The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will amplify its partnership with Hart Magnet School, a Title 1 elementary school in urban Stamford, Connecticut, by increasing exposure and access to the arts for first-fifth graders, their families, and educators. A new program model, leveraging the museum's artist exhibitions, will focus on technology and an inquiry-based approach to science. Students, educators, and families will be encouraged to see and think in new ways through on-site STEAM tours at the museum, artist-led workshops at Hart, teacher professional development, and afterschool family activities. Outside evaluators will work with the project team to develop goals and associated metrics to measure how the model of museum-school partnership can enhance student achievement, engage families more deeply in their child's school experience and community, and contribute to teacher professional development. The evaluator will also train museum staff on best practices for program assessment.
In partnership with the Pasadena and Los Angeles Unified School Districts, the Armory Center for the Arts will develop and implement comprehensive visual art-math and visual art-science curricula for grades two through five at Title I elementary schools. The curricula will be developed in conjunction with Armory teaching artists and educators, and will align with the Common Core Standards for math and science, and with the National Core Visual Arts Standards. The museum will deliver the program in 48 classrooms over a three-year period. Professional development, paired with in-class program modeling, will enable participating teachers to implement arts integration strategies into their teaching practice, with an overall goal of creating a sustainable and long-term impact on student learning. An external evaluator will oversee program assessment in the schools. The museum will post sample lessons from each curriculum online to demonstrate the style and scope of the program for possible use by additional school districts.
The Children's Museum of the Upstate will expand its STEAM outreach programming to benefit both teachers and students in the Greenville County Schools. The museum will serve 2,000 students through STEAM programs held on-site at their elementary schools, with a focus on curriculum areas where standardized test scores indicate that students are struggling. A new program for preschoolers will be piloted in the school district's six child development centers. The pre-school classes will visit the museum for a field trip that includes free exploration time and a tailored storytime lesson. The museum will also present four teacher workshops reaching 400 educators to assist them in teaching STEAM topics. An independent evaluator will conduct an evaluation of the outreach programming and develop assessment tools to help determine how the curriculum can support student achievement and result in improved standardized test scores.
The Paine Art Center and Gardens will address challenges facing arts education in the region, in particular the low retention rate of new visual and performing arts teachers in the first five years of entering the field. Previous community-based planning sessions determined that arts integration is a compelling and relevant strategy to address the needs of new teachers and arts education. The project will support the development and implementation of the ArtsCore Laboratory, a new dedicated classroom at the Paine, which facilitates teacher collaboration, experimentation, and art activities for students. The laboratory will be designed and equipped to foster interdisciplinary activities and learning styles, with an emphasis on connecting STEM education with arts education. A new educator-in-residence program, the ArtsCore Experience, will offer a professional development program for teachers. The initiatives are a collaboration between the museum and the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, the Oshkosh Area School District, and more than seven additional school districts.
This project is a Smart and Connected Communities award. The community is part of Evanston, Illinois and is composed of the lead partners described below:
EvanSTEM which is a in-school/out of school time (OST) program to improve access and engagement for students in Evanston who have underperformed or been underrepresented in STEM.
McGaw YMCA which consists of 12,000 families serving 20,000 individuals and supporting technology and makerspace activities (MetaMedia) in a safe community atmosphere.
Office of Community Education Partnerships (OCEP) at Northwestern University which provides support for the university and community to collaborate on research, teaching, and service initiatives.
This partnership will develop a new approach to learning enagement through the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) interests of all young people in Evanston. This project is entitled Interests for All (I4All) and builds upon existing research results of the two Principal Investigators (PIs) and previous partnerships between the lead partners (EvanSTEM and MetaMedia had OCEP as a founding partner). I4All also brings together Evanston school districts, OST prividers, the city, and Evanston's Northwestern University as participants.
In particular the project builds on PI Pinkard's Cities of Learning project and co-PI Stevens' FUSE Studios project. Both of these projects have explicit goals to broaden participation in STEAM pursuits, a goal that is significantly advanced through I4All. In this project, I4All infrastructure will be evaluated using quantitative metrics that will tell the researchers whether and to what degree Evanston youth are finding and developing their STEAM interests and whether the I4All infrastructure supports a significantly more equitable distribution of opportunities to youth. The researchers will also conduct in depth qualitative case studies of youth interest development. These longitudinal studies will complement the quantitative metrics of participation and give measures that will be used in informing changes in I4All as part of the PIs Design Based Implementation Research approach. The artifacts produced in I4All include FUSE studio projects, software infrastructure to guide the students through OST and in-school activities and to provide to the students actionable information as to logistics for participation in I4All activities, and data that will be available to all stakeholders to evaluate the effectiveness of I4All. Additionally, this research has the potential to provide for scaling this model to different communities, leveraging the OST network in one community to begin to offer professional development more widely throughout the school districts and as an exemplar for other districts. These research results could also affect strategies and policies created by local school officials and community organizations regarding how to work together to create local learning environments to create an ecosystem where formal and informal learning spaces support and reinforce STEAM knowledge.
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.
This Conference Paper was presented at the International Soceity for the Learning Sciences Confernece in June 2018. We summarize interviews with youth ages 9-15 about their failure mindsets, and if those midsets cross boundaries between learning environments.
Previous research on youth’s perceptions and reactions to failure established a view of failure as a negative, debilitating experience for youth, yet STEM and in particular making programs increasingly promote a pedagogy of failures as productive learning experiences. Looking to unpack perceptions of failure across contexts and
Making is a recent educational phenomenon that is increasingly occurring in schools and informal learning spaces around the world. In this paper we explore data from maker educators about their experiences with failure. We surveyed maker educators about how they view failure happening with youth in their formal and informal programs and how they respond. The results reveal some concrete strategies that seem to show promise for helping educators increase the likelihood that failure experiences for youth can lead to gains in learning and persistence.
This article summarizes a survey of formal
Because of the siloed nature of formal educational curricula, students who opt out of STEM coursework, for whatever reason, lose the opportunity to engage with the domain of science almost entirely, thereby closing the door to the STEM workforce pipeline. This disproportionately impacts students of color and women. This project advances an alliance that consists of a consortium of community-engaged partners, including university and k-12 educational agencies, community colleges, community organizations, cultural institutions and local businesses. The project built around this alliance will leverage interdisciplinary spaces in the curriculum, particularly the humanities and social sciences, across academic levels, as a forum for integrating and applying STEM to bear on the practical, social, economic and political issues of modern life. The PIs establish a physical Community STEM Center as an anchoring institution for STEM engagement. This Center will be situated within the community that the alliance serves, bringing STEM opportunities and engagement to students instead of asking them to come where STEM education is currently provided. The activities enacted through the Community STEM Center will focus on enduring problems experienced by the communities, where students, community residents, teachers, and experts from higher education, industry and other community-based entities can come together to work on understanding them and developing evidenced centered advocacy as a means for addressing them. To facilitate the work at the Community STEM Center, the project creates a Community Ambassadors Program (CAP), leveraging participation across alliance members in partnership with the community. This Design and Development Launch Pilot will cultivate the necessary knowledgebase to develop a scalable model for implementation across diverse urban communities.
Technical Summary
This Design and Development Launch Pilot focuses on shifting the narrative of STEM education away from a solitary focus on formalized educational experiences and targets STEM content. This project develops and facilitates a parallel set of activities designed to engage under-represented students in learning how and why STEM is relevant to their lives, and approached through new and non-traditional educational dimensions. The five main objectives of this proposed pilot are to: (1) Develop a pilot alliance of community-engaged partners, including university and k-12 educational agencies, community colleges, community organizations, cultural institutions and industry;(2)Establish a physical Community STEM Advocacy Center as an anchoring institution for change embedded within the community that the pilot alliance serves; (3) Leverage interdisciplinary spaces in curricula, across academic levels, particularly the humanities and social sciences, as a forum for integrating and applying STEM to bear on the practical, social, economic and political issues of modern life; (4) Create a Community Ambassadors Program (CAP), leveraging participation across higher education pilot alliance members in partnership with the community; and (5)Conduct an evaluation of project initiatives and research regarding the usability and feasibility of a systemic approach to developing community-based, interdisciplinary pathways to broaden STEM participation pathways. Efforts to examine the impact of this community-based, interdisciplinary approach concentrates on the proximal outcomes related to STEM interest, self-efficacy and identity. Data will be collected in pre/post format across our three constituent samples: 1) Community STEM Advocacy Center participants; 2) k-12 students; and, 3) postsecondary students. Analysis of data will be conducted through MANCOVAs to account for potential co-variation among construct scores. Qualitative data will also be collected to contextualize findings and enable the development of a rich case study. At least two observations will be conducted in the Community STEM Advocacy Center and the two classroom implementations to document engagement, participant interactions and level of STEM content.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Kimberly LawlessDonald WinkLudwig Carlos NitscheAixa AlfonsoJeremiah Abiade