Reflections from a researcher and caregiver on the process of working together on a study examining strategies to communicate the relevance of engineering practices at exhibits.
On October 1, 2015, Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) was awarded a 3‑year grant of 2.7 million dollars from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund the project Hacking Your Mind (award number 1515520). A major public and social media project, Hacking Your Mind (HYM) planned to engage Americans with the new discoveries being made in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences and the remarkable insights these discoveries offer into how individuals make numerous daily decisions and judgments, as well as the broader impact of this highly personal phenomenon on nearly every aspect of
While there is extensive evidence that STEM careers can be important pathways for augmenting social mobility and for increasing individual prestige, many youth perceive a STEM trajectory as an unattractive option. In the US, women and members of historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups, continue to be underrepresented across STEM disciplines. One vehicle for generating and sustaining interest in STEM is providing youth long-term access to informal science education (ISE) institutions. Here, we incorporate triangulation methods, collecting and synthesizing both qualitative and
An interview with Jacquelynne S. Eccles, an academic researcher, is presented. Eccles states that after enrolling in graduate school at UCLA in Los Angeles, California, she learned more about what it entailed to be an academic researcher. Eccles avers that she is interested in how people make selections. Eccles believe that the expectations for one's performance and the value that one connects to acting well are heavily socialized within the cultural setting as individuals grow up.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Héfer Bembenutty
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The goal of Women in Cognitive Science is to improve the visibility of women scientists by fostering an environment that welcomes and nurtures young women scholars, to contribute to the professional development of scholars throughout their career, and to facilitate creation of a network that will provide contacts and connections to other women in science. Several workshops are designed for women in cognitive science, especially women in the early stages of their academic career. The workshops focus on negotiation techniques to create opportunities and optimize mechanisms to sustain research visibility and productivity. A second focus is on grant application writing for predoctoral, postdoctoral, and early career scientists. Workshops will take place at meetings of the Psychonomic Society, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Psychological Sciences. The workshops will take the form of a public forum with invited speaker-panelists to initiate discussion about best practices for the professional advancement of women in cognitive science at the individual and institutional level. By partnering with these established societies, the workshops will maximize the outreach potential to a group that continues to be underrepresented in senior academic positions in the cognitive sciences.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Mary PetersonDiane BeckKaren Schloss
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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kimberly LawlessDonald WinkLudwig Carlos NitscheAixa AlfonsoJeremiah Abiade
This briefing paper reports findings from the Youth Access & Equity in Informal Science Learning (ISL) project,
a UK-US researcher-practitioner partnership funded by the Science Learning+ scheme. Our project focuses on young people aged 11-14 primarily from under-served and non-dominant communities and includes researchers and practitioners from a range of ISL settings: designed spaces (e.g. museums, zoos), community-based (e.g. after school clubs) and everyday science spaces (e.g. science media).
Soundprint Media Center, Inc. and RLPaul Productions, produced a cross-media package that includes a website (capecosmos.org), radio programs, and museum-based family events related to the 50th anniversary of the Space Program. The project, Out of This World (OOTW), is a program that sought to stimulate interest in science by presenting the little known stories of African-Americans and women who contributed to the U.S. Space program, and to provide historical context for the scope and reach of the nascent aerospace science program. Through radio documentaries and collaborations with science centers and museums, including the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum (NASM), OOTW broke new ground in developing an integrated media project that reached different audiences. The deliverables included: three radio documentaries (; an educational DVD package with 20 video mini-documentaries, curator interviews with space research pioneers and a learning guide; an interactive website that recreates a space mission circa 1961, and a series of live two-way video conferences between NASM and some 14 partner museums and science centers. OOTW used the power of investigative journalism and the reach of public radio and local science museums to connect with adults and school-age children, to cut across demographic categories, and to include a significant number of minority and at-risk children.
Over the last ten years, out-of-school-time (OST) science programs have multiplied to increase young people’s exposure to science. However, there are still not enough opportunities for long-term engagement, which is essential to move youth from having interest in science to having the skills, knowledge, and self-efficacy to pursue careers in science. This article describes findings from exploratory research conducted to document the experiences of a small group of young women of color who participated in a museum-based OST program during their middle and high school years.
This study focused on girls’ engagement with science and how they negotiate identities with and in opposition to science in a three-year study of community-based afterschool initiatives. Rahm conducted a multi-sited ethnography, observing girls’ whose families had recently immigrated to Montreal, Canada and were participating in a community organization creating science newsletters and science fair projects.
Women have made tremendous progress in education and the workplace during the past 50 years. Even in historically male fields such as business, law, and medicine, women have made impressive gains. In scientific areas, however, women’s educational gains have been less dramatic, and their progress in the workplace still slower. In an era when women are increasingly prominent in medicine, law, and business, why are so few women becoming scientists and engineers? This study tackles this puzzling question and presents a picture of what we know—and what is still to be understood—about girls and
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Catherine HillChristianne CorbettAndresse St. Rose