders, and 10 other community members (i.e. members ages 18-50, likely parents) in each design cycle (35 tribal members total). Some designers are likely to participate in multiple design cycles. The tribe currently has 48 youth ages 6-18 and the project aims to engage at least 30 across all three design cycles. Over four years of designing three different experiences, the NWBSN aims to recruit at least 100 tribal members (just under 20% of the tribe) to make contributions (as designers, storytellers, or to provide cultural artifacts or design feedback).
This CAREER award 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.
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.
American Indian and Alaska Native communities continue to disproportionately face significant environmental challenges and concerns as a predominately place-based people whose health, culture, community, and livelihood are often directly linked to the state of their local environment. With increasing threats to Native lands and traditions, there is an urgent need to promote ecological sustainability awareness and opportunities among all stakeholders within and beyond the impacted areas. This is especially true among the dozens of tribes and over 50,000 members of the Coast Salish Nations in the Pacific Northwest United States. The youth within these communities are particularly vulnerable. This Innovations in Development project endeavors to address this serious concern by implementing a multidimensional, multigenerational model aimed at intersecting traditional ecological knowledge with contemporary knowledge to promote: (a) environmental sustainability awareness, (b) increased STEM knowledge and skills across various scientific domains, and (c) STEM fields and workforce opportunities within Coast Salish communities. Building on results from a prior pilot study, the project will be grounded on eight guiding principles. These principles will be reflected in all aspects of the project including an innovative, culturally responsive toolkit, curriculum, museum exhibit and programming, workshops, and a newly established community of practice. If successful, this project could provide new insights on effective mechanisms for not only promoting STEM knowledge and skills within informal contexts among Coast Salish communities but also awareness and social change around issues of environmental sustainability in the Pacific Northwest.
Over a five-year period, the project will build upon an extant curriculum and findings codified in a pilot study. Each aspect of the pilot work will be refined to ensure that the model established in this Innovations and Development project is coherent, comprehensive, and replicable. Workshops and internships will prepare up to 200 Coast Salish Nation informal community educators to implement the model within their communities. Over 2,500 Coast Salish Nation and Swinomish youth, adults, educators, and elders are expected to be directly impacted by the workshops, internships, curriculum and online toolkit. Another 300 learners of diverse ages are expected to benefit from portable teaching collections developed by the project. Through a partnership with the Washington State Burke Natural History Museum, an exhibit and museum programming based on the model will be developed and accessible in the Museum, potentially reaching another 35,000 people each year. The project evaluation will assess the extent to which the following expected outcomes are achieved: (a) increased awareness and understanding of Indigenous environmental sustainability challenges; (b) increased skills in developing and implementing education programs through an Indigenous lens; (c) increased interest in and awareness of the environmental sciences and other STEM disciplines and fields; and (d) sustainable relationships among the Coast Salish Nations. A process evaluation will be conducted to formatively monitor and assess the work. A cross cultural team, including a recognized Coast Salish Indigenous evaluator, will lead the summative evaluation. The project team is experienced and led by representatives from the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Oregon State University, Garden Raised Bounty, the Center for Lifelong STEM Learning, the Urban Indian Research Institute, Feed Seven Generations, and the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.
In partnership with the Digital NEST, students engage in near to peer learning with a technical tool for the benefit of a nonprofit that tackles issues the youth are passionate about. Youth build first from an 'internal’ Impactathon, to planning and developing an additional Impactathon for a local partner and then traveling to another partner elsewhere in the state. Participants range from 14 to 24 from UC Santa Cruz students to middle schoolers from Watsonville and Salinas.
This poster was presented at the 2019 AISL Principal Investigators Meeting.
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.
DATE:
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Helen TurnerJonathan BakerChrystie Naeole
Learn how to create opportunities for young people from low-income, ethnically diverse communities to learn about growing food, doing science, and how science can help them contribute to their community in positive ways. The authors developed a program that integrates hydroponics (a method of growing plants indoors without soil) into both in-school and out-of-school educational settings.
This is an Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research supporting research in Smart and Connected Communities. The research supported by the award is collaborative with research at the University of Colorado. The researchers are studying the use of technologies to enable communities to connect youth and youth organizations to effectively support diverse learning pathways for all students. These communities, the youth, the youth organizations, formal and informal education organizations, and civic organizations form a learning ecology. The DePaul University researchers will design and implement a smart community infrastructure in the City of Chicago to track real-time student participation in community STEM activities and to develop mobile applications for both students and adults. The smart community infrastructure will bring together information from a variety of sources that affect students' participation in community activities. These include geographic information (e.g., where the student lives, where the activities take place, the student transportation options, the school the student attends), student related information (e.g., the education and experience background of the student, the economic status of the student, students' schedules), and activity information (e.g., location of activity, requirements for participation). The University of Colorado researchers will take the lead on analyzing these data in terms of a community learning ecologies framework and will explore computational approaches (i.e., recommender systems, visualizations of learning opportunities) to improve youth exploration and uptake of interests and programs. These smart technologies are then used to reduce the friction in the learning connection infrastructure (called L3 for informal, formal, and virtual learning) to enable the student to access opportunities for participation in STEM activities that are most feasible and most appropriate for the student. Such a flexible computational approach is needed to support the necessary diversity of potential recommendations: new interests for youth to explore; specific programs based on interests, friends' activities, or geographic accessibility; or programs needed to "level-up" (develop deeper skills) and complete skills to enhance youths' learning portfolios. Although this information was always available, it was never integrated so it could be used to serve the community of both learners and the providers and to provide measurable student learning and participation outcomes. The learning ecologies theoretical framework and supporting computational methods are a contribution to the state of the art in studying afterschool learning opportunities. While the concept of learning ecologies is not new, to date, no one has offered such a systematic and theoretically-grounded portfolio of measures for characterizing the health and resilience of STEM learning ecologies at multiple scales. The theoretical frameworks and concepts draw together multiple research and application domains: computer science, sociology of education, complexity science, and urban planning. The L3 Connects infrastructure itself represents an unprecedented opportunities for conducting "living lab" experiments to improve stakeholder experience of linking providers to a single network and linking youth to more expanded and varied opportunities. The University of Colorado team will employ three methods: mapping, modeling, and linking youth to STEM learning opportunities in school and out of school settings in a large urban city (Chicago). The recommender system will be embedded into youth and parent facing mobile apps, enabling the team to characterize the degree to which content-based, collaborative filtering, or constraint based recommendations influence youth actions. The project will result in two measurable outcomes of importance to key L3 stakeholder groups: a 10% increase in the number of providers (programs that are part of the infrastructure) in target neighborhoods and a 20% increase in the number of youth participating in programs.
This is an Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research supporting research in Smart and Connected Communities. The research supported by the award is collaborative with research at DePaul University. The researchers are studying the use of technologies to enable communities to connect youth and youth organizations to effectively support diverse learning pathways for all students. These communities, the youth, the youth organizations, formal and informal education organizations, and civic organizations form a learning ecology. The DePaul University researchers will design and implement a smart community infrastructure in the City of Chicago to track real-time student participation in community STEM activities and to develop mobile applications for both students and adults. The smart community infrastructure will bring together information from a variety of sources that affect students' participation in community activities. These include geographic information (e.g., where the student lives, where the activities take place, the student transportation options, the school the student attends), student related information (e.g., the education and experience background of the student, the economic status of the student, students' schedules), and activity information (e.g., location of activity, requirements for participation). The University of Colorado researchers will take the lead on analyzing these data in terms of a community learning ecologies framework and will explore computational approaches (i.e., recommender systems, visualizations of learning opportunities) to improve youth exploration and uptake of interests and programs. These smart technologies are then used to reduce the friction in the learning connection infrastructure (called L3 for informal, formal, and virtual learning) to enable the student to access opportunities for participation in STEM activities that are most feasible and most appropriate for the student. Such a flexible computational approach is needed to support the necessary diversity of potential recommendations: new interests for youth to explore; specific programs based on interests, friends' activities, or geographic accessibility; or programs needed to "level-up" (develop deeper skills) and complete skills to enhance youths' learning portfolios. Although this information was always available, it was never integrated so it could be used to serve the community of both learners and the providers and to provide measurable student learning and participation outcomes. The learning ecologies theoretical framework and supporting computational methods are a contribution to the state of the art in studying afterschool learning opportunities. While the concept of learning ecologies is not new, to date, no one has offered such a systematic and theoretically-grounded portfolio of measures for characterizing the health and resilience of STEM learning ecologies at multiple scales. The theoretical frameworks and concepts draw together multiple research and application domains: computer science, sociology of education, complexity science, and urban planning. The L3 Connects infrastructure itself represents an unprecedented opportunities for conducting "living lab" experiments to improve stakeholder experience of linking providers to a single network and linking youth to more expanded and varied opportunities. The University of Colorado team will employ three methods: mapping, modeling, and linking youth to STEM learning opportunities in school and out of school settings in a large urban city (Chicago). The recommender system will be embedded into youth and parent facing mobile apps, enabling the team to characterize the degree to which content-based, collaborative filtering, or constraint based recommendations influence youth actions. The project will result in two measurable outcomes of importance to key L3 stakeholder groups: a 10% increase in the number of providers (programs that are part of the infrastructure) in target neighborhoods and a 20% increase in the number of youth participating in programs.
As a part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds research and innovative resources for use in a variety of settings. In this project, the primary goal of Geo-literacy Education in Micronesia is to demonstrate the potential for effective intergenerational, informal learning and development of geo-literacy through an Informal STEM Learning Team (ISLT) model for Pacific island communities. This will be accomplished by means of a suite of six informal learning modules that blend local/Indigenous approaches, Western STEM knowledge systems, and active learning. This project will be implemented across 12 select communities in the Republic of Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia - which consists of the four States of Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap - and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Jointly, these entities are referred to as the Freely Associated States (FAS). Geo-literacy refers to combining both local knowledge and Western STEM into a synthesized understanding of the world as a set of interconnected, dynamic physical, biological, and social systems, and using this integrated knowledge to make informed decisions. Applications include natural resource management, conservation, and disaster risk reduction. The project will: (1) demonstrate that the recruitment and development of an ISLT model is an effective method of engaging communities in geo-literacy activities; (2) increase geo-literacy knowledge and advocacy skills of ISLT participants; (3) produce and disseminate geo-literacy educational materials and resources (e.g., place-based teaching guides, geospatial data systems, educational apps, 2-D and 3-D models, and digital maps); and (4) provide evidence that FAS residents use these geo-literacy educational materials and resources to positively influence decision-making.
DATE:
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Corrin BarrosKoh Ming WeiDanko TabrosiEmerson Odango
With support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, The Wild Center (TWC) engaged Insight Evaluation Services (IES) to assess the impact of specific outreach activities of the Northern New York Maple Project between September 2013 and September 2015. Data for this two-year evaluation study were collected via in-depth telephone interviews conducted with a total of 25 participants, including 16 Tupper Tappers (Tupper Lake area residents who engaged in backyard tapping to provide sap for syrup production at the museum through the Community Maple Project), four local school teachers
This evaluation reports on the Mission: Solar System project, a 2-year project funded by NASA. The goal of the Mission: Solar System was to create a collection of resources that integrates digital media with hands-on science and engineering activities to support kids’ exploration in formal and informal education settings. Our goal in creating the resources were: For youth: (1) Provide opportunities to use science, technology, engineering, and math to solve challenges related to exploring our solar system, (2) Build and hone critical thinking, problem-solving, and design process skills, (3)