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.
The Sustainability Teams Empower and Amplify Membership in STEM (S-TEAMS), an NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot project, will tackle the problem of persistent underrepresentation by low-income, minority, and women students in STEM disciplines and careers through transdisciplinary teamwork. As science is increasingly done in teams, collaborations bring diversity to research. Diverse interactions can support critical thinking, problem-solving, and is a priority among STEM disciplines. By exploring a set of individual contributors that can be effect change through collective impact, this project will explore alternative approaches to broadly enhance diversity in STEM, such as sense of community and perceived program benefit. The S-TEAMS project relies on the use of sustainability as the organizing frame for the deployment of learning communities (teams) that engage deeply with active learning. Studies on the issue of underrepresentation often cite a feeling of isolation and lack of academically supportive networks with other students like themselves as major reasons for a disinclination to pursue education and careers in STEM, even as the numbers of underrepresented groups are increasing in colleges and universities across the country. The growth of sustainability science provides an excellent opportunity to include students from underrepresented groups in supportive teams working together on problems that require expertise in multiple disciplines. Participating students will develop professional skills and strengthen STEM- and sustainability-specific skills through real-world experience in problem solving and team science. Ultimately this project is expected to help increase the number of qualified professionals in the field of sustainability and the number of minorities in the STEM professions.
While there is certainly a clear need to improve engagement and retention of underrepresented groups across the entire spectrum of STEM education - from K-12 through graduate education, and on through career choices - the explicit focus here is on the undergraduate piece of this critical issue. This approach to teamwork makes STEM socialization integral to the active learning process. Five-member transdisciplinary teams, from disciplines such as biology, chemistry, computer and information sciences, geography, geology, mathematics, physics, and sustainability science, will work together for ten weeks in summer 2018 on real-world projects with corporations, government organizations, and nongovernment organizations. Sustainability teams with low participation by underrepresented groups will be compared to those with high representation to gather insights regarding individual and collective engagement, productivity, and ongoing interest in STEM. Such insights will be used to scale up the effort through partnership with New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability (NJHEPS).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Amy TuiningaAshwani VasishthPankaj Lai
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. This project will develop and test intergenerational science media resources for parents that are participating in adult education programs and their young children. The materials will build on the research-based and successful children's television program, Fetch with Ruff Ruffman. The target audience includes parents enrolled in adult education programs who lack a high school diploma or are in English as a Second Language classes. These resources will support parents' engagement in science activities with their children both in the adult education settings as well as at home. Adult and family educators will receive professional development resources and training to support their integration of the parent/child activities. Project partners include the National Center for Families Learning, Kentucky Educational Television, and Alabama Public Television,
The goals of the Ruff Family Science project are to: (1) investigate adult education settings that feature an intergenerational learning model, in order to learn about the unique characteristics of adults and families who are enrolled in these programs; (2) examine the institutional circumstances and educator practices that support joint parent/child engagement in science; (3) iteratively develop new prototype resources meet the priorities and needs of families and educators involved in intergenerational education settings; and (4) develop the knowledge needed to create a fuller set of materials in the future that will motivate and support diverse, low-income parents to investigate science with their children. The research strategy is comprised of three main components: Phase 1: Needs Assessment: Determine key motivations and behaviors common to adult education students who are also parents; surface obstacles and assets inherent in these parents' current practices; and examine the needs and available resources for supplementing parents' current engagement in family science learning. Phase 2: Prototype Development: Iteratively develop two prototype Activity Sets, along with related educator supports and training materials, designed to promote joint parent-child engagement with English and Spanish-speaking families around physical science concepts. Phase 3: Prototype Field Test: Test how the two refined prototype Activity Sets work in different educational settings (adult education, parent education, and parent and child together time). Explore factors that support or impede effective implementation. Sources of data for the study include observations of adult and parent education classes using an expert interview protocol, focus groups, adult and family educator interviews, and parent surveys.
STEM Pathways is a collaboration between five Minnesota informal STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education organizations—The Bakken Museum, Bell Museum of Natural History, Minnesota Zoo, STARBASE Minnesota, and The Works Museum—working with Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) and advised by the Minnesota Department of Education. STEM Pathways (logo shown in Figure 1) aims to provide a deliberate and connected series of meaningful in-school and out-of-school STEM learning experiences to strengthen outcomes for students, build the foundation for a local ecosystem of STEM
Afterschool and community science programs have become widely recognized as important sanctuaries for science learning for low-income urban youth and as offering them with "missing opportunities." Yet, more needs to be known about how youth, themselves, perceive such opportunities. What motivates youth to seek out such opportunities in the nonschool hours? How do youth describe the doing and talking of science in such programs? Given such descriptions, how do youth perceive the role of these programs in their lives? This paper relies on stories from three youth drawn from a multisited
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jrene RahmMarie-Paule Martel-RenyJohn Moore
The goal of this outreach program was for Chemistry at the Space-Time (CaSTL) limit to partner with the Boys and Girls Club (BGC) of Santa Ana, CA to increase their participants' interest, enthusiasm and learning outcomes in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) fields, through the development of science and chemistry hands-on lessons. The Boys and Girls Club of Santa Ana serves nearly 2,700 participants each day at six sites. Ninety percent of their participants identify as Hispanic/Latino and 93% are on free or reduced lunch. Although the Boys and Girls Club offers limited STEM activities, they agreed to partner with CaSTL, a UC-Irvine NSF-funded Center for Chemical Innovation, to expand their STEM ISE activities. CaSTL, in close collaboration with both the California Science Project of Irvine (CSPI), developed 24 science lesson plans that engage participants in high-level, hands-on, and interactive lessons that expose program participants to the visualization of chemistry and physics, based on CaSTL's mission. All lessons align with the California Science Standards, are highly interactive, and do not mimic the school day. These lessons compliment the state standards, but go much further in providing the participants experimental, hands-on activities that they often do not receive in their schools, due to budget, space and time restrictions. CaSTL faculty and graduate students ensured that the lens through which CaSTL research occurs was clearly represented in the lessons. CaSTL graduate students developed one of the lessons and kit and taught the spectroscopy lesson at the club.
Children's Television Workshop is embaring on a ground- breaking experiment in informal science education: the production of an entertaining animated series of 13 half- hour programs for Saturday morning commercial television, based on David Macaulay's bestselling book, The Way Things Work. The audience will be six- to eleven-year olds, with special focus on minority and economically disadvantaged children. The series' primary goal will be to entertain children with lively and appealing characters in a dramatic storyline, while stimulating children's interest in the scientific principles behind the workings of familiar machines and illustrating the action of their parts. NSF support will enable CTW to adapt the CTW Model -- the collaborative process used in earlier NSF-supported programs, 3-2-1 Contact and Square One Tv -- to the opportunities of the animation format and the realities of the partnership with a commercial network. Through a development agreement with CBS, CTW has begun the process of developing the series concept, characters, and storylines. Upon successful completion of this phase, production will follow with an anticipated broadcast premiere in fall 1992. NSF's $2.36 million support will allow this project to be possible by completing the series' funding; it will allow CTW to conduct significant formative research and summative analyses of educational impact, and to reach large minority and economically disadvantaged audiences through wider promotion and the creation and distribution of complementary print materials.