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.
Dr. Ann Chester, Director of the Health Sciences and Technology Academy (HSTA) in West Virginia was looking for professional researchers interested in working with HSTA's high school-aged participants through community-based participatory research (CBPR) projects. Dr. Alicia Zbehlik, with the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice in New Hampshire, needed to further her research in knee osteoarthritis to support a pilot intervention in her target population. The two met, saw potential benefits to both organizations in forming a partnership, and agreed to undertake a one-year
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Paul Luis SicilianoBethany L. HornbeckSara HanksSummer L. KuhnAlicia J. ZbehlikAnn L. Chester
Increased emphasis on K-12 engineering education, including the advent and incorporation of NGSS in many curricula, has spurred the need for increased engineering learning opportunities for younger students. This is particularly true for students from underrepresented minority populations or economically disadvantaged schools, who traditionally lag their peers in the pursuit of STEM majors or careers. To address this deficit, we have created the Hk Maker Lab, a summer program for New York City high school students that introduces them to biomedical engineering design. The students learn the
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Aaron Matthew KyleMichael CarapezzaChristine Kovich
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. This project is exploring and identifying successful, cross-institutional approaches to using maker activities to engage members of communities of color (with a focus on family groups) in STEM activities.
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.
Making Connections, a three-year design-based research study conducted by the Science Museum of Minnesota in partnership with Twin Cities' communities, is developing and studying new ways to engage a broader audience in meaningful Maker experiences. This study draws and builds on existing theoretical frameworks to examine how community engagement techniques can be used to co-design and implement culturally-relevant marketing, activities, and events focused on Making that attract families from underrepresented audiences and ultimately engage them in meaningful informal STEM learning. The research is being done in three phases: Sharing and Listening - co-design with targeted communities; Making Activities Design and Implementation; Final Analysis, Synthesis and Dissemination. The project is also exploring new approaches in museums' cross-institutional practices that can strengthen the quality of their community-engagement. In recent years, Making - a do-it-yourself, grassroots approach to designing and constructing real things through creativity, problem-solving, and tool use - has received increasing attention as a fruitful vehicle for introducing young people to the excitement of science and engineering and to career skills in these fields. Maker Faires attract hundreds and thousands of people to engage in Making activities every year, and the popularity of these events, as well as the number of museums and libraries that are beginning to provide opportunities for the public to regularly engage in these types of activities, are skyrocketing. However, Maker programs tend to draw audiences that are predominantly white, middle class, male, well educated, and strongly interested in science, despite the fact that the practices of Making are as common in more diverse communities. Making Connections has the potential to transform how children begin to cultivate a lifelong interest in engineering at a young age, which may ultimately encourage more young people of color to pursue engineering careers in the future.