The Michigan Science Center will purchase a portable planetarium that will bring planetarium shows to more than 2,000 children through its Traveling Science Program. The museum plans to take the programs to 10 schools and 8 libraries in Metro Detroit and 6 libraries in northern Michigan. They will deliver the portable planetarium shows in coordination with the museum’s long-standing “Scopes in the City” program, which allows people to use telescopes to see the night sky. The program also will expose students to Michigan’s growing aerospace industry and help increase their interest in earth and space science.
The University of Montana spectrUM Discovery Area will implement “Making Across Montana” —a project to engage K–12 students and teachers in rural and tribal communities with making and tinkering. In collaboration with K–12 education partners in the rural Bitterroot Valley and on the Flathead Indian Reservation, the museum will develop a mobile making and tinkering exhibition and education program. The exhibition will be able to travel to K–12 schools statewide. The project team will develop a K–12 teacher professional development workshop, along with accompanying curriculum resources and supplies. The traveling program and related materials will build schools’ capacity to incorporate making and tinkering—and informal STEM experiences more broadly—into their teaching.
The Hollister Herbarium at Tennessee Tech University will implement “Rooting Students in their Botanical History” — an educational module targeted for 11th and 12th grade biology students. The module will address “plant blindness,” a phenomenon defined as the failure to notice or appreciate plants. The herbarium will collaborate with three Tennessee high school biology teachers, a videographer, and a graduate research assistant to increase knowledge, awareness, and appreciation of plants over the three-year project. Students also will get to know herbarium specimens as an essential resource for information about the natural world.
The Key West Tropical Forest and Botanical Garden will strengthen and expand its “Living Laboratory,” a hands-on outdoor youth environmental education program. New curricula will target students in preschool through 6th grade to expand the reach of the program. Additional programming will serve students in middle school and high school, including facilitating guided research projects for students in the district STEM Fair. Partnerships with local organizations will help to expand inclusive programming for at-risk and economically disadvantaged students and make the program free. They will use student-created videos of their experiments and activities to create multimedia online tutorial resources for educators.
The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum will partner with the Flowing Wells Unified School District on “We Bee Scientists,” a program to engage students in grades K–6 in real-world science by learning about bees—the most important group of pollinators. They plan to create a curriculum and related activities aligned with the Arizona science standards. The program is an expansion of the Tucson Bee Collaborative, which empowers community scientists from “K to grey” to contribute to ecosystem health and understanding through the study of native bees. The museum also will partner with Pima Community College and the University of Arizona on the program, which will involve volunteers and high school, college, and university students in documenting the abundance and diversity of native bees.
Science fairs offer potential opportunities for students to learn first-hand about the practices of science. Over the past six years we have been carrying out voluntary and anonymous surveys with regional and national groups of high school and post high school students to learn about their high school science fair experiences regarding help received, obstacles encountered, and opinions about the value and impact of science fair. Understanding what students think about science fairs will help educators make science fairs more effective learning opportunities. In this paper, we focus on the
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
To engage youth in global challenges such as energy issues, students’ own community can serve as personally relevant venues for scientific inquiry. For example, after students learn about heat transfer in school, they can use this knowledge to inspect the energy efficiency of their own schools and public buildings in their neighborhood.
To bridge the gap between school science and citizen science, students need scientific instruments that can be used both in and out of school and a community to share their discoveries.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting. The RAPID: Using Popular Media to Educate Youth About the Biology of Viruses and the Current COVID-19 Pandemic project's goal is develop a web-accessible package of customizable graphics, illustrated stories, and essays, which can be easily incorporated into free-choice and directed on-line learning as well standards-based lesson plans for Grades 6-8.
The call for more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education taking place in informal settings has the potential to shape future generations, drive new innovations and expand opportunities. Yet, its power remains to be fully realized in many communities of color. However, research has shown that using creative embodied activities to explore science phenomena is a promising approach to supporting understanding and engagement, particularly for youth who have experienced marginalization. Prior pilot work by the principal investigator found that authentic inquiries into science through embodied learning approaches can provide rich opportunities for sense-making through kinesthetic experience, embodied imagining, and the representation of physics concepts for Black and Latinx teens when learning approaches focused on dance and dance-making. This Research in Service to Practice project builds on prior work to better understand the unique opportunities for learning, engagement, and identity development for these youth when physics is explored in the context of the Embodied Physics Learning Lab Model. The model is conceptualized as a set of components that (1) allow youth to experience and utilize their intersectional identities; (2) impact engagement with physics ideas, concepts and phenomena; and (3) lead to the development of physics knowledge and other skills. The project aims to contribute to more expansive definitions of physics and physics learning in informal spaces. While the study focuses primarily on Black and Latinx youth, the methods and discoveries have the potential to impact the teaching of physics for a much broader audience including middle- and high-school children, adults who may have been turned off to physics at an earlier age, and undergraduate physical science majors who are struggling with difficult concepts. 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.
The research is grounded in sociocultural perspectives on learning and identity, embodied interaction and enactive cognition, and responsive design. The design is also informed by the notion of “ArtScience” which highlights commonalities between the thinking and making practices used by artists and by scientists and builds on the theoretical philosophy that all things can be understood through art or through science but integrating the two lenses allows for more complete understandings. Research will investigate the relationship between embodied learning approaches, design principles, and structures of the Embodied Physics Learning Lab model using the lenses of physics, dance, and integrated ArtScience to better understand the model. The project employs design-based research to address two overarching research questions: (1) What unique opportunities for learning, engagement, and identity development for Black and Latinx youth occur when physics is explored in the context of the Embodied Physics Learning Lab Model? and (2) How do variations in site demographics and site implementation influence the impact and scalability of the Learning Lab model? Further, the inquiry will consider (a) how youth experience and utilize their intersectional various identities in the context of the activities, structures, and essential elements of the embodied physics learning lab; (b) how youth's level of physics engagement changes depending on which embodied learning approaches and essential element structures are used; (c) the physics knowledge and other skills youth attain through the set of activities; and (d) how, if at all, the embodied learning approaches engage youth in thinking about their own agency as STEM doers. An interdisciplinary team of researchers, choreographers, and youth along with community organizations will co-design and implement project activities across four sites. Approximately 200 high school youth will be engaged; 24 will have the role of Teen Thought Partner. Through three iterative design cycles of implementation, the project will refine the model to investigate which elements most affect successful implementation and to identify the conditions necessary for scale-up. Data will be collected in the form of video, field notes, pre- and post- interviews, pre- and post- surveys, and artifacts created by the youth. Analyses will include a combination of interaction analysis, descriptive data analysis, and movement analysis. In addition to the research findings and explication of the affordances and constraints of the model, the project will also create a curricular resource, including narrative text and video demonstrations of physics concepts led by the teen thought partners, video case training modules, and assessment tools.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Folashade Cromwell SolomonDionne Champion
Research suggests that when both science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and social-emotional development (SED) are supported in afterschool, summer, and other informal settings, young people can better develop skills for the future such as leadership, decision-making, and relationship-building so they could have successful careers/participation in STEM. However, researchers and practitioners working in the out-of-school time (OST) sector often do so without connections across these fields. The appeal for more integration of STEM and SED in OST program delivery and data collection has remained abstract and aspirational. This Literature Review and Synthesis project is the next step needed to move the OST field toward the intentional, explicit, and evidence-based integration of STEM and SED in research and practice. The project will create shared understanding necessary to improve program content, staff training, and evaluation. This synthesis will support future research on unified STEM+SED that can lead to more effective, equitable, and developmentally appropriate programming. Improved programming will contribute to talent development, address STEM workforce needs, and promote socioeconomic mobility to benefit children, youth, educators, and society. 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 project will systematically examine what domains and skills at the interface of STEM+SED are most researched among K-12 youth in informal STEM learning environments, compared to formal STEM educational environments. The team will further explore how gender, race, and other intersectional forms of equity can be added to the STEM+SED equation. The project team will search and appraise empirical and gray literature (2001-2020) to identify the most commonly researched domains and skills at the interface of STEM+SED in informal environments serving K-12 youth. The review and synthesis process will include four steps: search, appraisal, synthesis, and analysis. The search will begin with STEM+SED skills in four foundational domains (agency, belonging, engagement, and reflection) identified previously with experts from the fields of STEM and SED. The search will include all existing, eligible references from formal K-12 settings to contrast commonly studied domains and skills (e.g., perseverance, self-regulation, teamwork, complex problem-solving, self-awareness) in formal versus informal learning environments. The study approach will then compare these domains and skills by the demographics variables noted above. Following the creation of a strong catalog of evidence, information will be synthesized using three “pillars” for building coherence in STEM+SED integration: phenomenon (the knowing), implementation (the doing) and assessment (the result). These pillars will be used to organize and critically analyze the literature. Building conceptual coherence through a systematic review and synthesis of literature from the fields of STEM and SED will lead to greater understanding of STEM+SED in OST practice, highlight the most important content and skills to learn in informal environments, and identify when and how youth should learn specific content and skills at the interface of STEM+SED. Applying coherence to the integration of STEM+SED ensures that the principles and practices are layered carefully, in ways that avoid superficial checklists or duplication of effort and build meaningfully upon young people’s knowledge and skills. The long-term goal is to broker connections and alignment of STEM+SED across schools and OST programs. Recommendations and a roadmap to guide equitable, effective STEM+SED research, practice, and policy will result from this research.
This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).
Research shows that Black girls and women, regardless of their academic achievements and STEM interests, often encounter academic under-preparation, social isolation, exclusion, and race-gender discrimination that negatively impacts their ongoing engagement and retention in STEM. This project will provide innovative, culturally relevant learning environments to middle and high school Black girls to counter these negative trends. Using hands-on coding and robotics activities, project participants will develop positive attitudes toward science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The project emphasizes peer-mentoring by providing opportunities for Black female high school (assistant coaches) and Black college students (coaches) to serve as counselors and mentors to participants. Additionally, engineers, scientists, and executives from STEM industries will serve as mentors and share their experiences to broaden participants’ STEM career aspirations. The project is a three-year collaborative effort between the University of California Davis C-STEM Center, the Umoja Community Education Foundation, and the 66 affiliated California community colleges, industry partners, and school districts in California. Over three years, nearly 2,000 females will participate in the project.
Learning environments for Black girls and women led by other Black girls and women are referred to as “counterspaces” where they are free to engage in STEM in ways that value their identities while promoting STEM engagement, interests, and career aspirations. The project’s curriculum will follow a research-based, culturally relevant multi-tiered mentoring approach. The curriculum is designed to develop participants’ STEM content knowledge, critical thinking, and logical reasoning capabilities through meaningful connections to real-life applications using hands-on coding and robotics. A mixed-method longitudinal study will examine the impact on participants’ STEM outcomes, emphasizing contributing new knowledge on the viability of multi-tiered, culturally relevant mentoring for increasing equity in informal STEM learning (ISL). The program's effectiveness will be evaluated using longitudinal assessments of mathematics standards, computer science and robotics conceptual knowledge, logical and critical thinking skills, STEM school achievements, interests and attitudes toward STEM subjects, advanced STEM course-taking, involvement in other ISL opportunities, and leadership in STEM in one’s school/university and community. The project will test a locally based informal learning model with projects hosted by other K-12 and college partners.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Harry ChengFaheemah Mustafaa
resourceevaluationProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Summative evaluation study for the Space Earth and Informal Science Education (SEISE) project examining professional impacts including project reach, partnerships, professional knowledge, and professionals' use of the project’s public-facing products and their implementation of practices for engaging the public
Over the course of the five-year NASA grant, the Space and Earth Informal STEM Education (SEISE) project offered a range of free professional development opportunities and resources to support informal educators’ ability to offer Earth and space programming and to partner with others