Techbridge Girls’ mission is to help girls discover a passion for science, engineering, and technology (SET). In August 2013, Techbridge Girls was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation grant to scale up its afterschool program from the San Francisco Bay Area to multiple new locations around the United States. Techbridge Girls began offering afterschool programming at elementary and middle schools in Greater Seattle in 2014, and in Washington, DC in 2015.
Education Development Center is conducting the formative and summative evaluation of the project. To assess the implementation
Techbridge Girls’ mission is to help girls discover a passion for science, engineering, and technology (SET). In August 2013, Techbridge Girls was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation grant to scale up its afterschool program from the San Francisco Bay Area to multiple new locations around the United States. Techbridge Girls began offering afterschool programming at elementary and middle schools in Greater Seattle in 2014, and in Washington, DC in 2015.
Education Development Center is conducting the formative and summative evaluation of the project. To assess the implementation
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
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This is a project to offer the Forum on Inclusive STEMM Entrepreneurship (FISE), a novel effort to broaden the participation of underrepresented minority women in STEMM entrepreneurship and to enhance the diversity of the science and engineering workforce. Through a convening of educators, entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, industry leaders, investors and policy experts, entrepreneurial education thought leaders, and intersectionality scholars the PI proposes to use this conference as a platform for building capacity in the preparation and development of future entrepreneurs from underrepresented groups. The PI also seeks to contribute to the emerging field of research that bridges tech entrepreneurship and education policy.
The proposed forum has the potential to advance knowledge in the field of entrepreneurship education and engineering education. Given the dearth of research-based interventions to broaden participation in tech entrepreneurship, this conference offers an opportunity for participants to contribute to the leading edge of research and interventions in this field.
The convening and associated activities will leverage the social capital of knowledgeable experts in the academy and industry, investors, entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs to address critical needs of the nation that relate to enhanced global competitiveness, an improved national economy, and the participation of underrepresented cohorts in entrepreneurship and commercialization.
The University of California, Irvine will lead this Design and Development Launch Pilot to engage with collaborators from the Orange County CA STEM Initiative, the Orange County CA Department of Education, the Orange County CA Workforce Investment Board, the Jamboree Affordable Housing Communities, the Orangewood Foundation for Foster and Community Youth Services, OCTANE-Technology Incubator, Project Tomorrow and Growth Section. This project was created in response to the Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (NSF INCLUDES) program solicitation (NSF 16-544). The INCLUDES program is a comprehensive national initiative designed to enhance U.S. leadership in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) discoveries and innovations focused on NSF's commitment to diversity, inclusion, and broadening participation in these fields. The INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilots represent bold, innovative ways for solving a broadening participation challenge in STEM.
The full participation of all of America's STEM talent is critical to the advancement of science and engineering for national security, health and prosperity. Our nation is advancing knowledge and practices to address the computing technology education practices for recruiting, better educating, retaining and graduating a productive STEM workforce. However women who are members of underrepresented minority groups, with low socioeconomic status, historically underperform in STEM and specifically in computing technology. This project, NSF INCLUDES: Supporting Women Advancing Through Technology, has the potential to significantly advance a collaborative approach by a group of organizations to improve the success of poor, underrepresented minority women who are learning computing technology and transitioning to the STEM workforce.
The project will demonstrate the outcomes of computer science training for women, particular disenfranchised and underrepresented minority women that may be exiting foster youth services, living in low income housing, and/or having been denied access to programs particularly in technology due to their socioeconomic status. Partnering organizations will design, develop and launch a short-term, intensive training opportunity in computer science for women ages 16 to 34 who are unemployed or underemployed, and who desire to engage in upward career mobility. The program will include a replicable, custom curriculum and an educational approach that will be scalable. A boot camp will teach the fundamentals of Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, SQL, JavaScript, and AngularJS, and prepare participants for a career in web development while enabling them to keep their day jobs and have childcare provided. Educating a randomized sample treatment group of up to 150 women in this launch pilot, the partners will also offer internships and/or job shadows, where participants gain client experience, learn from more experienced developers, and continue to build their portfolios. All of the women in the program will receive information, coaching and exposure to college and career opportunities. Job placement in STEM careers is the outcome goal of this design and development launch pilot.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Linda ChristopherChristine Olmstead
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
EvaluATE is a national resource center dedicated to supporting and improving the evaluation practices of approximately 250 ATE grantees across the country. EvaluATE conducts webinars and workshops, publishes a quarterly newsletter, maintains a website with a digital resource library, develops materials to guide evaluation work, and conducts an annual survey of ATE grantees. EvaluATE's mission is to promote the goals of the ATE program by partnering with projects and centers to strengthen the program's evaluation knowledge base, expand the use of exemplary evaluation practices, and support the continuous improvement of technician education throughout the nation. EvaluATE's goals associated with this proposal are to: (1) Ensure that all ATE Principal Investigators and evaluators know the essential elements of a credible and useful evaluation; (2) Maintain a comprehensive collection of online resources for ATE evaluation; (3) Strengthen and expand the network of ATE evaluation stakeholders; and (4) Gather, synthesize, and disseminate data about the ATE program activities to advance knowledge about ATE/technician education. The Center plans to produce a comprehensive set of evaluation resources to complement other services, engaging several community college-based Principal Investigators and evaluators in that process.
EvaluATE's products are informed by current research on evaluation, the National Science Foundation's priorities for the evaluation of ATE grants, and the needs of ATE PIs and evaluators for sound guidance that is immediately relevant and usable in their contexts. The fundamental nature of EvaluATE's work is geared toward supporting ATE grantees to use evaluation regularly to improve their work and demonstrate their impacts. All of EvaluATE's products are available to the public. EvaluATE's findings from the annual survey of ATE grantees aid in advancing understanding of the status of technician education and illuminate areas for additional research. The new survey investigates ATE grantees' work to serve underrepresented and special populations, including women, people of color, and veterans. Survey data are available upon request for research and evaluation purposes.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Lori WingateArlen GullicksonEmma PerkKelly RobertsonLyssa Becho
Girls met to engage with Through My Window twice each week after school. The afterschool program format provided a freer, less structured atmosphere than a classroom setting. Students extensively debated and investigated the questions and themes posed by the novel, Talk to Me. The meeting space had plenty of space for students to move around, as well as teachers who encouraged the expression of full emotional and intellectual enthusiasm for the story at hand.
SciGirls Strategies is a National Science Foundation–funded project led by Twin Cities PBS (TPT) in partnership with St. Catherine University, the National Girls Collaborative, and XSci (The Experiential Science Education Research Collaborative) at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for STEM Learning. This three-year initiative aims to increase the number of high school girls recruited to and retained in fields where females are traditionally underrepresented: technical science, engineering, technology, and math (STEM) pathways. We seek to accomplish this goal by providing career and
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Rita KarlBradley McLainAlicia Santiago
Techbridge has proposed a broad implementation project that will scale up a tested multi-faceted model that increases girls' interest in STEM careers. The objectives of this project are to increase girls' engineering, technology, and science skills and career interests; build STEM capacity and sustainability across communities; enhance STEM and career exploration for underrepresented girls and their families; and advance research on the scale-up, sustainability, and impact of the model with career exploration. The Techbridge approach is grounded in Eccles' expectancy value model, and helps bridge critical junctures as girls transition from elementary to middle school and middle school to high school, immersing participants in a network of peers and supportive adults. Techbridge targets girls in grades 5-12 with a model that includes five components: a previously tested and evaluated curriculum, career exploration, professional development for staff and teachers, family engagement, and dissemination. The inquiry-based curriculum introduces electrical engineering and computer science through engaging, hands-on units on Cars and Engines, Green Design, and Electrical Engineering. The Techbridge model will be enhanced to include a central repository for curriculum and support materials, electronic girl-driven career exploration resources, an online learning community and video tools for staff, and customized family guides. Project deliverables include the dissemination of the enhanced model to three cities, 24 school sites and teachers, 2,000 girls, and over 600 role models. A supplementary research component will study the broad implementation of the Techbridge model by examining the fidelity of implementation and the program's impact on girls' STEM engagement and learning. The research questions are as follows: (1) To what extent and how do new program sites demonstrate adherence to the Techbridge program model? (2) Do new sites experience similar or increased participant responsiveness to Techbridge programming with regard to scientific learning outcomes, career awareness, attitude and interest in engineering? (3)How are changes experienced by girls sustained over time, if at all? (4) To what extent and how do new sites balance instilling the Techbridge essentials, those critical components Techbridge identifies as essential for success, with the need for local adaptation and ownership of the program? and (5) Given the potential for customization in local communities, do new sites maintain programmatic quality of delivery experienced at the original site? If so, what are elements essential to success regarding quality delivery? The mixed-methods study will include document analysis, embedded assessments, participant survey scales, and observations. Qualitative data methods include interviews with teachers, role models, staff and focus groups with girls. A project evaluation will also be conducted which investigates project outcomes for participants (girls, teachers, role models, and families) and fidelity of the implementation and enhancements at expansion sites, using a quasi-experimental approach. Career and learning outcomes for girls will be determined using embedded assessments, portfolios, surveys, school data, and previously validated instruments such as the Career Interest Questionnaire and the Modified Attitudes towards Science Inventory. The Managing Complex Change model is used as a framework for the project evaluation for the purpose of examining factors related to the effectiveness of scaling. The dissemination of research and evaluation findings will be achieved through the use of publications, blogs, social media, and conferences. It is anticipated that this project will broaden the participation of Hispanic, African-American, and English language learner girls, build capacity for STEM programming and sustainability at the dissemination sites, and disseminate findings to over 1 million educators, researchers, and community members. Broader impacts include contributing to the field's understanding of how virtual role models and field trips can engage young women, increase corporate advocacy, and engage participants in research and dissemination efforts.