This project from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) is centered on the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse, which will traverse the US from southwest to the northeast, passing over several urban areas.
This project uses bikes and biking to introduce STEM content and experiences to traditionally underrepresented youth (grades 9-10) by having them participate in place-based informal learning activities.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Noemi WaightShakhnoza KayumovaRyan RishGreses PerezSarah Robert
Many Black youth in both urban and rural areas lack engaging opportunities to learn mathematics in a manner that leads to full participation in STEM. The Young People’s Project (YPP), the Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP), and the Education for Liberation Network (EdLib) each have over two decades of experience working on this issue. In the city of Baltimore, where 90% of youth in poverty are Black, and only 5% of these students meet or exceed expectations in math, BAP, a youth led organization, develops and employs high school and college age youth to provide after-school tutoring in Algebra 1, and to advocate for a more just education for themselves and their peers. YPP works in urban or rural low income communities that span the country developing Math Literacy Worker programs that employ young people ages 14-22 to create spaces to help their younger peers learn math. Building on these deep and rich experiences, this Innovations in Development project studies how Black students see themselves as mathematicians in the context of paid peer-to-peer math teaching--a combined social, pedagogical, and economic strategy. Focusing primarily in Baltimore, the project studies how young people grow into new self-definitions through their work in informal, student-determined math learning spaces, structured collaboratively with adults who are experts in both mathematics and youth development. The project seeks to demonstrate the benefits of investing in young people as learners, teachers, and educational collaborators as part of a core strategy to improve math learning outcomes for all students.
The project uses a mixed methods approach to describe how mathematical identity develops over time in young people employed in a Youth-Directed Mathematics Collaboratory. 60 high school aged students with varying mathematical backgrounds (first in Baltimore and later in Boston) will learn how to develop peer- and near-peer led math activities with local young people in informal settings, after-school programs, camps, and community centers, reaching approximately 600 youth/children. The high school aged youth employed in this project will develop their own math skills and their own pedagogical skills through the already existing YPP and BAP structures, made up largely of peers and near-peers just like themselves. They will also participate in on-going conversations within the Collaboratory and with the community about the cultural significance of doing mathematics, which for YPP and BAP is a part of the ongoing Civil Rights/Human Rights movement. Mathematical identity will be studied along four dimensions: (a) students’ sequencing and interpretation of past mathematical experiences (autobiographical identity); (b) other people’s talk to them and their talk about themselves as learners, doers, and teachers of mathematics (discoursal identity); (c) the development of their own voices in descriptions and uses of mathematical knowledge and ideas (authorial identity); and (d) their acceptance or rejection of available selfhoods (socio-culturally available identity). Intended outcomes from the project include a clear description of how mathematical identity develops in paid peer-teaching contexts, and growing recognition from both local communities and policy-makers that young people have a key role to play, not only as learners, but also as teachers and as co-researchers of mathematics education.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jay GillenMaisha MosesThomas NikundiweNaama LewisAlice Cook
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning 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. Specifically, this project connects Native Hawaiian youth ages 12-17 and their family members to STEM by channeling their cultural relationship with ʻāina, the sustaining elements of the natural world including the land, sea, and air. This project seeks to: broaden participation of Native Hawaiian youth who have been historically underrepresented in STEM; actively uphold Native Hawaiian ways of knowing and traditional knowledge; articulate the science rooted in cultural wisdom; and bring STEM into the lives of participants as they connect to the ʻāina. In partnership with six ʻāina-based community organizations across Hawaiʻi, this project will develop, implement, and study ʻāina-centered environmental education activities that explore solutions to local environmental problems. For example, in one module youth and their families will explore of a section of a nearby stream; identify and discuss the native, non-native, and invasive species; remove invasive species from a small section of the stream and make observations leading to discussions of unintended consequences and systemic impacts; ultimately, learners will meet at additional local waterways to engage in similar explorations and discussions, transferring their knowledge to understanding the impacts of construction on local streams and coral reefs. To this effort, the community-based organizations bring their expertise in preserving Hawaiian culture and sustainable island lifestyle, including rural and urban systems such as farming and irrigation traditions and the restoration of cultural sites. University of Hawai’i faculty and staff bring expertise in Environmental Science, Biology, Hawaiian Studies and Problem-Based Learning Curriculum Development. This project further supports organizational learning and sharing among the six community-based organizations. Grounded in Hawaiian ʻAʻo, where learning and teaching are the same interaction, community-based organizations will create a Community of Practice that will co-learn Problem-Based Learning pedagogy; co-learn and engage in research and evaluation methods; and share experiential and traditional knowledge to co-develop the ʻāina-based environmental education activities.
This project is uniquely situated to study the impact of community-led culturally relevant pedagogy on Hawaiian learners’ interests and connections to environmental science, and to understand ʻāina-based learning through empirical research. Research methods draw on Community-Based Participatory Research and Indigenous Research Methods to develop a collaborative research design process incorporated into the project’s key components. Community members, researchers, and evaluators will work together to examine the following research questions: 1) How does environmental Problem-Based Learning situate within ʻāina-based informal contexts?; 2) What are the environmental education learning impacts of ʻāina-based activities on youth and family participants?; and 3) How does the ʻāina-centered Problem-Based Learning approach to informal STEM education support STEM knowledge, interest and awareness? The evaluation will employ a mixed-methods participatory design to explore program efficacy, fidelity, and implementation more broadly across community-based sites, as well as program sustainability within each community-based site. Anticipated project outcomes are a 15-week organizational learning and sharing program with six ʻāina-based community organizations and 72 staff; the design and implementation of 18 activities to reach 360 youth and at least one of their family members; and the launch of an ʻāina-based STEM Community of Practice. The project’s research and development process for ʻāina-centered environmental education activities will be shared broadly and provide a useful example for other organizations locally and nationally working in informal settings with Native or Indigenous populations.
Diversity in the STEM workforce is essential for expanding the talent pool and bringing new ideas to bear in solving societal problems, yet entrenched gaps remain. In STEM higher education, students from certain racial and ethnic groups continue to be underrepresented in STEM majors and fields. Colleges and universities have responded by offering precollege STEM programs to high school students from predominantly underrepresented groups. These programs have been shown to positively affect students' analytical and critical thinking skills, STEM content knowledge and exposure, and self-efficacy through STEM-focused enrichment and research experiences. In fact, salient research suggests that out-of-school-time, precollege STEM experiences are key influencers in students' pursuit of STEM majors and careers, and underscore the value of precollege STEM programs in their ability to prepare students in STEM. This NSF INCLUDES Alliance: STEM PUSH - Pathways for Underrepresented Students to Higher Education Network - will form a national network of precollege STEM programs to actualize their value through the creation, spread and scale of an equitable, evidence-based pathway for university admissions - precollege STEM program accreditation. Building on several successful NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilots, this Alliance will use a networked improvement community approach to transform college admissions by establishing an accreditation process for precollege STEM programs in which standards-based credentials serve as indicators of program quality that are recognized by colleges and universities as rigorous and worthy of favorable consideration during undergraduate admissions processes. Given the high enrollment of students from underrepresented groups in precollege STEM programs, the Alliance endeavors to broaden participation in STEM by maximizing college access and STEM outcomes in higher education and beyond.
The STEM PUSH Network is a national alliance of precollege STEM programs, STEM and culturally responsive pedagogy experts, formal and informal education practitioners, college admissions professionals, the accreditation sector, and other higher education representatives. The Alliance will establish a formidable collaborative improvement space using the networked improvement community model and a "next generation" accreditation model that will serve as a mechanism for communicating the power of precollege programs to admissions offices. Framing this work is the notion that the accreditation of precollege STEM programs is an equitable supplemental admissions criterion to the current, often cited as a culturally biased, standardized test score-based system. To achieve its shared vision and goals, the Alliance has four key objectives: (1) establish and support a national precollege STEM program networked community, (2) develop a standards-based precollege STEM program accreditation system to broaden participation in STEM, (3) test and validate the model within the networked improvement community, and (4) spread, scale, and sustain the model through its backbone organization, the STEM Learning Ecosystem Community of Practice. Each objective will be closely monitored and evaluated by an external evaluator. In addition, the data infrastructure developed through this Alliance will provide an unprecedented opportunity to advance scholarship in the fields of networked improvement community design and development, the efficacy of STEM precollege programs, and effective practices for broadening participation pathways from high school to higher education. By the end of five years, the STEM PUSH Network will transform ten urban ecosystems across the country into communities where students from underrepresented groups have increased college access and therefore, entree to STEM opportunities and majors in higher education. The model has the potential to be replicated by another 80 STEM ecosystems that will have access to Alliance materials and strategies through the backbone organization.
This NSF INCLUDES Alliance is funded by NSF Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (NSF INCLUDES), a comprehensive national initiative to enhance U.S. leadership in discoveries and innovations by focusing on diversity, inclusion and broadening participation in STEM at scale. It is also co-funded by the NSF Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers program and the Advancing Informal STEM Learning Program.
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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alison Slinskey LeggJan MorrisonJennifer IritiAlaine AllenDavid Boone
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.
Making, which supports interest-driven skill-development and learning, has been recognized as having the potential to engage underserved youth in STEM. Makerspaces are community spaces that allow participants to create items using tools, such as 3-D printers, computer-aided design, and digital fabrication technologies. Makerspaces and making-related programs are often inaccessible, unaffordable, or simply not available to underserved youth. Digital Harbor will partner with recreation centers, two in Pittsburgh and two in Baltimore, to research, refine and implement an equity-based approach to making that will engage underserved youth aged 12-16 in making. The project will prepare out-of-school time (OST) educators to collaboratively develop culturally sensitive curricula with underserved youth to engage them in maker-based technology and computer science experiences. The project will (1) design a professional development program that will prepare and support local educators to collaboratively design and deliver localized, maker-based, STEM curricula; (2) research the impact of these programs on both educators' and youth's self-efficacy, creativity, and attitudes towards STEM; and (3) develop and evaluate an online Localization Toolkit that will prepare educators in makerspaces across the nation in using an equity-based approach to create localized content. The project will result in four new maker sites (two in Baltimore and two in Pittsburgh directly impact 4 sites (10 educators and 240 youth). The project will result several resources that will support the development and educational programs of other community sites. The resources will include the Localization Toolkit, Case Studies, Best Practices, and Research Study. The Localization Toolkit has the potential to strengthen infrastructure and capacity building in OST maker-based programs, as well as other informal and formal education programs using similar pedagogies and design principles.
The project will use a mixed-methods approach in researching the challenges and processes involved in establishing the four maker sites in Baltimore and Pittsburgh, the approaches and effectiveness of the professional development program on OST educators, and the impacts of the project of participation on the self-efficacy, creativity, and attitudes on participating youth and educators. The research study will apply several instruments and data collection sources to develop quantitative data, including youth attendance logs, the Upper Elementary and Middle/High School Student Attitudes toward STEM survey, a retrospective technology self-efficacy survey and pre-post surveys. In addition to project document review, the researchers will collect qualitative data through educator interviews, educator focus groups, and youth focus groups. Project research and resources will reach key audiences of learning scientists and OST educators through articles in peer-reviewed and practitioner journals, public events and professional conferences. These audiences will also be reached through the project website, which will share project resources. The project will reach OST sites across the country directly through dissemination partners, including the National Recreation and Parks Association, Association of Science and Technology Centers, and statewide out-of-school networks.
This Innovations in Development 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.
The project will advance efforts by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute for Learning Innovation to bring together young adults from communities historically underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to collaboratively conduct scientifically driven challenges embedded in a mobile learning tool based upon the AAAS Active Explorer platform. The project will be conducted at the Washington National Mall, San Francisco National Golden Gate Park, and the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, and will study how a mobile technology used in these settings can facilitate learner engagement in science content; how it can affect young adults' engagement in science-learning processes; and whether interest in learning science and technology has been furthered. The 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, including pathways for broadening access to STEM learning experiences and advancing research STEM learning. Research questions will investigate science learning inequalities by addressing how place-based augmented reality games can connect young adults to scientific practices, including observing science phenomena, analyzing data, and communicating findings; how young adults develop science skills related to their science self-efficacy through participation in augmented reality science exploration; and how mobile technologies and gaming can serve as mediators that enable young adults to improve their science identity. In addition to engaging young adults in science activities at the National Parks and increasing their science skills, the project will provide valuable information to National Park staff and scientists to assist them in designing effective tools, resources and experiences to better engage young adults. Research teams will collect data in the form of digital ethnography, focus groups, activity reports, artifacts, and surveys. The project will document learning and engagement through mobile technology in three urban national parks that will involve 60 young adults at each location, and will create innovative measurement tools to monitor how informal settings can leverage the intersections of the arts and sciences to support student engagement and learning.