This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
To engage youth in global challenges such as energy issues, students’ own community can serve as personally relevant venues for scientific inquiry. For example, after students learn about heat transfer in school, they can use this knowledge to inspect the energy efficiency of their own schools and public buildings in their neighborhood.
To bridge the gap between school science and citizen science, students need scientific instruments that can be used both in and out of school and a community to share their discoveries.
Refugee youth are particularly vulnerable to STEM disenfranchisement due to factors including limited or interrupted schooling following displacement; restricted exposure to STEM education; and linguistic, cultural, ethnic, socioeconomic, and racial minority status. Refugee youth may experience a gap in STEM skills and knowledge, and a conflict between the identities necessary for participation in their families and communities, and those expected for success in STEM settings. To conduct research to better understand these challenges, an interrelated set of activities will be developed. First, youth will learn principles of physics and computing by participating in cosmic ray research with physicists using an instructional approach that builds from their home languages and cultures. Then youth periodically share what they are learning in the cosmic ray research with their parents, siblings, and science teachers at family and community science events. Finally, youth conduct reflective research on their own STEM identity development over the course of the project. Research on learning will be conducted within and across these three strands to better understand how refugee youth develop STEM-positive identities. This project will benefit society by improving equity and diversity in STEM through (1) creating opportunities for refugee youth to participate in physics research and to develop computing skills and (2) producing knowledge on STEM identity development that may be applied more broadly to improve STEM education. Deliverables from this project include: (a) research publications on STEM identity and learning; (b) curriculum resources for teaching physics and computing to multilingual youth; (c) an online digital storytelling exhibit offering narratives about belonging in STEM research which can be shared with STEM stakeholders (policy makers, scientists, educators, etc.); and (d) an online database of cosmic ray data which will be available to physicists worldwide for research purposes. This Innovations in Development proposal 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 program is designed to provide multiple contexts, relationships, and modes across and within which the identity work of individual students can be studied to look for convergence or divergence. To achieve this goal, the research applies a linguistic anthropological framework embedding discourse analysis in a larger ethnography. Data collected in this study include field notes, audio and video recordings of naturalistic interactions in the cosmic ray research and other program activities, multimodal artifacts (e.g., students' digital stories), student work products, interviews, and surveys. Critically, this methodology combines the analysis of identity formation as it unfolds in moment-to-moment conversations (during STEM learning, and in conversations about STEM and STEM learning) with reflective tasks and the production of personal narratives (e.g., in digital stories and interviews). Documenting convergence and divergence of STEM identities across these sources of data offers both methodological and theoretical contributions to the field. The research will offer thick description of the discursive practices of refugee youth to reveal how they construct identities related to STEM and STEM disciplines across settings (e.g., during cosmic ray research, while creating digital stories), relationships (e.g., peer, parent, teacher), and the languages they speak (e.g., English, Swahili). The findings will be of potential value to instructional designers of informal learning experiences including those working with afterschool, museums, science centers and the like, educators, and scholars of learning and identity.
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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Tino NyaweloJohn MatthewsJordan GertonSarah Braden
This CAISE report is designed to track and characterize sector growth, change and impact, important publications, hot topics/trends, new players, funding, and other related areas in Informal STEM Education (ISE) in 2017. The goal is to provide information and links for use by ISE professionals, science communicators, and interested stakeholders who want to discover new strategies and potential collaborators for project and proposal development. Designed as a slide presentation and divided into sectors, it can be used modularly or as a complete report. Each sector reports on research, events
Worldwide, four million people participate in geocaching--a game of discovering hidden treasures with GPS-enabled devices (including smart phones). Geocachers span all ages and tend to be interested in technology and the outdoors. To share information about the Montana Climate Assessment (MCA), an NSF-funded scientific report, Montana State University created a custom trackable geocaching coin featuring the MCA Website and logo. We then recruited volunteers to hide one coin in each of Montana’s 56 counties. Volunteer geocachers enthusiastically adopted all 56 counties, wrote blogs and social media posts about the coins, and engaged local Scout troops and schools. Other geocachers then found and circulated the coins while learning about Montana’s climate. One coin has traveled nearly 4,000 miles; several have visited other states and Canada. 95% of the volunteers said the project made them feel more connected to university research, and they told an average of seven other people about the project. Nearly all of the participants were unfamiliar with the Montana Climate Assessment prior to participating. The geocaching educational outreach project included several partnerships, including with Geocaching Headquarters in Seattle (a.k.a. “Groundspeak”); Cache Advance, Inc., an environmentally friendly outdoor gear company; and Gallatin Valley Geocachers. An advisory board of geocachers helped launch the project.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Suzi TaylorRay CallawayM.J. NehasilCathy Whitlock
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. In this exploratory Change Makers project, the Concord Consortium will develop, test, and evaluate a citizen science program that leverages innovative technology, such that youth engage directly with energy issues through scientific inquiry. The project will create the Infrared Street View, a citizen science program that aims to produce a thermal version of Google's Street View using an affordable infrared camera attached to a smartphone. The infrared camera serves as a high-throughput data acquisition instrument that collects thousands of temperature data points each time a picture is taken. Youth will collect massive geotagged thermal data that have considerable scientific and educational value for visualizing energy usage and improving energy efficiency at all levels. The Infrared Street View program will provide a Web-based platform for youth and anyone interested in energy efficiency to view and analyze the aggregated data to identify possible energy losses. By sharing their scientific findings with stakeholders, youth will make changes to the way energy is being used. The project will start with school, public, and commercial buildings in selected areas where performing thermal scan of the buildings and publishing their thermal images for educational and research purposes are permitted by school leaders, town officials, and property owners. In collaboration with high schools and out-of-school programs in Massachusetts, this project will conduct pilot-tests with approximately 200 students.
To contribute to advancing learning, the study will probe three research questions: 1) Under what circumstances can technology bridge out-of-school and classroom science learning and improve learning on both sides? 2) To what extent can unobtrusive assessment based on data mining support research and evaluation of student learning in out-of-school settings? and 3) To what extent can instructional intelligence built into the app used in the program help students learn in out-of-school programs and improve the quality of data they contribute to the citizen science project? Data sources for investigating these questions include students' interaction data with the app logged behind the scenes and the images they have taken, as well as results based on traditional assessments from a small number of participants. Throughout the project, staff will widely disseminate project products and findings through the Internet, science fairs, conferences, publications, and partner networks. An eight-member Advisory Board consisting of cleantech experts, science educators, and educational researchers will oversee and evaluate this project.
Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR), often referred to as crowdsourcing or citizen science, engages participants in authentic research, which both advances science discovery as well as increases the potential for participants' understanding and use of science in their lives and careers. This four year research project examines youth participation in PPSR projects that are facilitated by Natural History Museums (NHMs). NHMs, like PPSR, have a dual focus on scientific research and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. The NHMs in this project have established in-person and online PPSR programs and have close ties with local urban community-based organizations. Together, these traits make NHMs appropriate informal learning settings to study how young people participate in PPSR and what they learn. This study focuses on three types of PPSR experiences: short-term outdoor events like bioblitzes, long-term outdoor environmental monitoring projects, and online PPSR projects such as crowdsourcing the ID of field observations. The findings of this study will be shared through PPSR networks as well as throughout the field in informal STEM learning in order to strength youth programming in STEM, such that youth are empowered to engage in STEM research and activities in their communities. This project is funded through Science Learning+, which is an international partnership between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Wellcome Trust with the UK Economic and Social Research Council. The goal of this joint funding effort is to make transformational steps toward improving the knowledge base and practices of informal STEM experiences. Within NSF, Science Learning+ is part of the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program that seeks to enhance learning in informal environments and to broaden access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences.
The study employs observations, surveys, interviews, and learning analytics to explore three overarching questions about youth learning: 1) What is the nature of the learning environments and what activities do youth engage in when participating in NHM-led PPSR? 2) To what extent do youth develop three science learning outcomes, through participation in NHM-led citizen science programs? The three are: a) An understanding of the science content, b) identification of roles for themselves in the practice of science, and c) a sense of agency for taking actions using science? 3) What program features and settings in NHM-led PPSR foster these three science learning outcomes among youth? Based on studies occurring at multiple NHMs in the US and the UK, the broader impact of this study includes providing research-based recommendations for NHM practitioners that will help make PPSR projects and learning science more accessible and productive for youth. This project is collaboration between education researchers at University of California, Davis and Open University (UK), and Oxford University (UK) and citizen science practitioners, educators, and environmental scientists at three NHMs in the US and UK: NHM London, California Academy of Sciences, and NHM Los Angeles.
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
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. The project developed FieldScope, a GIS-based platform that enables organizations to engage students and members of the public in educational citizen science projects.
NOVA Labs (pbs.org/nova/labs) is a free digital platform that engages teens and lifelong learners in activities and games that foster authentic scientific exploration. From building RNA molecules and designing renewable energy systems to tracking cloud movements and learning cybersecurity strategies, NOVA Labs participants can take part in real-world investigations by visualizing, analyzing, and playing with the same data that scientists use. Each Lab focuses on a different area of active research. But all of them illustrate key concepts with engaging and informative videos, and guide participants as they answer scientific questions or design solutions to current problems. Supporting pages on each Lab site explain the purpose and functions of the Lab, help teachers incorporate it into their classrooms, foster collaboration between users, and help users make connections to the broader world of STEM. Users are encouraged to explore potential career paths through “Meet the Scientists” profiles, and to obtain information about local and national STEM resources.
This report was completed by the Program Evaluation Research Group at Endicott College in October 2013. It describes the outcomes and impacts of a four-year, NSF-funded project called Go Botany: Integrated Tools to Advance Botanical Learning (grant number 0840186). Go Botany focuses on fostering increased interest in and knowledge of botany among youth and adults in New England. This was being done through the creation of an online flora for the region, along with the development of related tools, including PlantShare, and a user-friendly interface for ‘smartphones’. In January 2012, the PI
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Judah LeblangNew England Wild Flower Society
Our Year 3 formative evaluation of Go Botany, a four-year NSF-funded project focused on botanical learning, centered on tracking the continued development and the launch of the Go Botany Simple Key, which contains botanical data on more than 1200 native plants in the New England region. The project is a collaboration between the New England Wild Flower Society and three partnering institutions: The Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, VT; The Chewonki Foundation in Wiscasset, Maine; and the Yale Peabody Museum on Natural History in New Haven, CT. During Year 3, the Go Botany Simple Key was
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Judah LeblangNew England Wild Flower Society
The Coalition for Watershed Education, consisting of the Land Access Information Association, Great Lakes Children's Museum, Interlochen Public Radio and Northwestern Michigan College Great Lakes Studies Institute will implement a comprehensive science education project for youth and adults. The major components include: Watershed Discovery field experiences, Soundscapes radio broadcasts, Waterscapes exhibits, a project website, and the expanded Great Lakes Coalition for Watershed Education. Watershed Discovery is a field-based experience for youth ages 11-17. Teams of 6-10 youth will work with mentors who specialize in GPS, GIS, geology and geography to research and collect data on the Great Lakes watershed. These students will also use their new knowledge to produce radio segments as part of the Soundscapes component. Youth teams will be trained to interview sources, gather information and write scripts for use on the local National Public Radio affiliate. The Great Lakes Children's Museum will design a permanent, interactive watershed of 1,500 square feet, as well as a traveling exhibit of 500 square feet for visitors ages 7-12. Other deliverables include "A Community Guide to Watershed-based Science Education" (available in print and CD-ROM), a one-day regional dissemination conference, and an interactive website. Strategic impact will be realized through the development of a novel model for watershed education, its subsequent replication and summative evaluation outcomes. It is estimated that over 40,000 children will be reached by this community-wide initiative.