RISES (Re-energize and Invigorate Student Engagement through Science) is a coordinated suite of resources including 42 interactive English and Spanish STEM videos produced by Children's Museum Houston in coordination with the science curriculum department at Houston ISD. The videos are aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, and each come with a bilingual Activity Guide and Parent Prompt sheet, which includes guiding questions and other extension activities.
This project is expanding an effective mobile making program to achieve sustainable, widespread impact among underserved youth. Making is a design-based, participant-driven endeavor that is based on a learning by doing pedagogy. For nearly a decade, California State University San Marcos has operated out-of-school making programs for bringing both equipment and university student facilitators to the sites in under-served communities. In collaboration with four other CSU campuses, this project will expand along four dimensions: (a) adding community sites in addition to school sites (b) adding rural contexts in addition to urban/suburban, (c) adding hybrid and online options in addition to in-person), and (d) including future teachers as facilitators in addition to STEM undergraduates. The program uses design thinking as a framework to engage participants in addressing real-world problems that are personally and socially meaningful. Participants will use low- and high-tech tools, such as circuity, coding, and robotics to engage in activities that respond to design challenges. A diverse group of university students will lead weekly, 90-minute activities and serve as near-peer mentors, providing a connection to the university for the youth participants, many of whom will be first-generation college students. The project will significantly expand the Mobile Making program from 12 sites in North San Diego County to 48 sites across California, with nearly 2,000 university facilitators providing 12 hours of programming each year to over 10,000 underserved youth (grades 4th through 8th) during the five-year timeline.
The project research will examine whether the additional sites and program variations result in positive youth and university student outcomes. For youth in grades 4 through 8, the project will evaluate impacts including sustained interest in making and STEM, increased self-efficacy in making and STEM, and a greater sense that making and STEM are relevant to their lives. For university student facilitators, the project will investigate impacts including broadened technical skills, increased leadership and 21st century skills, and increased lifelong interest in STEM outreach/informal science education. Multiple sources of data will be used to research the expanded Mobile Making program's impact on youth and undergraduate participants, compare implementation sites, and understand the program's efficacy when across different communities with diverse learner populations. A mixed methods approach that leverages extant data (attendance numbers, student artifacts), surveys, focus groups, making session feedback forms, observations, and field notes will together be used to assess youth and university student participant outcomes. The project will disaggregate data based on gender, race/ethnicity, grade level, and site to understand the Mobile Making program's impact on youth participants at multiple levels across contexts. The project will further compare findings from different types of implementation sites (e.g., school vs. library), learner groups, (e.g., middle vs. upper elementary students), and facilitator groups (e.g., STEM majors vs. future teachers). This will enable the project to conduct cross-case comparisons between CSU campuses. Project research will also compare findings from urban and rural school sites as well as based on the modality of teaching and learning (e.g., in-person vs. online). The mobile making program activities, project research, and a toolkit for implementing a Mobile maker program will be widely disseminated to researchers, educators, and out-of-school programs.
It is estimated that over 95% of all school children across the country are out of the classroom due to social distancing mandates in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost overnight, families have had to develop and support new practices for learning at home as districts scramble to meet the academic, social and emotional needs of their communities. It is essential to collect data now to develop a deeper understanding of how schools and families are adapting to these changes and will continue to do so in coming weeks/months - the troubles they encounter, and the solutions they generate. Retrospective accounts may mask critical features of what was experienced, minimizing the country’s capacity to conceptualize and build more robust, equitable and transformative learning ecologies for the future. Emphasizing an equity approach to solution development, this research will document how families engage in creative practices to generate powerful learning based on local needs, values, contexts, and histories in this present crisis. It will address the following questions: (1) What resources are schools providing and how are parents navigating and extending these resources to sustain their child’s learning? (2) How are families exploring science and math concepts related to the pandemic? (3) How are parents and families learning to adapt (e.g. communication with teachers; broader social networks) and what challenges do they face (e.g. subscription costs; reliable Internet)? (4) How are digital resources for STEM, curated by the research team, utilized for learning?
Emergency school closures are exposing significant gaps in access to the Internet and communication devices, and the capacity of parents/caregivers and communities to capitalize on technology to sustain health-relevant learning in a time of crisis. This project will use a novel, remote-diary tool based on a smartphone-enabled data collection platform, to reach families across the country. Mobile-phone-enabled remote diary tools make it possible to reach families who are under-connected, not just those with robust technical infrastructure. The data collected will lay the groundwork for creating new socio-technical support systems informed by diverse families’ experiences, as the crisis unfolds. Approximately 200 parents with school age children (early and upper elementary grades) living at home will be recruited. This study and a subsequent virtual workshop with other researchers who are also using remote methods to study learning will help establish a broader research agenda to specify the conditions under which socio-technical systems productively augment a family’s capacity to innovate and learn when traditional co-located school settings disappear. It will advance our understanding of how human learning adapts to unexpectedly changed learning environments. This study draws on advances in remote data collection and new analytical tools for innovation in research design.
For both parents and educators, monitoring and adjusting their behaviors to ensure that children develop appropriate prosocial and learning behaviors is a complex balance between nurturance and limit setting. When these interactions are strained, negative or coercive cycles may emerge that delay appropriate development and exacerbate existing impairment. To disrupt the development of coercive cycles, adults must have the ability to accurately assess the quality of their interactions with children and integrate this information into personal change. Approaches to measuring these types of interactions will inform what we know about the mechanisms of child social, emotional, and learning development in STEM learning settings, and enable the creation of adaptive interventions for those moments when support is most needed. This project envisions a closed-loop intervention framework to promote a supportive and interactive environment around children. Smart wearables will sense interaction and responses between the children and their parents or educators, using embedded machine learning technology to recognize supportive behaviors. The perceived behaviors will be sent to a cloud server where adaptive interaction strategies will be identified from either online psychological consultation or artificial intelligence. These interaction strategies will then be provided to the parents and educators in the form of guidance cues to promote a supportive STEM learning environment around the children.
This planning project aims to understand the barriers and critical problems in the implementation of smart technology and psychological strategies to support adult-child interactions in STEM learning settings. The work will proceed by convening key stakeholders (parent organizations, formal educational institutions, and informal educational institutions) in a series of iterative discussions to produce a set of adult-child behavioral targets that are essential to children’s development of social, emotional, and learning skills. Further discussions will then identify mechanisms to enhance these behaviors, and reduce competing, less effective approaches. Qualitative thematic analysis of the discussions will be used to capture these behaviors and mechanisms. Then technologies will be developed to measure, provide feedback on, and improve these behaviors. These devices will be piloted with adult-child dyads. Audiovisual data collected by the devices will be human coded as well as processed by algorithms to vet the technological capacity of the devices to detect and respond to targeted behaviors. A series of debriefing interviews and surveys with adult-child dyads will be used to determine the feasibility, acceptability, and utility of the devices. The collected preliminary data will support the forming of critical technological and social science research questions that co-inform one another: questions about the social engagement between adults and children will drive the technical research, and what can be discovered via the technological research will open up new questions that can be posed about social engagement between children and adults. Adult-child interactions are key social factors that integrate to produce student social, emotional, and academic outcomes. Within our informal educational communities, our formal educational communities, and our familial communities it is essential to find the best mechanisms for measuring, providing feedback, and improving these interactions. This work thus seeks to advance a new approach to, and evidence-based understanding of, the development of STEM learning. This Smart and Connected Communities project is also supported by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning 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.
This project addresses a longstanding problem in informal science education: how to increase the likelihood of consequential science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning from short duration experiences such as field trips. Although informal learning experiences can greatly contribute to interest in and knowledge of science, there is a shared concern among educators and researchers that students may have difficulty recalling and using scientific information and practices emphasized during these experiences, even though doing so would further their science learning. Nonetheless, science learning is rarely, if ever, a "one-shot deal." Children acquire knowledge about science cumulatively across different contexts and activities. Therefore, it is important that informal science learning institutions identify effective practices that support the consolidation of learning and memory from exhibit experiences to foster portable, usable knowledge across contexts, such as from informal science learning institutions, to classrooms, and homes. To this end, this Research in Service to Practice project seeks to harness the power and potential of visual representations (e.g., graphs, drawings, charts, maps, etc.) for enhancing learning and encouraging effective reflection during and after science learning experiences. The project promises to increase learning for the 9,000+ 5th and 6th grade students from across the rurality and growing diversity of the state of Maine who annually participate in LabVenture, a 2.5-hour exploration of the Gulf of Maine ecosystem at Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The research will provide new and actionable informal science learning practices that promote engagement with visual representations and reflection, and science understandings that can be applied broadly by informal science institutions. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) and the Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12) programs. It supports the AISL program goals to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. It supports the DRK-12 program goal of enhancing the learning and teaching of STEM by preK-12 students and teachers.
The project is grounded in the idea that visual representations, including drawings, can both enhance science learning and encourage reflection on doing science that can support extension of that learning beyond a singular informal science experience. The project uses design-based research to address the following research questions: (1) Does reflection during an informal science learning experience promote students’ retention and subsequent use of science information and practices that are part of the experience? (2) Does interpreting and constructing visual representations, such as drawings, improve students’ understanding and retention of information, and if so, how and when? and (3) Does combining visual representations and narrative reflections confer benefits on students’ science learning and engagement in science practices both during the informal learning experience, and later in their classrooms and at home? These questions will be pursued in collaboration with practitioners (both informal educators and classroom teachers) and a diverse team of graduate and undergraduate student researchers. Approximately 600 student groups (roughly 3000 individual students) will be observed during the LabVenture experience, with further data collection involving a portion of these students at school and at home. The project will yield resources and video demonstrations of field-tested, empirically based practices that promote engagement with visual representations and reflection, and science understandings that can travel within students' learning ecosystem. In support of broadening participation, the undergraduate/graduate student researchers will gain wide understanding and experience connecting research to practice and communicating science to academic and nonacademic audiences.
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.
Informal STEM learning environments, programs, and policies can be designed to support and promote neurodiversity through inclusive practices. This project will explore the benefits of informal STEM learning for K-12 neurodiverse learners through a systematic review and meta-analysis of extant literature and research grounded in the theory of social model of ability. This framework is an asset-based approach and aims to promote social, cognitive, and physical inclusion, leading to positive outcomes. Using various quantitative and qualitative methodologies, this project endeavors to collect and synthesize the evidence for supporting and enhancing accessibility and inclusiveness in informal STEM learning for K-12 neurodiverse learners. It will explore key features of informal STEM learning and effective, evidence-based strategies to effectively engage children and youth with neurological conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, and dyspraxia, in informal STEM learning environments. The findings of this complex synthesis will provide a timely contribution to deeper understanding of supports for neurodiversity while also highlighting areas that inform further research, shifts in practice, and policy.
The systematic review will occur over a two-year period. It will focus on identifying program elements that promote inclusion of children and youth with neurodevelopmental disabilities in informal STEM learning contexts. Specifically, the review will explore two overarching research questions and several sub-research questions:
RQ1. What program elements (teaching and learning variables) in informal STEM learning settings facilitate inclusion of K-12 neurodiverse STEM learners? Sub-RQ1a: What are the overlapping and discrete characteristics of the program elements that facilitate social, cognitive, and physical inclusion?
Sub-RQ1b: In what ways do the program elements that facilitate inclusion vary by informal STEM learning setting?
RQ2: What program elements (teaching and learning variables) in informal STEM learning settings are correlated with benefits for K-12 neurodiverse STEM learners? Sub-RQ2a: What are the overlapping and discrete characteristics of the program elements that correlate with increased STEM identity, self- efficacy, interest in STEM, or STEM learning?
Sub-RQ2b: In what ways do the program elements that correlate with positive results for students vary by informal STEM learning setting? The research synthesis will consider several different types of studies, including research and evaluation; experimental and quasi-experimental designs; quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods; and implementation studies.
The research team will (a) review all analyses and organize findings to illustrate patterns, factors, and relationships, (b) identify key distinctions and nuances derived from the contexts represented in the literature, and (c) revisit and confirm the strength of evidence for making overall assertions of what works, why, and with whom. The findings will be disseminated in practice briefs, journal articles, the AISL resource center, as well as presentations and materials for researchers, practitioners, and informal STEM leaders. Ultimately, this work will result in a comprehensive synthesis of effective informal STEM learning practices for neurodiverse K-12 learners and identify opportunities for further research and development.
This literature review and meta-analysis 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.
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. An ongoing challenge to the design of effective STEM learning exhibits for diverse young children is the absence of reliable and evidence-based resources that designers can apply to the design of STEM exhibits that draw upon play as a child's primary pedagogy, while simultaneously engaging children with STEM content and processes that support development of STEM skills such as observation. To address these challenges, the project team will use a collaborative process in which learning researchers and informal STEM practitioners iteratively develop, design, and test the STEM for Play Framework that could then be applied to the design of STEM-focused exhibits that support play and STEM skill use among early learners.
This Research in Service to Practice project will address these questions: 1) What is a framework for play in early STEM learning that is inclusive of children's cultural influences?; 2) To what extent do interactions between early learners (ages 3-8) and caregivers or peers at exhibits influence the structure and effectiveness of play for supporting STEM skill development?; 3) How do practitioners link play to STEM skill development, and to what extent does a framework for play in early STEM learning assist in identifying types of play that supports early STEM skill development?; and 4) What do practitioners identify as best practices in exhibit design that support the development of STEM skills for early childhood audiences, and conversely, to what extent do practitioners perceive specific aspects of the design as influential to play? The project team will address these questions across four phases of study that will include (a) development of a critical research synthesis to inform the initial STEM for Play framework; (b) the use of surveys, focus groups, and interviews to solicit feedback from practitioners; (c) testing and revising the framework by conducting structured observations of STEM exhibits at multiple museums. The project team will use multiple analytic approaches including qualitative thematic analyses as well as inferential statistics. Results will be disseminated to children?s museums, science centers, and research communities.
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.
For nearly 20 years, the UAB Center for Community OutReach Development (CORD) has conducted SEPA funded research that has greatly enhanced the number of minority students entering the pipeline to college and biomedical careers, e.g., nearly all of CORD’s Summer Research Interns since 1998 (>300) have completed/are completing college and most of them are continuing on to graduate biomedical research and/or clinical training and careers. CORD’s programs that focused on high and middle school students have drawn many minority students into biomedical careers, but a low percentage of minority students benefit from these programs because far too many are already left behind academically in grades 4-6, due, at least in part, to a significant drop in science grades between grades 4 and 6, a drop from which most students never recover. A major contributor to this effect is that most grade 4-6 teachers in predominantly minority schools lack significant formal training in science and often are not fully aware of the great opportunities offered by biomedical careers.
In SEEC II, CORD will deliver intensive inquiry-based science training to grade 4-6 teachers, providing them with science content and hands-on science experiences that will afford their student both content and skills that will make them excited about, and competitive for, the advanced courses needed to move into biomedical research careers. SEEC II will also link teachers together across the elementary/middle school divide and bring the teachers together with administrators and parents, who will experience firsthand the excitement that inquiry learning brings and the significant advancement it provides in science and in reading and math. At monthly meetings and large annual celebrations, the parents, teachers and administrators will learn about the opportunities that biomedical careers can provide for the student who is well prepared. They will also consider the financial and educational steps required to ensure that students have the ability to reach these professions.
SEEC II will also expand CORD’s middle school LabWorks and Summer Science Camps to include grade 4-5 students and provide the teachers with professional learning in informal settings. During summer training, in small groups, the teachers will expand one of the inquiry-based science activities that they complete in the training, and they will use these in their classrooms and communicate with the others in their group to perfect these experiences in the school year. Finally, the teachers and grade 4-5 students will develop science and engineering fair-type research projects with which they will compete both on the school level and at the annual meeting. Thus, the students will share with their parents the excitement that science brings. The Intellectual Merit of SEEC II will be to test a model to enhance grade 4-6 teacher development and vertical alignment, providing science content, exposure to biomedical scientists and training in participatory science experiments, thus positioning teachers to succeed. The Broader Impacts will include the translation and testing of a science education model to assist minority students to avoid the middle school plunge and reach biomedical careers.
For public health to improve, all sectors of society much have access to the highest quality health science news and information possible. How that information is translated, packaged and disseminated is important: the stories matter. Our journalism and mentoring program will grow the health science literacy of the nation by building the next generation of science communicators, ensuring that cadre of youth from historically disadvantaged groups have the discipline, creativity and critical thinking skills needed to be successful health science-literate citizens and advocates within their own communities.
Using a combination of youth-generated videos, broadcast reporting and online curriculum resources, PBS NewsHour will engineer successful educational experiences to engage students from all backgrounds, and particularly underserved populations, to explore clinical, biomedical, and behavioral research. The PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Labs program, currently in 41 states, will create 10 health science reporting labs to produce unique news stories that view health and science topics from a youth perspective. We will incorporate these videos into lesson plans and learning tools disseminated to the general public, educators and youth media organizations. Students will be supported along the way with curricula and mentorship on both fundamental research and the critical thinking skills necessary for responsible journalism. This process will ensure the next generation includes citizens who are effective science communicators and self-motivated learners with a deep connection to science beyond the textbook and classroom.
PBS NewsHour will develop a STEM-reporting curriculum to teach students important research skills. The program will include activities that expose students to careers in research, highlight a diverse assortment of pioneering scientists as role models and promote internship opportunities. The resources will be posted on the PBS NewsHour Extra site which has 170,000 views per month and our partner sites on PBS Learning Media and Share My Lesson—the two biggest free education resource sites on the web—thus greatly expanding the potential scope of our outreach and impact.
NewsHour broadcast topics will be finalized through our advisory panel and the researchers interviewed for the stories will be selected for their expertise and skills as effective science communicators, as well as their diversity and ability to connect with youth. Finally, we will launch an outreach and community awareness campaign through strategic partnerships and coordinated cross promotion of stories through social media platforms.
Many of the Hispanic children and families who live in the Rio Grande Valley lack opportunities to engage in inspirational and educational experiences introducing Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) concepts and related careers. The University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) will adapt and research the "Energy and U Show," which will introduce thousands of children and families to an exciting and dramatic that shows interconverting different forms of energy. The show will meld the excitement of chemical demonstrations and the natural connection between energy and STEM education in a fully produced, on-stage science extravaganza. A foundational philosophy of the show is that there is additional real value in getting children and youth onto a college campus. For many of its participants, this is their first time sitting in a seat at a university, the first opportunity for them to envision themselves in this environment. In partnership with the University of Minnesota, which originally developed the show, UTRGV will adapt the show, now presented in English, to a bilingual, culturally accessible format that is designed to Hispanic family audiences and student groups in learning about energy and related careers. Evaluation results demonstrate that the show has effectively engaged thousands of Minnesota students. The target audience will be upper elementary (4th-5th grade), middle school students, and their parents. This project will be led by UTRGV, nation's second-largest Hispanic Serving Institution, with a student enrollment of 28,000, of which over 90% are Hispanic and more than 60% are first-generation college students). In addition to the show, the project will include: (1) a manual to guide implementation of the program and related resources at different national or international venues; (2) educational resources for parents, teachers and school counselors introducing STEM careers and specific STEM college majors; (3) mentoring of UTRGV faculty in outreach activities; and (4) dissemination of the show to other campuses and venues.
The project will conduct ongoing research and evaluation guiding the adaptation of the show and investigation of factors contributing to positive educational impacts of the project, which will be carried out by a bilingual/bicultural researcher. Project research instruments will measure student level of engagement, interest and learning, as well as college interest, in surveys and analysis of data pre and post demonstration. The project will specifically investigate the impact of language on student impacts. Each component of this project will be studied to determine program intervention effectiveness (the scientific demonstration and language of the demonstration). To determine program effectiveness, a baseline of data before program implementation will be established concerning Hispanic students, their persistence, and perceptions of the environment. The project will measure parent perceptions of STEM careers for their children through pre and post demonstration surveys and focus groups. Student and parent research participants will be able to use surveys or respond to other research activities in the language of their choice. Project findings will contribute to the knowledge base concerning how linguistically and culturally adapted science shows and related resources adapted into can have positive impacts regarding the STEM knowledge and careers of students and parents from low-income and Hispanic communities.
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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Karen LozanoArturo FuentesAaron MassariBrian Warren
Mentoring is a widely accepted strategy for supporting positive socioemotional and cognitive development across a variety of sectors including education, workforce development, and the justice system. An estimated 2.5 million volunteer mentors support youth development in the United States each year. However, there is broad concern that practice has outpaced empirical testing, with significant gaps in the research literature on important modifiers of mentoring relationships and their impacts. This is especially true for mentoring youth ages 10-14 in STEM. Studying highly successful programs may be one way to better understand the role of mentoring and moderators of mentoring effectiveness. The Science Club, a community-based STEM mentoring program for middle-grade youth in the Chicago area, will provide multiple sites for a research study to examine three important issues for advancing theory and practice for STEM mentoring. These issues include (1) understanding STEM mentoring for youth in the middle grades, (2) identifying outcomes and motivations for scientist mentors to more fully participate in mentoring programs, and (3) examining a model of middle-school-focused STEM mentoring collaboration.
Through a series of three studies, the team will investigate which elements of the mentoring relationships are associated with the demonstrated STEM identity gains in youth participants. The work will also contribute much-needed data on the impact of STEM mentoring relationships on the mentors themselves. Study 1 is designed as a retrospective study of program alumni, both youth and mentors, about the nature and extent of each their STEM identity shifts during their time in Science Club. A purposeful sample of 160+ youth and 100+ mentor alumni will participate. Study 2 is a prospective study of three consecutive cohorts of active Science Club participants, built on data and findings from Study 1. In Study 2, the team will design and implement a new Identity-Focused Mentoring Observation Instrument specifically aimed at exploring the nature and quality of mentoring relationships and their role in science identity development longitudinally. Three independent cohorts of 40 youth and 20 mentors each will participate. Study 3 is retrospective, examining how participating individuals and organizations perceive and are impacted by mentoring. The three studies employ a mixed methods approach utilizing surveys, observations, individual interviews, and document review.
This proposal will fill critical gaps in the mentoring literature regarding the formative middle school years through novel, empirical research. Building on the current literature and practice, outcomes of the work will inform practice and enhance knowledge-building in the field on both mentoring relationships and the collective impact of university-school-OST partnerships.
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.