Hopa Mountain, working in partnership with Montana State University (MSU), will develop innovative and coordinated opportunities for Montana youth to strengthen their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) skills and knowledge while preparing them for higher education and careers in health sciences. The overall project goal of HealthMakers is to support rural and tribal youth’s interest and exposure to careers in the sciences while giving them the skills and resources to play leadership roles in increasing healthy family practices in their homes and communities. HealthMakers will achieve meaningful impacts annually through four strategies: (1) Health-focused college preparation programs for 50 teens; (2) Summer academic enrichment programs for 20 teens; (3) Community-based science literacy events for 2,000 children and their families, and (4) Professional development for educators, community members, and parents. Hopa Mountain and MSU will engage youth, educators, community leaders, and parents in training opportunities through HealthMakers. Participants will take part in community-based workshops, college tours, and summer institutes led by MSU faculty, healthcare professionals, Hopa Mountain staff, and their peers. Through these strategic aims, HealthMakers will help create a stronger workforce and inspire students to pursue careers in the sciences.
PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE:
HealthMakers will support the development of health-related outreach and college preparation programs and training resources to create a better-informed workforce for Montana and inspire students to pursue careers in the sciences. These strategic aims and deliverables benefiting rural and tribal families and children, will help create a stronger workforce and inspire students to pursue careers in the sciences. Working together, Hopa Mountain and Montana State University will support rural and tribal youth’s interest and exposure to careers in the health sciences while giving them the skills and resources to play leadership roles in increasing healthy family practices in their communities.
As part of a grant from the National Science Foundation, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) developed, implemented, and evaluated the National Center for Blind Youth in Science (NCBYS), a three-year full-scale development project to increase informal learning opportunities for blind youth in STEM. Through this grant, the NCBYS extended opportunities for informal science learning for the direct benefit of blind students by conducting six NFB STEM2U regional programs included programs for blind youth, their parents/caregivers, blind teen mentors (apprentices), and museum educators.
By engaging diverse publics in immersive and deliberative learning forums, this three-year project will use NOAA data and expertise to strengthen community resilience and decision-making around a variety of climate and weather-related hazards across the United States. Led by Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes and the Museum of Science Boston, the project will develop citizen forums hosted by regional science centers to create a new, replicable model for learning and engagement. These forums, to be hosted initially in Boston and Phoenix and then expanded to an additional six sites around the U.S., will facilitate public deliberation on real-world issues of concern to local communities, including rising sea levels, extreme precipitation, heat waves, and drought. The forums will identify and clarify citizen values and perspectives while creating stakeholder networks in support of local resilience measures. The forum materials developed in collaboration with NOAA will foster better understanding of environmental changes and best practices for improving community resiliency, and will create a suite of materials and case studies adaptable for use by science centers, teachers, and students. With regional science centers bringing together the public, scientific experts, and local officials, the project will create resilience-centered partnerships and a framework for learning and engagement that can be replicated nationwide.
People of color who live in low income, urban communities experience lower levels of educational attainment than whites and continue to be underrepresented in science at all educational and professional levels. It is widely accepted that this underrepresentation in science is related, not only to processes of historical exclusion and racism, but to how science is commonly taught and that investigating authentic, relevant science questions can improve engagement and learning of underrepresented students. Approaching science in these ways, however, requires new teaching practices, including ways of relating cross-culturally. In addition to inequity in science and broader educational outcomes, people of color from low income, urban communities experience high rates of certain health problems that can be directly or indirectly linked to mosquitoes. Recognizing that undertaking public health research and preventative outreach efforts in these communities is challenging, there is a critical need for an innovative approach that leverages local youth resources for epidemiological inquiry and education. Such an approach would motivate the pursuit of science among historically-excluded youth while, additionally, involving pre-service, in-service, and informal educators in joint participatory inquiry structured around opportunities to learn and practice authentic, ambitious science teaching and learning.
Our long-term goal is to interrupt the reproduction of educational and health disparities in a low-income, urban context and to support historically-excluded youth in their trajectories toward science. This will be accomplished through the overall objective of this project to promote authentic science, ambitious teaching, and an orientation to science pursuits among elementary students participating in a university-school-community partnership promise program, through inquiry focused on mosquitoes and human health. The following specific aims will be pursued in support of the objective:
1. Historically-excluded youth will develop authentic science knowledge, skills, and dispositions, as well as curiosity, interest, and positive identification with science, and motivation for continued science study by participating in a scientific community and engaging in the activities and discourses of the discipline. Teams of students and educators will engage in community-based participatory research aimed at assessing and responding to health and well-being issues that are linked to mosquitoes in urban, low-income communities. In addition, the study of mosquitoes will engage student curiosity and interest, enhance their positive identification with science, and motivate their continued study.
2. Informal and formal science educators will demonstrate competence in authentic and ambitious science teaching and model an affirming orientation toward cultural diversity in science. Pre-service, in-service, and informal educators will participate in courses and summer institutes where they will be exposed to ambitious teaching practices and gain proficiency, through reflective processes such as video study, in adapting traditional science curricula to authentic science goals that meet the needs of historically excluded youth.
3. Residents in the community will display more accurate understandings and transformed practices with respect to mosquitoes in the urban ecosystem in service of enhanced health and well-being. Residents will learn from an array of youth-produced, culturally responsive educational materials that will be part of an ongoing outreach and prevention campaign to raise community awareness of the interplay between humans and mosquitoes.
These outcomes are expected to have an important positive impact because they have potential for improving both immediate and long-term educational and health outcomes of youth and other residents in a low-income, urban community.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Katherine Richardson BrunaLyric Colleen Bartholomay
Recruiting more research scientists from rural Appalachia is essential for reducing the critical public health disparities found in this region. As a designated medically underserved area, the people of Appalachia endure limited access to healthcare and accompanying public health education, and exhibit higher disease incidences and shorter lifespans than the conventional U.S. population (Pollard & Jacobsen, 2013). These health concerns, coupled with the fact that rural Appalachian adults are less likely to trust people from outside their communities, highlights the need for rural Appalachian youth to enter the biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research workforce. However, doing so requires not only the specific desire to pursue a science, technology, engineering, math, or medical science (STEMM) related degree, it also requires the more general desire to pursue post-secondary education at all. This is clearly not occurring in Tennessee’s rural Appalachian regions where nearly 75% of adults realize educational achievements only up to the high school level. Although a great deal of research and intervention has been done to increase students’ interest in STEMM disciplines, very little research has considered the unique barriers to higher education experienced by rural Appalachian youth. A critical gap in past interventions research is the failure to address these key pieces of the puzzle: combatting real and perceived barriers to higher education and STEMM pursuits in order to increase self-efficacy for, belief in the value of, and interest in pursuing an undergraduate degree. Such barriers are especially salient for rural Appalachian youth.
Our long-range goal is to increase the diversity of biomedical, clinical and behavioral research scientists by developing interventions that both reduce barriers to higher education and increase interest in pipeline STEMM majors among rural Appalachian high school students. Our objective in this application is to determine the extent to which a multifaceted intervention strategy combining interventions to address the barriers to and supports for higher education with interventions to increase interest in STEMM fields leads to increased intentions to pursue an undergraduate STEMM degree. Our hypothesis is that students who experience such interventions will show increases in important intrapersonal social-cognitive factors and in their intentions to pursue a postsecondary degree than students not exposed to such interventions. Based on the low numbers of students from this region who pursue post-secondary education and the research demonstrating the unique barriers faced by this and similar populations (Gibbons & Borders, 2010), we believe it is necessary to reduce perceived barriers to college-going in addition to helping students explore STEMM career options. In other words, it is not enough to simply offer immersive and hands-on research and exploratory career experiences to rural Appalachian youth; they need targeted interventions to help them understand college life, navigate financial planning for college, strategize ways to succeed in college, and interact with college-educated role models. Only this combination of general college-going and specific STEMM-field information can overcome the barriers faced by this population. Therefore, our specific aims are:
Specific Aim 1: Understand the role of barriers to and support for higher education in Appalachian high school students’ interest in pursuing STEMM-related undergraduate degrees. We will compare outcomes for students who participate in our interventions, designed to proactively reduce general college-going barriers while increasing support systems, to outcomes for students from closely matched schools who do not participate in these interventions to determine the extent to which such low-cost interventions, which can reach large numbers of students, are effective in increasing rural Appalachian youth’s intent to pursue STEMM-related undergraduate degrees.
Specific Aim 2: Develop sustainable interventions that decrease barriers to and increase support for higher education and that increase STEMM-related self-efficacy and interest. Throughout our project, we will integrate training for teachers and school counselors, nurture lasting community partnerships, and develop a website with comprehensive training modules to allow the schools to continue implementing the major features of the interventions long after funding ends.
This research is innovative because it is among the first to recognize the unique needs of this region by directly addressing barriers to and supports for higher education and integrating such barriers-focused interventions with more typical STEMM-focused interventions. Our model provides opportunities to assess college-going and STEMM-specific self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and barriers/supports, giving us a true understanding of how to best serve this group. Ultimately, this project will allow future researchers to understand the complex balance of services needed to increase the number of rural Appalachians entering the biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research science workforce.
The goal of the Hawaii Science Career Inspiration grant (HiSCI) is to enhance science education resources and training available to teachers and students in disadvantaged communities of Hawaii in order to ensure a maximally large and diverse workforce to meet the nation’s biomedical, behavioural and clinical research needs. The HiSCI Program will build on the knowledge gained from two past SEPA grants and the University of Hawaii Center for Cardiovascular Research and leverage resources from all corners of the state to accomplish four specific aims:
1) Increase student interest and exposure to health science careers by providing multiple science exposure opportunities and mentoring along the primary, intermediate, and secondary school experiences for at least 300 students a year and a printed and web-based STEM career resource guide and career posters to alert students, counsellors and teachers to all available opportunities;
2) Provide professional development for 20 middle and high school teachers a year, to include scientific content and foster an understanding of the scientific research process, in addition to medical students mentoring intermediate and high school students;
3) Listen, respond to, and connect the science teacher community in Hawaii by holding innovative listening groups for teachers across the state; and
4) Provide tools and supplies for at least twenty K-12 classrooms a year through a mini-grant process and alert teachers across the state to free resources both locally and nationally. The HiSCI Program is highly relevant to Hawaii’s public health and science infrastructure as it will provide an innovative way to gain knowledge of science training needs and will provide many of the resources to teachers and students across the state by leveraging, communicating and sharing existing resources.
The connections among neuroscience, educational research, and teaching practice have historically been tenuous (Cameron and Chudler 2003; Devonshire and Dommett 2010). This is particularly true in public schools, where so many issues are competing for attention—state testing, school politics, financial constraints, lack of time, and demands from parents and the surrounding community. Teachers and administrators often struggle to make use of advances in educational research to impact teaching and learning (Hardiman and Denckla 2009; Devonshire and Dommett 2010). At the Franklin Institute, we
The National Science Festival Network project, also operating as the Science Festival Alliance, is designed to create a sustainable national network of science festivals that engages all facets of the general public in science learning. Science Festivals, clearly distinct from "science fairs", are community-wide activities engaging professional scientists and informal and K-12 educators targeting underrepresented segments of local communities historically underserved by formal or informal STEM educational activities. The initiative builds on previous work in other parts of the world (e.g. Europe, Australasia) and on recent efforts in the U.S. to create science festivals. The target audiences are families, children and youth ages 5-18, adults, professional scientists and educators in K-12 and informal science institutions, and underserved and underrepresented communities. Project partners include the MIT Museum in Cambridge, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco, and the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The deliverables include annual science festivals in these four cities supported by year-round related activities for K-12 and informal audiences, a partnership network, a web portal, and two national conferences. Ten science festivals will be convened in total over the 3 years of the project, each reaching 15,000 to 60,000 participants per year. STEM content includes earth and space science, oceanography, biological/biomedical science, bioinformatics, and computer, behavioral, aeronautical, nanotechnology, environmental, and nuclear science. An independent evaluator will systematically assess audience participation and perceptions, level/types of science interest stimulated in target groups, growth of partnering support at individual sites, and increasing interactions between ISE and formal K-12 education. A variety of qualitative and quantitative assessments will be designed and utilized. The project has the potential to transform public communication and understanding of science and increase the numbers of youth interested in pursuing science.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Loren ThompsonJeremy BabendureBen Wiehe
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This presentation was part of the "Twist and Shout: Using physical movement in STEM education" session at the 2014 ASTC Conference in Raleigh, NC. The session shared, showcased, and compiled creative new ways to incorporate physicality into the learning process.
An annual conference gathers young Native Americans from several states and many tribes to celebrate their culture, deal with issues they face in their communities, and get involved in tribal and state political issues.
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Sara Hill
resourceprojectWebsites, Mobile Apps, and Online Media
SETAC is funded by the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Union and emerges out of the need to undertake specific action for the improvement of science education. It regards science education as among the fundamental tools for developing active citizens in the knowledge society. SETAC draws on the cooperation between formal and informal learning institutions, aiming to enhance school science education and active citizenship looking further into the role of science education as a lifelong tool in the knowledge society. On the day of the project’s conclusion, 31 October 2010, after two years of work SETAC contributes the following products and results to the field: 1. “Quality Science Education: Where do we stand? Guidelines for practice from a European experience” This is the concluding manifesto that presents the results of the SETAC work in the form of recommendations for practitioners working in formal and informal science learning institutions; 2. “Teaching and Learning Scientific Literacy and Citizenship in Partnership with Schools and Science Museums” This paper constitutes the theoretical framework of the project and innovative ways of using museums for science education and develop new modes of linking formal and informal learning environments; 3. Tools for teaching and learning in science: misconceptions, authentic questions, motivation. Three specific studies, leading to three specific reports, have been conducted in the context of the project, looking in particular into notions with an important role in science teaching and learning. These are on: Children’s misconceptions; Authentic questions as tool when working in science education; Students’ attitudes and motivation as factors influencing their achievement and participation in science and science-related issues; 4. Activities with schools: SETAC developed a series of prototype education activities which were tested with schools in each country. Among the activities developed between the partners, two have been chosen and are available on-line for practitioners to use and to adapt in their own context. These are: The Energy role game, a role game on Energy invites students to act in different roles, those of the stakeholders of an imaginary community, called to debate and decide upon a certain common problem; MyTest www.museoscienza.org/myTest, which aims to encourage students to engage in researching, reflecting and communicating science-oriented topics; 5. European in-service training course for primary and secondary school teachers across Europe. The training course is designed in such a way as to engage participants in debate and exploration of issues related to science education and active citizenship. The course is open to school teachers, headteachers and teacher trainers from all EU-member and associate countries. Professionals interested can apply for a EU Comenius grant. All the products of the project as well as information about the training course are available at the project website, some of them in more than one languages: www.museoscienza.org/setac
The goal of a two-year SEPA grant, Phase II of a collaboration between Columbia University (CU) and the New York Hall of Science (NYHoS), was to enhance science teaching and learning through the use of portable laboratories and hands-on modules to study biotechnology and microscopy in middle and secondary school classes. Four multi-day workshops were held at the NYHoS to train teachers to use the portable laboratory kits. The primary goals of this evaluation are to assess: 1) the workshops' value for teaching the hands-on kit curriculum, 2) teachers' perception of the portable laboratories'
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Ellen GiustiNew York Hall of Science