This Research in Service to Practice 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 project will research the educational impact of social robots in informal learning environments, with applications to how social robots can improve participation and engagement of middle-school girls in out-of-school computer science programs in under-resourced rural and urban areas. The use of robots to improve STEM outcomes has focused on having learners program robots as tools to accomplish tasks (e.g., play soccer). An alternate approach views robots as social actors that can respond intelligently to users. By designing a programmable robot with social characteristics, the project aims to create a culturally-responsive curriculum for Latina, African American, and Native American girls who have been excluded by approaches that separate technical skill and social interaction. The knowledge produced by this project related to the use and benefits of social programmable robots has the potential to impact the many after-school and weekend programs that attempt to engage learners in STEM ideas using programmable robot curricula.
The project robot, named Cozmo, will be programmed using a visual programming language and will convey emotion with facial expressions, sounds, and movements. Middle school girls will engage in programming activities, collaborative reflection, and interact with college women mentors trained to facilitate the course. The project will investigate whether the socially expressive Cozmo improves computer science outcomes such as attitudes, self-efficacy, and knowledge among the middle school female participants differently than the non-social version. The project will also investigate whether adding rapport-building dialogue to Cozmo enhances these outcomes (e.g., when a learner succeeds in getting Cozmo to move, Cozmo can celebrate, saying "I can move! You're amazing!"). These questions will be examined research conducted with participants in multi-session after-school courses facilitated by Girl Scout troops in Arizona. The project will disseminate project research and resources widely by sharing research findings in educational and learning science journals; creating a website with open source code for programming social robots; and making project curriculum and related guidelines available to Girl Scouts and other educational programs.
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 is an "Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science" (INCLUDES) Design and Development Launch Pilot that will implement a plan to assess the feasibility of a strategy designed to ensure high levels of improvement in K-12 grade students' mathematics achievement. The plan will focus on an often-neglected group of students--those who have been performing at the lowest quartile on state tests of mathematics, including African American, Hispanic, Native American, students with disabilities, and those segregated in urban and rural communities across the country. The project will draw on lessons learned from the nation's Civil Rights Movement and a community-organizing strategy learned during the struggle to achieve voting rights for African Americans. The Algebra Project (AP) is a national, nonprofit organization that uses mathematics as an organizing tool to ensure quality public school education for every child in America; it believes that every child has a right to a quality education to succeed in this technology-based society. AP's unique approach to school reform intentionally develops sustainable, student-centered models by building coalitions of stakeholders within the local communities, particularly the historically underserved populations. The AP works to change the deeply rooted social attitudes that encourage the disenfranchisement of a third of the nation's population. It delivers a multi-pronged approach to build demand for and support of quality public schools, including research and development, school development, and community development education reform efforts through K-12 initiatives.
The Algebra Project and the Young People's Project (YPP) will join efforts to bring together over 70 individuals and organizations, including 17 universities of which 8 are Historical Black Colleges and Universities, school districts, mathematics educators, and researchers to examine their experiences, and use collective learning to refine and hone strategies that they have piloted and tested to promote mathematics inclusion. The role of YPP in the proposed project will be to organize and facilitate the youth component, such that project activities reflect the language and culture of students, continuously leveraging and building upon their voice, creative input, and ongoing feedback. YPP will conduct workshops for students organized around math-based games that provide collective experiences in which student learning requires individual reflection, small group work, teamwork and discussion. The proposed work will comprise the design of effective learning opportunities; building and supporting a cadre of teachers who can effectively work with students learning under the proposed approach; using technologies to enhance teaching and learning; and utilizing evaluation and research to drive continuous improvement. Because bringing together an effective network with diverse expertise to collaborate towards national impact requires expert facilitation processes, the project will establish working groups around three major principles: (1) Organizing from the bottom up through students, their teachers, and others in local communities committed to their education, allied with individuals and organizations who have expertise and dedication for achieving the stated goals, can produce significant progress and the conditions for collective impact; (2) Effective learning materials and formal and informal learning opportunities in mathematics can be designed and implemented for students performing in the bottom academic quartile; and (3) Teachers and other educators can become more proficient and more confident in their capacity to produce students who are successful in learning the level of mathematics required for full participation in STEM. The working groups will also be tasked to consider two cross-cutting topics: (a) the communication structures and technologies needed to operate and expand the present network, and to create the "backbone" and other structures needed to operate and expand the network; and (b) the measurements and metrics for major needs, such as assessing students' mathematics literacy, socio-emotional development in specified areas; teachers' competencies; as well as the work of the network. The final product of this plan will be a "Theory of Collective Action and Strategic Plan". The plan will contain recommendations for collective actions needed in order for the current network to coordinate, add appropriate partners, develop the needed backbone structures, and become an NSF Alliance for national impact on the broadening participation challenge of improving the mathematics achievement. An external evaluator will conduct both formative and summative aspects of this process.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Robert MosesNell CobbGregory BudzbanMaisha MosesWilliam Crombie
Northern ecosystems are rapidly changing; so too are the learning and information needs of Arctic and sub-Arctic communities who depend on these ecosystems for wild harvested foods. Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) presents a possible method to increase flow of scientific and local knowledge, enhance STEM-based problem solving skills, and co-create new knowledge about phenology at local and regional or larger scales. However, there remain some key challenges that the field of PPSR research must address to achieve this goal. The proposed research will make substantial contributions to two of these issues by: 1) advancing theory on the interactions between PPSR and resilience in social-ecological systems, and 2) advancing our understanding of strategies to increase the engagement of youth and adults historically underrepresented in STEM, including Alaska Native and indigenous youth and their families who play an essential role in the sustainability of environmental monitoring in the high latitudes and rural locations throughout the globe. In particular, our project results will assist practitioners in choosing and investing in design elements of PPSR projects to better navigate the trade-offs between large-scale scientific outcomes and local cultural relevance. The data collected across the citizen science network will also advance scientific knowledge on the effects of phenological changes on berry availability to people and other animals.
The Arctic Harvest research goals are to 1) critically examine the relationship between PPSR learning outcomes in informal science environments and attributes of social-ecological resilience and 2) assess the impact of two program design elements (level of support and interaction with mentors and scientists, and an innovative story-based delivery method) on the engagement of underserved audiences. In partnership with afterschool clubs in urban and rural Alaska, we will assess the impact of participation in Winterberry, a new PPSR project that investigates the effect of changes in the timing of the seasons on subsistence berry resources. We propose to investigate individual and community-level learning outcomes expected to influence the ability for communities to adapt to climate change impacts, including attributes of engagement, higher-order thinking skills, and their influence on the level of civic action and interest in berry resource stewardship by the youth groups. Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, we compare these outcomes with the same citizen science program delivered through two alternate methods: 1) a highly supported delivery method with increased in-person interaction with program mentors and scientists, and 2) an innovative method that weaves in storytelling based on elder experiences, youth observations, and citizen science data at all stages of the program learning cycle. 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 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 project also has support from the Office of Polar Programs.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Katie SpellmanElena SparrowChrista MulderDeb Jones
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches and resources for use in a variety of settings. The project will conduct research designed to deepen our fundamental knowledge about culture, experience, and ecosystems cognition and to develop innovative practices and approaches to support learning about changing ecological systems and environmental decision making. Work on cultural differences in the production of complex systems knowledge is severely lacking. This gap in knowledge may contribute to the continued reproduction of inequities in science education. More broadly findings from this project will have clear implications for theories of cognitive development, especially those pertaining to how knowledge is shaped by culture and experience. Focusing on ecosystems may represent an opportunity to not only increase engagement and achievement in science among non-dominant communities and Native youth specifically, but also advance effective learning for all communities. The primary deliverables for the project are conference presentations and research publications. However, the project will also develop additional resources freely available to researchers, educators, and the general public. These will include summer curricular materials and teaching tools, professional development workshops, practitioner briefs about research findings that can be used in professional development workshops and shared share more broadly, and evaluation reports.
A deeper understanding of cultural influences on conceptions of the natural world can serve to advance the educational needs of children, including children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Project research will include two interrelated series of studies designed to expand knowledge about human cognition of complex ecosystems and the affordances of informal STEM learning environments in developing and supporting the critical 21st century skill of ecological systems level reasoning. The first consists of a series of experiments focused on ecological cognition and the role of humans in nature. The second consists of design-based research interventions in informal settings, summer workshops for youth and the communities, focused on ecological systems level thinking and socio-environmental decision making. The project will recruit and engage both child and adult participants from two broad cultural communities, Native Americans and European Americans living in urban and suburban communities, in part because it affords a sharp test of human-nature relations. Sampling from two different urban communities will avoid simple Native-non-Native comparative binaries and to conduct Native-to-Native comparative analysis. Based on results from this, the project will result in: 1) foundational knowledge about human learning and reasoning and ecosystems and environmental decision making, 2) culturally responsive models of learning and practice about complex ecosystems for indoors and outdoors informal learning environments, and 3) insights about research-practice-community partnerships. One important objective of the research is to broaden participation and close opportunity gaps for under-represented groups in STEM fields broadly and more specifically for Indigenous people. Members of Indigenous communities, who provide strong role models for other aspiring scholars, will be involved as postdoctoral fellows, research assistants and graduate fellows.
Young people learn about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in a variety of ways and from many sources, including school, the media, personal experiences, and friends and family. Yet STEM participation and identification by youth are not equal across social, economic, and cultural communities. This project will study a long-term, out-of-school program for high school-age youth, who are from groups under-represented in STEM academics and careers: girls, youth from low-income households, and youth of color. Located in the urban context of the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center (KAYSC) engages youth in applying culturally rich STEM content to work toward social justice and community building. Specifically, this project will examine how the learning practices of the KAYSC model support youth in identifying with, engaging in, and participating in STEM. Through studying the KAYSC's STEM Justice model, which centers youth as learners, teachers, and leaders who address critical community issues through STEM, this project will develop resources that informal science educators in a variety of contexts and programs can use to promote positive social change, equity, inclusion, and applied STEM learning.
The Science Museum of Minnesota will use design-based implementation research to study this model. This research will draw on and further the emerging theoretical framework of science capital. Science capital attempts to capture multiple aspects of science learning and application, including science knowledge, social and cultural resources, and science-related behaviors and practices. Empirically developing the theory of science capital has the potential to build concrete understanding of how to address inequalities in science participation. Four teams will work independently and collaboratively to do so: an adult research team, a high school youth research team, a practitioner team, and a co-design team composed of representatives from the other three teams. Research teams will collect data in the form of observations, semi-structured interviews, practitioner activity reports, artifacts, and the experience sampling method. Initial cycles of design will occur at the Science Museum of Minnesota as researchers and practitioners document, analyze, and iteratively design learning practices within the STEM Justice model. In the second half of the grant, the team will work with an external out-of-school time youth leadership site to implement the redesigned model. Participatory research and design methods involving both youth and adults can advance understanding of what makes out-of-school time STEM learning meaningful, relevant, and successful for marginalized youth and their communities. Grounded in culturally and socially relevant, community-based resources and programming, this project will study how leveraging STEM out-of-school time learning connected to social justice can broaden access to STEM as well as develop workforce, and leadership, and STEM skills by under-represented youth. The project also builds staff capacity for promoting equity and access in informal learning settings.
This project is being 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.