Hanohano o Oahu: The Geology and Moolelo of Kona to Ewa project will provide learning opportunities for 500 fourth grade students and their teachers from ten public schools located in central and leeward Oahu, Hawaii. A geology unit will be developed that includes a 90-minute class presentation, hands-on classroom activities, a Discovery Box to extend learning opportunities, and a full-day (5-hour) field trip experience. The multi-stop bus tour will be centered on the moku (district) of Kona and Ewa and highlight significant Oahu cultural sites, their moolelo (stories, history) and geology. A culture-based student activity booklet, hands-on activities, and other education materials will also be developed for the unit. The project will target rural communities with underserved families, large Hawaiian homestead neighborhoods, and little access to museum services. Participation in the programming will provide students and teachers with a better understanding of the connection between scientific information and Hawaiian knowledge.
The Lewis H. Latimer House Museum will develop a more cohesive education program that reflects both the museum's resources and the needs of local schools. The museum's deputy director and Tinkering Lab educator will work together to design a curriculum that meets current New York State and city standards, enabling the museum to more effectively serve schools in the community with object-based learning experiences. Packets of educational materials will be developed and made available for school teachers to download and use in their classrooms prior to and following visits to the museum. Target schools will be actively involved in the process of testing and utilizing the products. Project results will be shared with internal and external stakeholders to sustain long-term improvement and enhance institutional capacity.
Chicago's DuSable Museum of African American History will develop and present the "Exploration of African American Physicians and Surgeons" project with an overall goal to expose young people in the community to the opportunities and benefits of STEM education. Project components will include educational programming, lectures, and an historical exhibition revolving around African American contributions and achievements within the world of medicine. The exhibition will focus on work of Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the founder of Chicago's Provident Hospital, the first non-segregated hospital in the United States. Dr. Williams was the first general surgeon to perform a documented and successful pericardium surgical procedure to repair a wound. The project's educational programming will explore the ways in which other African American doctors broke down racial barriers within the field of medicine.
The Hands On Children's Museum will build on two of its most distinctive features-an Outdoor Discovery Center and a Young Makers program-to create a Nature Makers program. The interdisciplinary project will link nature-based learning with maker activities that use natural materials. Partnerships with Native American tribes, scientists, maker groups, and others will enrich the staff-led offerings. Nature Makers addresses two of the most significant needs in early learning-inspiring early STEM education and connecting children with the outdoors. Nature Makers will increase children's exposure to outdoor tinkering to build the foundation for STEM success in school; educate parents, caregivers, and teachers about the important role outdoor exploration plays in STEM achievement; and stimulate children's curiosity about the natural world and increase the time they spend outside. Evaluation findings will be shared internally to inform continuous improvement of program offerings, and externally to serve as a model for outdoor making activities.
The Children's Museum at La Habra's Lil' Innovators Early Childhood STEM project will increase STEM skill and engagement among early childhood preschool teachers, disadvantaged preschoolers, and their parents. Delivered in partnership with three of La Habra's Head Start and California State Preschool program schools, the project will provide 224 preschoolers and 20 teachers with a year-long program offering increased developmental skills in STEM for underserved, low-income Hispanic students who are primarily English Language Learners. Teacher outcomes will include improved strategies for teaching STEM and increased teaching quality of STEM subjects. Parent outcomes include increased belief in the importance of STEM and increased ability to support their child's STEM learning. The standards-based education project will improve the museum's ability to serve its public by creating a community of practice consisting of a network of administrators, educators, and evaluators who will work together to improve the quality of STEM education for the youngest learners in this academically-challenged community.
The New Jersey Historical Commission (NJHC) initiated the Understanding Communities Study with the goal to better understand how New Jersey history and history organizations can be more inclusive for all. NJHC contracted RK&A for the first phase of the study to conduct focus groups with members of Hispanic and Latino communities in New Jersey. NJHC plans to expand the study to other communities in the future. The New Jersey Center for Hispanic Policy, Research and Development served as advisors in the project.
With support from NJHC partners, RK&A conducted three focus groups with
This guide offers insight into community engagement practices and activity development from our making and equity project, Making Connections. It includes documentation and recommendations for work that is designed to engage community partners as equal partners, and is written most of all for other practitioners.
This Innovations in Development 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 Designing Our Tomorrow project will develop a framework for creating exhibit-based engineering design challenges and expand an existing model of facilitation for use in engineering exhibits. The project seeks to broaden participation in engineering and build capacity within the informal science education (ISE) field while raising public awareness of the importance of sustainable engineering design practices. The project focuses on girls aged 9-14 and their families and is co-developed with culturally responsive strategies to ensure the inclusion and influence of families from Latino communities. The project will conduct research resulting in theory-based measures of engineering proficiencies within an exhibit context and an exhibit facilitation model for the topic area of engineering. Based on the research, the project will develop an engineering design challenge framework for developing design challenges within an exhibit context. As the context for research, the project will develop a bilingual English/Spanish 2,000-square foot traveling exhibition designed to engage youth and families in engineering design challenges that advance their engineering proficiencies from beginner to more informed, supported by professional development modules and a host-site training workshop introducing strategies for facilitating family engineering experiences within a traveling exhibition. The project is a collaboration of Oregon Museum of Science and Industry with the Biomimicry Institute, Adelante Mujeres, and the Fleet Science Center.
Designing Our Tomorrow builds on a theory-based engineering teaching framework and several previous NSF-funded informal education projects to engage families in compelling design challenges presented through the lens of sustainable design exemplified by biomimicry. Through culturally-responsive co-development and research strategies to include members of Latino communities and provide challenges that highlight the altruistic, creative, personally relevant, and collaborative aspects of engineering, the Designing Our Tomorrow exhibition showcases engineering as an appealing career option for women and helps families support each other's engineering proficiencies. To better understand and promote engineering learning in an ISE setting, the project will conduct two research studies to inform and iteratively develop effective strategies. In the first study, measurement development will build on prior research and practice to design credible and reliable measures of engineering proficiency, awareness, and collaboration, as well as protocols for use in exhibit development and the study of facilitation at engineering exhibits, and future research. The second study will explore the effects of facilitation on the experience outcomes.
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.
In June of 2017, the Exploratorium hosted the GENIAL Summit which brought together approximately 91 practitioners, community leaders, diversity-focused organization staff, researchers, and media/marketing specialists from across the country and Puerto Rico for a one and a half day gathering. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Summit focused on increasing Latino participation in Informal STEM Learning (ISL) environments by examining these five content strands identified by the GENIAL team:
1. Latino Audiences
2. Marketing, Communicating, and Media
3. Community Collaboration and
This longitudinal research study will contribute to a broader understanding of the pathways of STEM-interested high school students from underrepresented groups who plan to pursue or complete science studies in their post-high school endeavors. The project will investigate the ways that formative authentic science experiences may support youth's persistence in STEM. The study focuses on approximately 900 urban youth who are high interest, high potential STEM students who participate in, or are alumni of, the Science Research Mentoring Program. This program provides intensive mentoring for high school youth from groups underrepresented in STEM careers. It takes place at 17 sites around New York City, including American Museum of Natural History, which is the original program site. Identifying key supports and obstacles in the pathways of high-interest, under-represented youth towards STEM careers can help practitioners design more inclusive and equitable STEM learning experiences and supports. In this way, the project will capitalize on student interest so that students with potential continue to persist.
In order to understand better the factors that influence these students, this research combines longitudinal social network and survey data with interviews and case studies, as well as an analysis of matched student data from New York City Public Schools' records. The research questions in the study are a) how do youths' social networks develop through their participation in scientists' communities of practice? b) what is the relationship between features of the communities of practice and youths' social networks, measures of academic achievement, and youths' pursuit of a STEM major? and c) what are the variations in youth pathways in relationship to learner characteristics, composition of social networks, and features of the community of practice? The research design allows for a rich, layered perspective of student pathways. In particular, by employing social network analysis, this study will reveal relational features of persistence that may be particularly critical for underrepresented youth, for whom STEM role models and cultural brokers provide an otherwise unavailable sense of belonging and identity in STEM. The study will also access a New York City Public Schools data set comprised of student-level records containing biographical and demographic variables, secondary and postsecondary course enrollment and grades, exam scores, persistence/graduation indicators, linked responses to post-secondary surveys, and post-education employment records and wages. These data enable examination of inter-relationships between in-school achievement and out-of-school STEM experiences through comparison of program participants to similar non-participant peers. This project is supported by NSF's EHR Core Research (ECR) program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field.
One way to encourage youth to pursue training in the STEM fields and enter the STEM workforce is to foster interest and engagement in STEM during adolescence. Informal STEM Learning Sites (ISLS) provide opportunities for building interest and engagement in the STEM fields through a multitude of avenues, including the programming that they provide for youth, particularly teens. Frequently, ISLS provide opportunities to participate in volunteer programs, internships or work, which allow teens both to learn relevant STEM knowledge as well as to share that knowledge with others through opportunities to serve as youth educators. While youth educator programs provide rich contexts for teens to engage as both learners and teachers in these informal STEM environments, research to date has not yet identified the relationship between serving as youth educators and STEM engagement. Thus, the goal of this project is to document the impact of youth educators on visitor learning in ISLS and to identify best practices for implementing youth educator programs. The project studies STEM interests and engagement in the youth participants and the visitors that they interact with at six different ISLS in the US and UK. This project is funded through Science Learning+, which is an international partnership between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Wellcome Trust with the UK Economic and Social Research Council. The goal of this joint funding effort is to make transformational steps toward improving the knowledge base and practices of informal STEM experiences. Within NSF, Science Learning+ is part of the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program that seeks to enhance learning in informal environments and to broaden access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences.
This project examines youth educator experiences related to STEM identity, educational aspirations, and motivation. The project also identifies outcomes that the youth educators have on visitors to ISLS in terms of knowledge, interest, and engagement in STEM. The specific aims are: 1) Outcomes for Teens - To measure the longitudinal impact of participation in an extended youth educator experience in an ISLS; 2) Outcomes for Visitors - To compare visitor engagement with and learning from exhibits in ISLS when they interact with a youth educator, relative to outcomes of interacting with an adult educator or no educator; and 3) Outcomes Across Demographics and STEM Sites - To examine differences in visitor engagement based on participant characteristics such as socio-economic status (SES), age, gender, and ethnicity and to compare outcomes of youth educator experiences across different types of ISLS. This research, which draws on expectancy value theory and social cognitive theory, will follow youth participants longitudinally over the course of 5 years and use latent variable analyses to understand the impact on the youth educators as well as the visitors with whom they interact. Importantly, the results of this research will be used to develop best practices for implementing youth educator programs in ISLS and the results will be disseminated to both academic and practice-based communities.
This project has clear and measurable broader impacts in a variety of ways. First, the project provides guidance to improve programming for youth in ISLS, including both the sites involved directly in the research and to the larger community of ISLS through evaluation, development, and dissemination of best practices. Additionally, this project provides rigorous, research-based evidence to identify and describe the outcomes of youth educator programs. This study directly benefits the participants of the research, both the visiting public and the youth educators, through opportunities to engage with science. The findings speak to issues of access and inclusivity in ISLS, providing insight into how to design environments that are welcoming and accessible for diverse groups of learners. Finally, this project provides evidence for best practices for ISLS in developing programs for youth that will lead to interest in and pursuit of STEM careers by members of underrepresented groups.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Adam Hartstone-RoseMatthew IrvinKelly Lynn MulveyElizabeth ClemensLauren ShenfeldAdam RutlandMark WinterbottomFrances BalkwillPeter McOwanKatie ChambersStephanie TylerLisa Stallard
Abstract: We aim to disrupt the multigenerational cycle of poverty in our rural indigenous (18% Native American and 82% Hispanic) community by training our successful college students to serve as role models in our schools. Poverty has led to low educational aspirations and expectations that plague our entire community. As such, its disruption requires a collective effort from our entire community. Our Collective unites two local public colleges, 3 school systems, 2 libraries, 1 museum, 1 national laboratory and four local organizations devoted to youth development. Together we will focus on raising aspirations and expectations in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) topics, for STEM deficiencies among 9th graders place them at risk of dropping out while STEM deficiencies among 11th and 12th graders preclude them from pursuing STEM majors in college and therefore from pursuing well paid STEM careers. We will accomplish this by training, placing, supporting, and assessing the impact of, an indigenous STEM mentor corps of successful undergraduate role models. By changing STEM aspirations and expectations while heightening their own sense of self-efficacy, we expect this corps to replenish itself and so permanently increase the flow of the state's indigenous populations into STEM majors and careers in line with NSF's mission to promote the progress of science while advancing the national health, prosperity and welfare.
Our broader goal is to focus the talents and energies of a diverse collective of community stakeholders on the empowerment of its local college population to address and solve a STEM disparity that bears directly on the community's well-being in a fashion that is generalizable to other marginalized communities. The scope of our project is defined by six tightly coupled new programs: three bringing indigenous STEM mentors to students, one training mentors, one training mentees to value and grow their network of mentors, and one training teachers to partner with us in STEM. The intellectual merit of our project lies not only in its assertion that authentic STEM mentors will exert an outsize influence in their communities while increasing their own sense of self-efficacy, but in the creation and careful application of instruments that assess the factors that determine teens' attitudes, career interests, and behaviors toward a STEM future; and mentors' sense of self development and progress through STEM programs. More precisely, evaluation of the programs has the potential to clarify two important questions about the role of college-age mentors in schools: (1) To what degree is the protege's academic performance and perceived scholastic competence mediated by the mentor's impact on (a) the quality of the protege's parental relationship and (b) the social capital of the allied classroom teacher; (2) To what degree does the quality of the student mentor's relationships with faculty and peers mediate the impact of her serving as mentor on her self-efficacy, academic performance, and leadership skills?