This project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances fundamental research on STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development. It responds to continuing concerns about racial and social inequities in STEM fields that begin to emerge in the early childhood years. The overarching goal of the project is to identify cultural strengths that support early science learning opportunities among Spanish-speaking children from immigrant Latin American communities, a population that is traditionally underrepresented in STEM educational and career pursuits. Building on a growing interest in the ways stories can promote early engagement in and understanding of science, this project will investigate the role of oral and written stories as culturally relevant and potentially powerful tools for making scientific ideas and inquiry practices meaningful and accessible for young Latinx children. Findings will reveal ways that family storytelling practices can provide accessible entry points for Latinx children's early science learning, and recommend methods that parents and educators can use to foster learning about scientific practices that can, in turn, increase interest and participation in science education and fields.
The project will advance knowledge on the socio-cultural and familial experience of Latinx children that can contribute to their early science learning and skills. The project team will examine the oral story and reading practices of 330 Latinx families with 3- to 5-year-old children recruited from three geographic locations in the United States: New York, Chicago, and San Jose. Combining interviews and observations, the project team will investigate: (1) how conversations about science and nature occur in Latinx children's daily lives, and (2) whether and to what extent narrative and expository books, family personal narratives, and adivinanzas (riddles) engender family conversations about scientific ideas and science practices. Across- and within-site comparisons will allow the project team to consider the immediate ecology and broader factors that shape Latinx families’ science-related views and practices. Although developmental science has long acknowledged that early learning is culturally situated, most research on early STEM is still informed by mainstream experiences that largely exclude the lived experiences of children from groups underrepresented in STEM, especially those who speak languages other than English. The proposed work will advance understanding of stories as cultural resources to support early science engagement and learning among Latinx children and inform the development of high quality, equitable informal and formal science educational opportunities for young children.
Milwaukee has established itself as a leader in water management and technology, hosting a widely recognized cluster of industrial, governmental, nonprofit, and academic activity focused on freshwater. At the same time, Milwaukee faces a wide range of challenges with freshwater, some unique to the region and others common to cities throughout the country. These challenges include vulnerability to flooding and combined sewer overflows after heavy rainfall, biological and pharmaceutical contamination in surface water, lead in drinking water infrastructure, and inequity in access to beaches and other recreational water amenities. Like other cities, Milwaukee grapples with the challenges global climate change imposes on urban water systems, including changing patterns of precipitation and drought.
These problems are further complicated by Milwaukee's acute racial and economic residential segregation. With a population of approximately 595,000, embedded within a metropolitan area of over 1.5 million, Milwaukee remains one of the country's most segregated cities. There is increasing urgency to engage the public--and especially those who are most vulnerable to environmental impacts--more deeply in the stewardship of urban water and in the task of creating sustainable urban futures. The primary goal of this four-year project is to foster community-engaged learning and environmental stewardship by developing a framework that integrates art with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) experiences along with geography, water management, and social science. Synergies between STEM learning and the arts suggest that collaborations among artists, scientists, and communities can open ways to bring informal learning about the science of sustainability to communities.
WaterMarks provides an artist generated conceptual framework developed by Mary Miss / City as Living Laboratory (CALL) to help people better understand their relationship to the water systems and infrastructure that support their lives. Project activities include artist/scientist/community member-led Walks, which are designed to engage intergenerational participants both from the neighborhoods and from across the city, in considering the conditions, characteristics, histories, and ecosystems of neighborhoods. Walks are expanded upon in Workshops with residents, local scientists/experts, and other stakeholders, and include exploring current water-related environmental challenges and proposing solutions. The Workshops draw on diverse perspectives, including lived experience, scientific knowledge, and policy expertise. Art projects created by local artists amplify community engagement with the topics, including programming for teens and young adults. Free Wi-Fi will be integrated into various Marker sites around the city providing access to online, self-guided learning opportunities exploring the water systems and issues facing surrounding neighborhoods. Current programming focuses primarily on Milwaukee's predominantly African American near North Side and the predominantly Latinx/Hispanic near South Side. Many neighborhoods in these sections are vulnerable to such problems as frequent flooding, lead contamination in drinking water, inequities in safety and maintenance of green space, and less access to Lake Michigan, the city's primary natural resource and recreational amenity.
The WaterMarks project advances informal STEM learning in at least two ways. First, while the WaterMarks project is designed to fit Milwaukee, the project includes the development of an Adaptable Model Guide. The Guide is designed so that other cities can modify and employ its inclusive structure, programming, and process of collaboration among artists, scientists, partner organizations, and residents to promote citywide civic engagement in urban sustainability through the combination of informal STEM learning and public art. The Guide will be developed by a Community-University Working Group (CULab) hosted by UW-Milwaukee's Center for Community-Based Learning, Leadership, and Research and made up of diverse community and campus-wide stakeholders. In addition to overseeing the Guide’s creation, CULab will conceptualize onboarding and mentorship strategies for new participants as well as a framework for the program’s expansion and sustainability.
Second, through evaluation and research, the project will build a theoretical model for the relationships among science learning, engagement with the arts, and the distinctive contexts of different neighborhoods within an urban social-ecological system. The evaluation team, COSI’s Center for Research and Evaluation, and led by Co-PI Donnelly Hayde, aims to conduct formative, summative, and process evaluation of the Watermarks project, with the additional goal of producing evaluative research findings that can contribute to the broader field of informal learning. Evaluation foci include: How does the implementation of WaterMarks support positive outcomes for the project’s communities and the development of an adaptable model for city-scale informal science learning about urban environments? 2. To what extent do the type and degree of outcome-related change experienced by participating community residents vary across and/or between project sites? What factors, if any, appear to be linked to these changes? 3. To what extent and in what ways do the activities of the WaterMarks projects appear to have in situ effects related to the experience of place at project sites?
The project’s research team led by PI Ryan Holifield and Co-PI Woonsup Choi, will investigate how visual artistic activities introduced by the programming team as part of the Walks (and potentially other engagement activities) interact with personal, sociocultural, and physical contexts to produce distinctive experiences and outcomes of informal science learning about urban water systems. The aim of the research will be to synthesize the results from the different WaterMarks sites into an analysis generalizable beyond specific neighborhoods and applicable to other cities. The project's research questions include: 1. How does participation in Walks focused on visual artistic activities affect outcomes and experiences of informal STEM learning about urban water systems? 2. How do outcomes and experiences of informal STEM learning vary across different urban water topics, participants from different demographic groups, and contrasting sociocultural and biophysical contexts?
This Innovations in Development project is led by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), in collaboration with City as Living Laboratory (CALL) and the COSI Center for Research and Evaluation.
Early childhood is a critical time for developing foundational knowledge, skills, and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). For that reason, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) places a great priority on developing early childhood STEM content, especially through its television shows that are watched by over 60% of young children in the United States. Research suggests that adding in-the-moment interaction to television watching promotes learning and engagement. Toward this end, researchers from the University of California, Irvine and PBS KIDS have prototyped interactive versions of science shows that children view on internet-connected devices while they communicate with the main character powered by an AI conversational agent. Pilot studies show that when children watch these new interactive videos with the main character pausing periodically to ask probing questions about the learning goals of the episode and following up with appropriate responses, they are more engaged and learn more about science, with heightened benefits for children who speak languages other than English at home. Based on these early results, in this Innovations in Development project the research team will develop, test and produce publicly available conversational episodes for two PBS KIDS television shows, one focused on science and the other on computational thinking.
The project will iteratively study and develop six conversational videos with novel forms of support for children, including extended back-and-forth conversation that builds upon a child's responses, visual scaffolding that facilitates verbal communication, and bilingual language processing so that children can answer in English or Spanish. The conversational videos will be evaluated in both lab-based and home settings. The lab-based study will involve 600 children ages 3-7 in a predominantly low-income Latino community in Southern California, in which researchers compare children’s learning and engagement when watching the conversational videos with three other formats: (1) watching the non-interactive broadcast version of the video; (2) watching the video with pseudo-interaction, in which the main character asks questions and gives a generic response after a fixed amount of time but can’t understand what the child says; or (3) watching the broadcast version of the video with a human co-viewer who pauses the video and asks questions. The home-based study will involve 80 families assigned to watch either the non-interactive or interactive videos as many times as they want over a month at home. In both the lab-based and home studies, pre- and post-tests will be used to examine the impact of video watching on science and language learning, and log data will be used to assess children’s verbalization and engagement while watching. Following the home study, the six videos will be further refined and made available for free to the public through the PBS KIDS apps and website, which are visited by more than 13 million users a month. Beyond providing engaging science learning opportunities to children throughout the country, this study will yield important insights into the design, usability, feasibility, and effectiveness of incorporating conversational agents into children’s STEM-oriented video content, with implications for extending this innovation to other educational media such as e-books, games, apps, and toys.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Mark WarschauerSilvia LovatoAndres BustamanteAbby JenkinsYing Xu
The call for more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education taking place in informal settings has the potential to shape future generations, drive new innovations and expand opportunities. Yet, its power remains to be fully realized in many communities of color. However, research has shown that using creative embodied activities to explore science phenomena is a promising approach to supporting understanding and engagement, particularly for youth who have experienced marginalization. Prior pilot work by the principal investigator found that authentic inquiries into science through embodied learning approaches can provide rich opportunities for sense-making through kinesthetic experience, embodied imagining, and the representation of physics concepts for Black and Latinx teens when learning approaches focused on dance and dance-making. This Research in Service to Practice project builds on prior work to better understand the unique opportunities for learning, engagement, and identity development for these youth when physics is explored in the context of the Embodied Physics Learning Lab Model. The model is conceptualized as a set of components that (1) allow youth to experience and utilize their intersectional identities; (2) impact engagement with physics ideas, concepts and phenomena; and (3) lead to the development of physics knowledge and other skills. The project aims to contribute to more expansive definitions of physics and physics learning in informal spaces. While the study focuses primarily on Black and Latinx youth, the methods and discoveries have the potential to impact the teaching of physics for a much broader audience including middle- and high-school children, adults who may have been turned off to physics at an earlier age, and undergraduate physical science majors who are struggling with difficult concepts. This 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.
The research is grounded in sociocultural perspectives on learning and identity, embodied interaction and enactive cognition, and responsive design. The design is also informed by the notion of “ArtScience” which highlights commonalities between the thinking and making practices used by artists and by scientists and builds on the theoretical philosophy that all things can be understood through art or through science but integrating the two lenses allows for more complete understandings. Research will investigate the relationship between embodied learning approaches, design principles, and structures of the Embodied Physics Learning Lab model using the lenses of physics, dance, and integrated ArtScience to better understand the model. The project employs design-based research to address two overarching research questions: (1) What unique opportunities for learning, engagement, and identity development for Black and Latinx youth occur when physics is explored in the context of the Embodied Physics Learning Lab Model? and (2) How do variations in site demographics and site implementation influence the impact and scalability of the Learning Lab model? Further, the inquiry will consider (a) how youth experience and utilize their intersectional various identities in the context of the activities, structures, and essential elements of the embodied physics learning lab; (b) how youth's level of physics engagement changes depending on which embodied learning approaches and essential element structures are used; (c) the physics knowledge and other skills youth attain through the set of activities; and (d) how, if at all, the embodied learning approaches engage youth in thinking about their own agency as STEM doers. An interdisciplinary team of researchers, choreographers, and youth along with community organizations will co-design and implement project activities across four sites. Approximately 200 high school youth will be engaged; 24 will have the role of Teen Thought Partner. Through three iterative design cycles of implementation, the project will refine the model to investigate which elements most affect successful implementation and to identify the conditions necessary for scale-up. Data will be collected in the form of video, field notes, pre- and post- interviews, pre- and post- surveys, and artifacts created by the youth. Analyses will include a combination of interaction analysis, descriptive data analysis, and movement analysis. In addition to the research findings and explication of the affordances and constraints of the model, the project will also create a curricular resource, including narrative text and video demonstrations of physics concepts led by the teen thought partners, video case training modules, and assessment tools.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Folashade Cromwell SolomonDionne Champion
Cyberchase: Mobile Adventures in STEM is designed to advance the STEM learning of children ages 6-8 and engage low-income families in informal STEM interactions. Based on a successful NSF-funded pilot, the project combines the appeal of the PBS KIDS series Cyberchase and the potential of mobile texting to deliver informal learning. WNET and Education Development Center will produce: three Cyberchase videos that blend math and environmental content; a bilingual family engagement campaign in 15 communities across the U.S. that combines this media with weekly text-based engagement; and research into use and impact of the model among low-income Latinx families. Mobile Adventures addresses the need to better engage underserved families in informal science practices that are foundational for future STEM learning. While the materials target low-income communities broadly, research will focus on low-income Latinx families with children ages 6-8, an age group overlooked in previous research on educational uses of texting. A needs assessment and formative testing will ensure that the project design meets the needs and interests of diverse Latinx and other families.
The goal of Mobile Adventures is to build knowledge about how innovative, culturally responsive tools can help Latinx and low-income families engage in fun STEM learning at home. A three-tiered research study will address the question: how and to what extent does a mobile text-and-media approach to delivering informal STEM learning materials foster joint media engagement between children and parents, building new repertoires for learning together? The study will combine analysis of observation in homes and community settings, backend data, and pre/post surveys. Research will deepen understanding of effective family engagement models that make media a central component, the potential of text messaging as a stimulus to parent/child STEM learning, and maximal design of media and community engagement to serve low-income Latinx families. Findings will be disseminated through national conferences and journals. The Cyberchase videos, distributed free on broadcast and digital platforms, will build the STEM literacy of millions of diverse children, while the family engagement campaign will involve a projected 3,750 families in 15 locations. Evaluation will assess how well the project has met its goals.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program.
Families play a vital role in supporting children’s informal science learning. Yet multiple studies have shown that Latinx families, particularly in neighborhoods with a high poverty rate, face many barriers to accessing informal science experiences and environments. Telenovelas, a type of television serial drama watched by Spanish-speaking audiences around the world, may provide an entryway to reaching these families. Prior research has shown that telenovelas can be an effective means of changing adults’ behavior, with potential cascading impacts on children. Education Development Center, Literacy Partners, and Univision will use a culturally responsive approach to broaden participation of Latinx families in informal science learning using La Fuerza de Creer, a popular Spanish-language telenovela that reaches 7 million U.S. viewers. The five-episode telenovela series will model positive informal science interactions between caregivers and their children and provide positive role models of Latinx scientists. The project team will then use the telenovela as the foundation for a five-session workshop series for caregivers to further explore how to engage in these informal science learning opportunities with their children. The La Fuerza-STEM project will build on families’ strengths and interests and tap their power—la fuerza—to engage children in exploring science. This research will examine the relationship between the telenovela/workshops and caregivers’ practices and attitudes towards science. La Fuerza-STEM seeks to expand informal science learning using a culturally grounded strategy to engage an under-served population that is historically under-represented in STEM.
The project will use an iterative research and design process that is guided by the input of both parent and scientific advisory boards. Front-end formative research with approximately 30 Latinx caregivers from under-resourced communities will explore their informal science practices. These experiences will then inform script development for the telenovela. A pre-post comparison group study with 200 caregivers will investigate how caregivers’ attitudes toward science might change as a result of viewing the telenovela. The project will then build a 5-session workshop series around the telenovela and these research findings. Finally, 300 caregivers will participate in a randomized controlled trial to examine the efficacy of the La Fuerza-STEM workshops on changing caregivers’ informal science attitudes and practices. Throughout, the project will address the overarching research question, How can a culturally relevant telenovela be used to improve Latinx caregivers’ science self-efficacy, career awareness, and informal science practices? Project findings and products will be publicly disseminated through publications, conference presentations, and local partner organizations, with an eye toward open access and data sharing. The project will generate knowledge about the effectiveness of embedding informal science content in a culturally-grounded medium—the telenovela—in improving caregivers’ confidence and competence to engage in informal science learning experiences with their children. With an anticipated audience of 7 million, the potential impact of the telenovela on caregivers’ informal science attitudes and practices is enormous. By implementing workshops with local organizations, the project aims to be self-sustaining, building the capacity of community partners to provide families with services targeting informal science knowledge and skills long after the grant has ended.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Joy KennedyJessica YoungAlexia RaynalAnthony Tassi
The U.S. urgently needs the perspective and knowledge of females who are Latinx and African American in STEM fields. Providing early STEM interest pathways for these populations that are historically underrepresented in STEM fields is critical to creating gender equity in the STEM workforce. There are profound inequities in STEM fields for women of color that impact their interest and persistence in these fields. This Research in Service to Practice project will build important knowledge about early pathways for reducing these inequities by developing early interest in STEM. Gender stereotypes around who can do STEM are one of the sociocultural barriers that contributes to girls’ loss of interest in STEM. These stereotypes emerge early and steer young women away from STEM studies and pursuits. Exposing girls to role models is an effective strategy for challenging stereotypes of who belongs and succeeds in STEM. This project will explore how an afterschool program that combines narrative and storytelling approaches, STEM role models, and family supports, sparks elementary-age girls’ interest in STEM and fosters their STEM identity. The project targets K-5 students and families from underrepresented groups (e.g., Latinx and African American) living in poverty. The project will evaluate an inquiry-based, afterschool program that serves both elementary school girls and boys and explores if adding storytelling components to the out-of-school time (OST) learning will better support girls’ interest in STEM. The storytelling features include: 1) shared reading of books featuring females in STEM; 2) students’ own narratives that reminisce about their STEM experiences; and 3) video interviews of female parents and community members with STEM careers. A secondary aim of this project is to build capacity of schools and afterschool providers to deliver and sustain afterschool STEM enrichment experiences. Museum-based informal STEM experts will co-teach with afterschool providers to deliver the Children’s Museum Houston (CMH) curriculum called Afterschool Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math (A’STEAM). Although A’STEAM has been implemented in over 100 sites and shows promise, to scale-up this and other promising afterschool programs, the team will evaluate how professional development resources and the co-facilitation approach can build afterschool educators' capacity to deliver the most promising approaches.
Researchers at the Children’s Learning Institute (CLI) at UTHealth will partner with Museum-based informal STEM educators at CMH, YES Prep, a high performing charter school serving >95% of underrepresented groups, and other afterschool providers serving mostly underrepresented groups experiencing poverty. Storytelling components that highlight females in STEM will be added to an existing afterschool program (A'STEAM Basic). This derivative program is called A’STEAM Stories. Both instantiations of the afterschool programs (Basic and Stories) include an afterschool educator component (ongoing professional development and coaching), a family component (e.g., home extension activities, in-person, and virtual family learning events), and two age-based groups (K-G2 and G3-G5). Further, the A’STEAM Stories professional development for educators includes training that challenges STEM gender stereotypes and explains how to make science interesting to girls. The 4-year project has four phases. In Phase 1, researchers, CMH, and afterschool educators will adapt the curriculum for scalability and the planned storytelling variation. During Phase 2, the research team will conduct an experimental study to evaluate program impacts on increasing STEM interest and identity and reducing STEM gender stereotypes. To this end, the project’s team will recruit 36 sites and 1200 children across Kindergarten through Grade 5. This experimental phase is designed to produce causal evidence and meet the highest standards for rigorous research. The researchers will randomly assign sites to one of three groups: control, A’STEAM Basic, or A’STEAM Stories. During Phase 3, researchers will follow-up with participating sites to understand if the inclusion of afterschool educators as co-facilitators of the program allowed for sustainability after Museum informal science educator support is withdrawn. In Phase 4, the team will disseminate the afterschool curriculum and conduct two training-of-trainers for local and national afterschool educators. This study uses quantitative and qualitative approaches. Data sources include educator and family surveys, focus groups, and interviews as well as observations of afterschool program instructional quality and analysis of parent-child discourse during a STEM task. Constructs assessed with children include STEM interest, STEM identity, and STEM gender stereotype endorsement as well as standardized measures of vocabulary, science, and math. Findings will increase understanding of how to optimize OST STEM experiences for elementary-age girls and how to strengthen STEM interest for all participants. Further, this project will advance our knowledge of the extent to which scaffolded, co-teaching approaches build capacity of afterschool providers to sustain inquiry-based STEM programs.
This Research in Service to Practice project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.
Increasing greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in science not only presents a social justice goal, but is also vital to the financial and social success of the nation. The stereotype of the older white male scientist has obscured the contributions of women and people of color. This project seeks to remedy these perceptions which are barriers to entry into STEM fields. The project will create a large-scale hub for STEM themed video content on YouTube and other social media platforms, featuring 100+ original STEM videos produced by PBS partners. This hub and accompanying research seeks to identify the characteristics of online STEM content that attract (or fail to attract) underrepresented groups, specifically Black and Hispanic communities as well as women of all races. The objectives of this project are to 1) provide a unified online science-themed hub, PBS Terra, on YouTube and other platforms for hosting, sharing, and distributing digital STEM series from diverse producers from across the PBS system; 2) conduct surveys and focus groups to examine and understand the needs and expectations of women, Black and Hispanic communities and their consumption of STEM video content online and 3) test hypotheses about the communicative strategies of STEM videos that feature Black and Hispanic female scientists. Project collaborators include PBS, researchers at the University of Utah and the University of Georgia, and consultants and advisors with expertise in broadening participation and inclusion in STEM.
Little is known about how or why adult Americans seek science content on YouTube, especially the motivations of adults from underrepresented minorities and females. The key research questions in this project are: 1) Why do Black and Hispanic audiences and women of all races seek science video content online? 2) How does showing Black and Hispanic female scientists in science video content on YouTube impact viewers’ identification with and sense of belonging in STEM? 3) How does the use of humor by Black and Hispanic scientists in YouTube science content affect viewers’ perceptions of the communicator and their engagement with STEM content? 4) How does the appearance and manner of dress of Black and Hispanic scientists in YouTube science content affect viewers’ perceptions in the aforementioned areas? A nationally representative baseline survey will be conducted. A probability sample of 2000 respondents will be obtained including oversampling of Black and Hispanic audiences. To complement findings from the survey, focus groups will be conducted in eight different regions of the country to learn why these targeted audiences do or do not seek science content on YouTube and what motivates them to share the content with their social media network. In addition, an experiment embedded in an online survey will test the hypothesis that greater on-screen representation of women and scientists of color will broaden existing perceptions about scientists. The experiment will consist of a 3 (scientist’s race: Black/Hispanic/White) × 2 (science issue: controversial/non-controversial) × 2 (style: casual/professional) between-subjects design. Survey participants will be randomly assigned to the experimental conditions. These factors (science issue and host appearance) can be altered by content producers to better reach and engage the targeted audiences. The project not only investigates theoretical questions at the intersection of STEM stereotypes and race, but findings related to these experimental conditions will offer practical insight into strategies that can be used by science communication practitioners.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Adam DylewskiSara YeoMichael Cacciatore
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Millions of Latinx youth, aged 14 to 18, work formal or informal jobs to provide income for themselves or their families. In the context of these workplaces, Latinx youth demonstrate numerous skills that are essential to industrial engineering, such as minimizing workplace injuries or optimizing processes to maximize efficiency. However, their workplace ingenuity and skills are often underrecognized by educational systems. To counter this lack of recognition, the purpose of this project is to iteratively develop and research an out-of-school engineering program for working Latinx youth. This program is designed to recognize and build from youths’ workplace experiences by connecting them with industrial engineering concepts and practices, such as those used to promote worker safety. This program is also designed for youth to articulate transformational visions of industrial engineering, which expand current goals, values, and methods commonly embraced within this discipline. This year-long program will be facilitated by educators of existing out-of-school programs (e.g., Mathematics, Engineering, and Science Achievement), in partnership with undergraduate mentors from the Society for Professional Hispanic Engineers and other local organizations that serve Latinx youth (e.g., Latinos in Action). Approximately 220 youth are expected to participate in the programming. Researchers will explore whether and how youth participants develop identities in engineering, as well as how the educators and mentors understand and enact assets-based, out-of-school engineering education grounded in youths’ experiences. Researchers will also identify the individual, institutional, and systemic factors that support or inhibit sustained implementation of the program over time in different sites and contexts. This project will result in a set of empirically tested, bilingual program materials that will be disseminated widely to professional organizations dedicated to out-of-school programming and to serving Latinx youth.
This project will result in a localizable, transferable, and sustainable model for an out-of-school time program that recognizes and amplifies Latinx youths’ workplace funds of knowledge and leverages them toward youth-driven visions and applications of engineering. This program, which will connect with other people and sites in youths’ learning ecosystems, is grounded in principles of translanguaging, transformational mentorship, and educational dignity and recognition. In partnership with youth participants, researchers will use a social design experiment to explore the following research questions: What are the engineering identity trajectories of working high school youth, and how do specific moments of identity negotiation and recognition relate to broader patterns across program sessions and identity trajectories for individual participants over time? To answer these questions, a pre-, mid- and post-program Engineering Identity Scale; recordings of program implementations; interviews; and youth artifacts will be analyzed using various methods such as critical multimodal discourse analysis. After implementations of the program across multiple sites, researchers will use design-based implementation research to answer the following questions: How do educators and mentors understand and enact assets-based pedagogies designed to foster recognition across sites? What institutional and systemic features (designed or naturalistic) support or inhibit productive adaptations and implementations of the program? These questions will be answered using constant comparative analyses of data sources such as interviews with the program educators and mentors, observations of program implementations, observations of professional development sessions, and public documents. Culturally responsive, educative evaluation will be used to iteratively improve the program. The resulting research and program materials will be disseminated widely through professional organizations dedicated to Latinx youth, engineering education, and out-of-school learning.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Amy Wilson-LopezAlfonso Torres-RuaMarisela Martinez-ColaColby Tofel-GrehlAlfonso Torres-Rua
Access to STEM information is unequal, with rural and poor communities often receiving the fewest public education science and science literacy opportunities. Rural areas also face unique STEM teaching and technology integration challenges. In fact, LatinX communities in rural areas are less likely to have access to educational resources and language supports available to LatinX communities in urban centers. This project will help address these inequities by engaging rural librarians, bilingual science communicators, polar scientists, and a technical team to create a series of five bilingual virtual reality (VR) experiences to enhance STEM understanding and appreciation. Project researchers will create a new channel for disseminating polar science, working first with rural Latinx communities in Wisconsin to create a new network between rural communities and university researchers. Involving rural librarians in the co-design of instruction process will produce new ways for rural libraries to engage their local communities and their growing Latinx populations with polar science learning experiences. Each of the five VR experiences will focus on a different area of research, using the captivating Arctic and Antarctic environments as a central theme to convey science. VR is a particularly powerful and apt approach, making it possible to visit places that most cannot experience first-hand while also learning about the wide range of significant research taking place in polar regions. After design, prototyping and testing are finished, the VR experiences will be freely available for use nationally in both rural and urban settings. Public engagement with science creates a multitude of mutual benefits that result from a better-informed society. These benefits include greater trust and more reasoned scrutiny of science along with increased interest in STEM careers, many of which have higher earning potential. The project team will partner with 51 rural libraries which are valued community outlets valuable outlets to improve science literacy and public engagement with science. The effects of this project will be seen with thousands of community members who take part in the testing of prototype VR experiences during development and scaled engagement through ongoing library programs utilizing the final VR experiences for years to come.
This project will create new informal STEM learning assessment techniques through combining prior efforts in the areas of educational data mining for stealth assessment and viewpoint similarity metrics through monitoring gaze direction. Results of the project contribute to the field of educational data mining (EDM), focusing on adopting its methods for VR learning experiences. EDM is a process of using fine grained interaction data from a digital system to support educationally relevant conclusions and has been applied extensively to intelligent tutors and more recently, educational videogames. This project will continue building on existing approaches by expanding to include the unique affordances of VR learning media, specifically gaze. The project will focus on predicting user quitting as well as assessing key learning goals within each experience and triangulate these predictive models with user observations and post-experience surveys. The eventual application of this foundational research would address the problem in assessing a learner using measures external to the experience itself (i.e., surveys) and instead provide new methods that instrument learners using only data generated by their actions within the learning context. These techniques will provide a new means for evaluating informal learning in immersive technology settings without need for explicit tagging. The findings from this project will enable a greater understanding of the relationship between a user’s experience and their learning outcomes, which may prove integral in the creation of educational interventions using VR technology.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments. This project is also supported by the Office of Polar Programs.
Mentoring is a widely accepted strategy for helping youth see how their interests and abilities fit with education and career pathways; however, more research is needed to better understand how different approaches to mentoring impact youth participants. Near-peer mentoring can be a particularly impactful approach, particularly when youth can identify with their mentors. This project investigates three approaches to near-peer mentoring of high-school-aged Hispanic youth by Hispanic undergraduate mathematics majors. Mentoring approaches include undergraduates' visits to high school classrooms, mathematics social media, and a summer math research camp. These three components of the intervention are aimed at facilitating enjoyment of advanced mathematics through dynamic, experiential learning and helping high school aged youth to align themselves with other doers of mathematics on the academic stage just beyond them, i.e., college.
Using a Design-Based Research approach that involves mixed methods, the research investigates how the three different near-peer mentoring approaches impact youth participants' attitudes and interests related to studying mathematics and pursuing a career in mathematics, the youth's sense of whether they themselves are doers of mathematics, and the youth's academic progress in mathematics. The project design and research study focus on the development of mathematical identity, where a mathematics identity encompasses a person's self-understanding of himself or herself in the context of doing mathematics, and is grounded in Anderson (2007)'s four faces of identity: Engage, Imagine, Achieve, and Nature. The study findings have the potential to uncover associations between informal interactions involving the near-peer groups of high school aged youth and undergraduates seen to impact attitudes, achievement, course selection choices, and identities relative to mathematics. It also responds to an important gap in current understandings regarding effective communication of mathematics through social media outlets, and results will describe the value of in-person mathematical interactions as well as online interactions through social media. The study will result in a model for using informal near-peer mentoring and social media applications for attracting young people to study and pursue careers in STEM. This project will also result in a body of scripted MathShow presentations and materials and Math Social Media content that will be publicly available to audiences internationally via YouTube and Instagram.
This Research in Service to Practice 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.
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.
DATE:
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Aaron WilsonSergey GrigorianXiaohui WangMayra Ortiz
Well-designed out-of-school time experiences can provide youth with rich opportunities to learn. However, to design effective out-of-school time experiences, it is critical to have a research basis that clarifies the features of programs that support increased youth engagement that then leads to better outcomes for youth. This project explores the features of programming that integrates sports, mathematics and science concepts, and growth mindset for 4th through 8th grade aged Latinx and African American youth. To accomplish this, the investigators refine curricular resources for out-of-school time programs and develop a model for professional learning experiences for informal educators and facilitators to support their implementation of integrated sports and STEM programming. To identify critical features of the programming, the researchers explore the ways that the program activities are implemented in two different contexts as well as the impact of the programming on youth participants' mindset, understanding of science and mathematics concepts, STEM interests, and self-perceived science and mathematics abilities. Additionally, researchers will explore the ways that the sports-themed programming supports (or could better support) girls' engagement.
The project builds on the University of Arizona researchers' existing partnerships with Major League Baseball (MLB) and Boys/Girls Club programs and an existing school-based MLB program for schools to (a) expand and refine Science of Baseball activities to enhance engagement among girls and incorporate growth mindset experiences that focus on the value of effort, determination, and learning from mistakes in both athletics and STEM; (b) study the enactment and outcomes of the program with 4th-8th grade aged youth in the two distinct informal learning settings; and (c) develop and refine a model for professional learning that includes in-person and on-line components for training informal STEM learning facilitators. The work will focus on two study contexts: afterschool programs of Boys and Girls Clubs in AZ, CA, and MO and summer programs of MLB in CA and MO. Participants will include 300 youth and up to 28 informal STEM learning facilitators split across the two contexts. Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR) will be used to a) iteratively refine the activities and professional development model, and b) study the enactment and outcomes of the program. Research questions focus on outcomes for youth participants (i.e., impact on growth mindset, STEM dispositions, and understanding of science/math concepts), and the elements of effective professional development for informal STEM educators. Outcomes of the project include empirical evidence of what works and what doesn't work in the design, implementation, and professional development for STEM learning programs that integrate sports and growth mindset principles. In addition, outcomes of the project will advance knowledge of how different out-of-school program structures with similar sports-focused STEM programming can similarly (or differentially) support youth learning.
This 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.
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.