Casual games are everywhere. People play them throughout life to pass the time, to engage in social interactions, and to learn. However, their simplicity and use in distraction-heavy environments can attenuate their potential for learning. This experimental study explored the effects playing an online, casual game has on awareness of human biological systems. Two hundred and forty-two children were given pretests at a Museum and posttests at home after playing either a treatment or control game. Also, 41 children were interviewed to explore deeper meanings behind the test results. Results show
By engaging diverse publics in immersive and deliberative learning forums, this three-year project will use NOAA data and expertise to strengthen community resilience and decision-making around a variety of climate and weather-related hazards across the United States. Led by Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes and the Museum of Science Boston, the project will develop citizen forums hosted by regional science centers to create a new, replicable model for learning and engagement. These forums, to be hosted initially in Boston and Phoenix and then expanded to an additional six sites around the U.S., will facilitate public deliberation on real-world issues of concern to local communities, including rising sea levels, extreme precipitation, heat waves, and drought. The forums will identify and clarify citizen values and perspectives while creating stakeholder networks in support of local resilience measures. The forum materials developed in collaboration with NOAA will foster better understanding of environmental changes and best practices for improving community resiliency, and will create a suite of materials and case studies adaptable for use by science centers, teachers, and students. With regional science centers bringing together the public, scientific experts, and local officials, the project will create resilience-centered partnerships and a framework for learning and engagement that can be replicated nationwide.
The lack of diversity in the clinician-scientist workforce is a “very serious concern to the NIH” and to health care professions. Current efforts to broaden participation in STEM fields typically target high school and college-age students. Yet, history and national trends suggest that these efforts alone will not result in rapid or significant change because racial and ethnic disparities are already evident by this time. Children are forming career preferences as early as elementary school, a time when they have little exposure to science and STEM career options. The overall vision of this team is to meet the nation’s workforce goal of developing a diverse, clinician-scientist workforce while meeting the nation’s STEM goals. As a step toward this vision, the goal of This Is How We “Role” is to inspire elementary school students towards careers as clinician-scientists by increasing the number of K-4 students with authentic STEM experiences.
This goal will be attained through two specific aims. The focus of Aim 1 is to distribute and evaluate a K-4 afterschool program across the diverse geographic regions of the US, to support the development of a robust and diverse clinician-scientist workforce. Aim 2 is focused on developing the community resources (afterschool program curriculum, informational books and online certificate program) for promoting health science literacy and encouraging careers in biomedical and clinical research for K-4 students from underserved and underrepresented communities. Combined, these aims will enhance opportunities for young children from underserved communities to have authentic STEM experiences by providing culturally responsive, afterschool educational programs which will be delivered by university student and clinician-scientist role models who are diverse in gender, race, and ethnicity.
Books and an online certificate program about health issues impacting people and their animals (i.e. diabetes, tooth decay) will be developed and distributed to children unable to attend afterschool programs. Further, by engaging veterinary programs and students from across the US, along with practicing veterinarians, this program will examine whether the approaches and curriculum developed are effective across the diverse communities and geographic regions that span the country. Elementary school teachers will serve as consultants to ensure that educational materials are consistent with Next Generation Science Standards, and will assist in training university students and clinician-scientists to better communicate the societal impact of their work to the public.
The program will continue to use the successful model of engaging elementary school students in STEM activities by using examples of health conditions that impact both people and their animals. Ultimately, this project will educate, improve the health of, and attract a diverse pool of elementary school students, particularly those from underserved communities, to careers as clinician-scientists.
Science Club Summer Camp (SC2) is a practicum-based teacher professional development program for elementary school teachers, aligned to the recently released Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). It seeks to address well-described gaps in the scientific training of elementary teachers that threaten the effective implementation of NGSS and interrupt development of early youth science skills. We offer that the best way to prepare a future STEM and biomedical workforce is to help improve NGSS-aligned instruction at the K-5 level.
SC2 uses an integrated approach to train Chicago Public School teachers and youth in the nature of science. An interdisciplinary team of scientists, master science teachers, NGSS experts, and youth development staff will collaborate to incorporate the NGSS Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs), Crosscutting Concepts, and science and engineering practices into both out-of-school time learning at a summer camp and academic year instruction. Program participants will also learn about NGSS connections to health and biomedicine through interactions with practicing scientists, visits to research labs, and inquiry into health phenomena.
Over the course of the program, we will train 64 teachers and more than 2000 youth in authentic science and health practices. A multi-faceted evaluation plan will assess the impact of our program on teacher beliefs, knowledge, and understanding of the NGSS, and the degree to which their training results in changes to their instructional practice. Additionally, we will help teachers design critical NGSS-aligned assessment tools as measures of student learning. These instruments will provide early evidence on the connections between NGSS-aligned instruction and deeper student learning.
In addition to addressing the acute need for NGSS-aligned teacher professional development strategies, and high quality summer learning opportunities for disadvantages youth, it is our expectation that this “dual use” approach will serve as a model for future teacher professional development programs that seek to bridge learning in formal and informal environments and strengthen academic-community partnerships.
The goal of the Hawaii Science Career Inspiration grant (HiSCI) is to enhance science education resources and training available to teachers and students in disadvantaged communities of Hawaii in order to ensure a maximally large and diverse workforce to meet the nation’s biomedical, behavioural and clinical research needs. The HiSCI Program will build on the knowledge gained from two past SEPA grants and the University of Hawaii Center for Cardiovascular Research and leverage resources from all corners of the state to accomplish four specific aims:
1) Increase student interest and exposure to health science careers by providing multiple science exposure opportunities and mentoring along the primary, intermediate, and secondary school experiences for at least 300 students a year and a printed and web-based STEM career resource guide and career posters to alert students, counsellors and teachers to all available opportunities;
2) Provide professional development for 20 middle and high school teachers a year, to include scientific content and foster an understanding of the scientific research process, in addition to medical students mentoring intermediate and high school students;
3) Listen, respond to, and connect the science teacher community in Hawaii by holding innovative listening groups for teachers across the state; and
4) Provide tools and supplies for at least twenty K-12 classrooms a year through a mini-grant process and alert teachers across the state to free resources both locally and nationally. The HiSCI Program is highly relevant to Hawaii’s public health and science infrastructure as it will provide an innovative way to gain knowledge of science training needs and will provide many of the resources to teachers and students across the state by leveraging, communicating and sharing existing resources.
Across the country, school administrators and educators struggle to find time for children to engage in physical activity while still giving them enough time in academic instruction. The steep rise in childhood obesity in the U.S. (National Center for Health Statistics, 2011; Ogden, Carroll, Kit, & Flegal, 2014) suggests that the concern is urgent.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Georgia HallKristin Fay PostonStephanie Harris
The Greensboro Children's Museum, in partnership with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Guilford County Schools, will develop and implement the "Grow It, Cook It, Eat It" project to study the impact of food systems literacy education on the knowledge and behavior of K-2 children in an underserved school. The project will bring food education to a local elementary school where museum educators will work alongside classroom teachers to create and deliver weekly lessons to 60 students based on sustainable gardening practices, kitchen efficacy, attitudes toward fresh, seasonal food, and behavior toward garden work and trying new foods. Participating elementary students will build the beginnings of a skills set that will empower them, and their families,to make smart food choices for a lifetime.
John J. Tyler Arboretum will develop visitor programming that will provide educational opportunities in its Edible Garden Center focused on the benefits of growing and eating fresh fruits and vegetables. The center will include a food gardening exhibit that addresses urban gardening issues such as raised beds, container gardens, rooftop gardening, holistic sustainable gardening practices and technologies, and traditional vegetable gardening techniques. Cooking demonstrations, healthy eating programs, and dedicated gardening activities will allow for hands-on learning about health and sustainability. The garden will also include a play space for children, art performances and art installations to create a visitor experience that is dynamic, educational and forward-thinking.
Pacific Science Center will expand its Science, Technology, Engineering and Math—Out-of-School Time (STEM-OST) model to new venues in the Puget Sound region to improve science literacy and increase interest in STEM careers for youth. STEM-OST brings hands-on lessons and activities in physics, engineering, astronomy, mathematics, geology, and health to elementary and middle school children in underserved communities throughout the summer months. The center will modify lessons and activities to serve students in grades K-2, align the curriculum with the Next Generation Science Standards, and increase the number of Family Science Days and Family Science Workshops offered to enhance parent involvement in STEM learning. The program will employ a tiered mentoring approach with outreach educators, teens, and education volunteers to increase interest in STEM content and provide direct links between STEM and workforce preparedness.
The Missouri Botanical Garden will work with six urban schools, to create new educational opportunities for teachers and students who use the garden's institutional research as a foundation for STEM Programming (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). Students in the program will focus on one of three core garden research themes: medicinal uses of plants, plants as a food source, or the ecological value of plants. Anchored by multiple field experiences at the garden and its satellite sites, follow up programming, and teacher professional development, the program will be aligned with state standards to address concerns with student proficiency in the STEM disciplines.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Robert Coulter
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This is a Science Learning+ planning project that will develop a research plan for investigating how applying the principles of embodied cognition to the design of informal learning environments can support young children's (ages 2-6) engagement with, and understanding of, science topics and concepts. While it has been fairly well established that cognition is intertwined with the body's interaction in the physical world, the precise means of applying these ideas to the design of effective learning environments is still emerging. Experimenting with various embodied cognition activities and physical learning configurations to understand what conditions are optimal for informal learning environments for early learners is a major objective of this project. During the planning grant period, the project will identity additional practitioner/research collaborations and will develop research plans for a suite of studies to be enacted by multiple teams of informal learning practitioners and cognitive scientists across the US and UK and that will be submitted as a Phase 2 research. The primary activities of this planning period include organizing a series of workshops that bring together informal learning educators and embodied cognition researchers to engage in deep discussion and design experimentation that will inform the development and refinement of research questions, protocols, and measurement tools. These discussions will be informed by observations of young children as they interact with the River of Grass, an exhibit prototype in which principles of embodied cognition are embedded in its design. The planning period will be led by a collaborative team of informal learning practitioners and cognitive scientists from the US and UK. This group will also oversee plans for the development of a new model for informal STEM research in which a constellation of practitioner/research teams across multiple organizations investigates topics of importance to informal learning practice and research that have the potential to result in a robust body of research that informs the design of informal learning spaces.
The National Federation of the Blind (NFB), with six science centers across the U.S., will develop, implement, and evaluate the National Center for Blind Youth in Science (NCBYS), a three-year full-scale development project to increase informal learning opportunities for blind youth in STEM. Through partnerships and companion research, the NCBYS will lead to greater capacity to engage the blind in informal STEM learning. The NCBYS confronts a critical area of need in STEM education, and a priority for the AISL program: the underrepresentation of people with disabilities in STEM. Educators are often unaware of methods to deliver STEM concepts to blind students, and students do not have the experience with which to advocate for accommodations. Many parents of blind students are ill-equipped to provide support or request accessible STEM adaptations. The NCBYS will expose blind youth to non-visual methods that facilitate their involvement in STEM; introduce science centers to additional non-visual methods that facilitate the involvement of the blind in their exhibits; educate parents as to their students' ability to be independent both inside and outside the STEM classroom; provide preservice teachers of blind students with hands-on experience with blind students in STEM; and conduct research to inform a field that is lacking in published material. The NCBYS will a) conduct six regional, two-day science programs for a total of 180 blind youth, one day taking place at a local science center; b) conduct concurrent onsite parent training sessions; c) incorporate preservice teachers of blind students in hands-on activities; and d) perform separate, week-long, advanced-study residential programs for 60 blind high school juniors and seniors focused on the design process and preparation for post-secondary STEM education. The NCBYS will advance knowledge and understanding in informal settings, particularly as they pertain to the underrepresented disability demographic; but it is also expected that benefits realized from the program will translate to formal arenas. The proposed team represents the varied fields that the project seeks to inform, and holds expertise in blindness education, STEM education, museum education, parent outreach, teacher training, disability research, and project management. The initiative is a unique opportunity for science centers and the disability population to collaborate for mutual benefit, with lasting implications in informal STEM delivery, parent engagement, and teacher training. It is also an innovative approach to inspiring problem-solving skills in blind high school students through the design process. A panel of experts in various STEM fields will inform content development. NCBYS advances the discovery and understanding of STEM learning for blind students by integrating significant research alongside interactive programs. The audience includes students and those responsible for delivering STEM content and educational services to blind students. For students, the program will demonstrate their ability to interface with science center activities. Students will also gain mentoring experience through activities paired with younger blind students. Parents and teachers of blind students, as well as science center personnel, will gain understanding in the experiences of the blind in STEM, and steps to facilitate their complete involvement. Older students will pursue design inquiries into STEM at a more advanced level, processes that would be explored in post-secondary pursuits. By engaging these groups, the NCBYS will build infrastructure in the informal and formal arenas. Society benefits from the inclusion of new scientific minds, resulting in a diverse workforce. The possibility for advanced study and eventual employment for blind students also reduces the possibility that they would be dependent upon society for daily care in the future. The results of the proposed project will be disseminated and published broadly through Web sites; e-mail lists; social media; student-developed e-portfolios of the design program; an audio-described video; and presentations at workshops for STEM educators, teachers of blind students, blind consumer groups, researchers in disability education, and museum personnel.