The Council for Opportunity in Education, in collaboration with TERC, seeks to advance the understanding of social and cultural factors that increase retention of women of color in computing; and implement and evaluate a mentoring and networking intervention for undergraduate women of color based on the project's research findings. Computing is unique because it ranks as one of the STEM fields that are least populated by women of color, and because while representation of women of color is increasing in nearly every other STEM field, it is currently decreasing in computing - even as national job prospects in technology fields increase. The project staff will conduct an extensive study of programs that have successfully served women of color in the computing fields and will conduct formal interviews with 15 professional women of color who have thrived in computing to learn about their educational strategies. Based on those findings, the project staff will develop and assess a small-scale intervention that will be modeled on the practices of mentoring and networking which have been established as effective among women of color who are students of STEM disciplines. By partnering with Broadening Participation in Computing Alliances and local and national organizations dedicated to diversifying computing, project staff will identify both women of color undergraduates to participate in the intervention and professionals who can serve as mentors to the undergraduates in the intervention phase of the project. Assisting the researchers will be a distinguished Advisory Board that provides expertise in broadening the representation of women of color in STEM education. The external evaluator will provide formative and summative assessments of the project's case study data and narratives data using methods of study analysis and narrative inquiry and will lead the formative and summative evaluation of the intervention using a mixed methods approach. The intervention evaluation will focus on three variables: 1) students' attitudes toward computer science, 2) their persistence in computer science and 3) their participant attitudes toward, and experiences in, the intervention.
This project extends the PIs' previous NSF-funded work on factors that impact the success of women of color in STEM. The project will contribute an improved understanding of the complex challenges that women of color encounter in computing. It will also illuminate individual and programmatic strategies that enable them to participate more fully and in greater numbers. The ultimate broader impact of the project should be a proven, scalable model for reversing the downward trend in the rates at which women of color earn bachelor's degrees in computer science.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Apriel HodariMaria Ong
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This project supports the Broader Impacts and Outreach Network for Institutional Collaboration (BIONIC), a national Research Coordination Network of Broader Impacts to support professionals who assist researchers to design, implement, and evaluate the Broader Impacts activities for NSF proposals and awards. All NSF proposals are evaluated not only on the Intellectual Merit of the proposed research, but also on the Broader Impacts of the proposed work, such as societal relevance, educational outreach, and community engagement. Many institutions have begun employing Broader Impacts support professionals, but in most cases, these individuals have not worked as a group to identify and share best practices. As a consequence, there has been much duplication of effort. Through coordination, BIONIC is expected to improve efficiency, reduce redundancy, and have significant impact in several areas: 1) Researchers will benefit from an increased understanding of the Broader Impacts merit review criterion and increased access to collaborators who can help them design, implement, and evaluate their Broader Impacts activities; 2) Institutions and research centers will increase their capacity to support Broader Impacts via mentoring for Broader Impacts professionals and consulting on how to build Broader Impacts support infrastructure, with attention to inclusion of non-research-intensive universities, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Hispanic- and Minority-Serving Institutions that may not have the resources to support an institutional Broader Impacts office; and 3) NSF, itself, will benefit from a systematic and consistent approach to Broader Impacts that will lead to better fulfillment of the Broader Impacts criterion by researchers, better evaluation of Broader Impacts activities by reviewers and program officers, and a system for evaluating the effectiveness of Broader Impacts activities in the aggregate, as mandated by Congress and the National Science Board. Through its many planned activities, BIONIC will ultimately help advance the societal aims that the Broader Impacts merit review criterion was meant to achieve.
The main goals of the project will be accomplished through the four specific objectives: 1) Identify and curate promising models, practices, and evaluation methods for the Broader Impacts community; 2) Expand engagement in, and support the development of, high-quality Broader Impacts activities by educating current and future faculty and researchers on effective practices; 3) Develop the human resources necessary for sustained growth and increased diversity of the Broader Impacts community; and 4) Promote cross-institutional collaboration and dissemination for Broader Impacts programs, practices, models, materials, and resources. BIONIC will facilitate collaborative Broader Impacts work across institutions, help leverage previously developed resources, support professional development, and train new colleagues to enter into the Broader Impacts field. This project will improve the quality and sustainability of Broader Impacts investments, as researchers continue to create unique and effective activities that are curated and broadly disseminated. BIONIC will create a network designed to assist NSF-funded researchers at their institutions in achieving the goals of the Broader Impacts Review Criterion. In so doing, BIONIC will promote Broader Impacts activities locally, nationally, and internationally and help to advance the Broader Impacts field.
This award is co-funded by the Divisions of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences and Emerging Frontiers in the Directorate for Biological Sciences and by the Division of Chemistry in the Directorate for Mathematics and Physical Sciences.
This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by developing a suite of digital tools designed to support positive messaging around skill-based education and careers and to improve mentors' communication with middle school-aged youth mentees. Maintaining U.S. economic advantage requires attracting talent to high-growth, high-demand skill-based, STEM-related careers that are traditionally attained through Career and Technical Education (CTE). Replacing old negative perceptions with new, more accurate messages about CTE and then reaching youth with these messages before high school is essential. Career-focused mentoring is a vehicle for delivering these messages and supporting youth exploration of CTE as a possible path for their own lives. Investigators will explore the hypothesis that through strong connections between those best positioned to articulate industry needs (mentors) and those most receptive to filling that need (mentees), this project will improve youth awareness and interest in CTE and the rewarding careers that are available to them. Research and development activities will be carried out collaboratively in informal learning environments in Boston and New York City that serve middle school-aged youth from underrepresented communities, through career-focused mentoring programs. The project team, led by media producers of the WGBH Education Foundation, includes market researchers and communications strategists at Global Strategy Group, learning scientists at Education Development Center, and mentorship program partners at SkillsUSA, Learning for Life's Middle School Explorer Clubs, and Boy Scouts of America's Scoutreach. If promising, the career-focused mentoring programs of SkillsUSA, Learning for Life, and Boy Scouts of America will incorporate the messaging roadmap and digital tools to support their mentoring curricula, which impact greater than one million youth in each year.
In the first phase of research, investigators will study perceptions of STEM-focused CTE from a nationwide sample of 800 middle school-aged youth and 30 mentors from skill-based STEM industries. In the second phase, investigators will work with six program leaders and 30 mentors from SkillsUSA, Explorer Clubs, Scoutreach, and other mentoring programs to document the needs of mentors for support as they enter into the mentoring process. The third phase will engage mentorship program leaders and 36 mentors in the iterative development of a suite of digital tools that would support positive messaging around skill-based education and careers and that would improve mentors' communication with youth mentees. In addition, a pre-post mentorship program pilot study will explore the promise of the digital tools for effectively supporting mentor-mentee communications that improve youth awareness and interest in STEM-focused CTE and skill-based, STEM-related careers. Thirty six mentors and 288 of their youth mentees will participate in the pilot study. Data sources for research include interviews and surveys of program leaders, mentors, and mentees, as well as tracking mentor activity within the online digital tool environment. This research would advance knowledge of how mentors influence disadvantaged youth perceptions of and interest in CTE and skill-based, STEM career pathways, in which there is currently little evidence as to how mentor preparation shapes ability to positively impact youth outcomes. Major outcomes will include a) deeper understandings of youth and mentor perceptions of CTE and mentors' needs for supporting their work with mentees, b) a messaging roadmap and digital tools that prepare mentors for their work with middle school youth, and c) empirical findings regarding the potential of the digital tools for effectively supporting mentor-mentee communications that improve youth's awareness and interest in CTE and skill-based, STEM-related careers. Outcomes will be shared widely to research, education, and industry communities, locally and nationally, through social media, partner networks, conference presentations, and research publications. An advisory board will provide independent review on the project activities.
The National Center for Science and Civic Engagement (NCSCE) contracted Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. (RK&A) to conduct a summative evaluation of its SENCER-ISE project partnerships. SENCER-ISE is an initiative that brings partners from higher education (HE) together with partners from informal science education (ISE) to create projects that engage audiences in science using the lens of civic engagement. SENCER funded 10 partnerships over three years—six through the National Science Foundation (DRL #1001795) and four through the Noyce Foundation. Previously, RK&A conducted a formative
Access to high quality evaluation results is essential for science communicators to identify negative patterns of audience response and improve outcomes. However, there are many good reasons why robust evaluation linked is not routinely conducted and linked to science communication practice. This essay begins by identifying some of the common challenges that explain this gap between evaluation evidence and practice. Automating evaluation processes through new technologies is then explicated as one solution to these challenges, capable of yielding accurate real-time results that can directly
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Climate Change Education Partnership Alliance (CCEPA) is a consortium made up of the six Phase II Climate Change Education Partnership (CCEP-II) program awardees funded in FY 2012. Collectively, the CCEPA is establishing a coordinated network devoted to increasing the adoption of effective, high quality educational programs and resources related to the science of climate change and its potential impacts. The establishment of a CCEPA Coordination Office addresses the need for a coordinating body that leverages and builds upon the CCEPA projects' individual initiatives. The CCEPA Coordination Office facilitates interactions to leverage a successful network of CCEP-II projects and individuals engaged in increasing climate science literacy. The efforts of the Coordination Office advance knowledge and understanding of how to effectively network related, but different, projects into a cohesive enterprise. The goal is to coordinate a functional network, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
The CCEPA Coordination Office at the University of Rhode Island is helping to move the CCEPA network forward on a number of key initiatives that strengthen it, reduce duplication, and enhance its overall impact. An important role of the Coordination Office is the facilitation of the transfer of best practices between projects. An effective network forges collaborations and establishes communities of practice through network working groups, building intellectual capital network-wide. The CCEPA Coordination Office has a key role in assisting the CCEPA project PIs and staff to disseminate the results of their work. Partnerships with other relevant societies and organizations assist the Coordination Office in identifying opportunities and synergies for sharing, disseminating, and leveraging network products as well as best practices that emerge as Earth system science education models and tools are evaluated. This endeavor broadens the collective impact of the individual projects across the country.
The Discovery Research K-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools (RMTs). Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.
STEM Practice-rich Investigations for NGSS Teaching (SPRINT) is an exploratory project that will research and develop resources and a model for professional learning needed to meet the demand of implementing the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The Exploratorium Teacher Institute will engage middle school science teachers in a one-year professional learning program to study how familiar routines and classroom tools, specifically hands-on science activities, can serve as starting points for teacher learning. The Teacher Institute will use existing hands-on activities as the basis for developing "practice-rich investigations" that provide teachers and students with opportunities for deep engagement with science and engineering practices. The results of this project will include: (1) empirical evidence from professional learning experiences that support teacher uptake of practice-rich investigations in workshops and their classrooms; (2) a portfolio of STEM practice-rich investigations developed from existing hands-on activities that are shown to enhance teacher understanding of NGSS; and (3) a design tool that supports teachers in modifying existing activities to align with NGSS.
SPRINT conjectures that to address the immediate challenge of supporting teachers to implement NGSS, professional learning models should engage teachers in the same active learning experiences they are expected to provide for their students and that building on teachers' existing strengths and understanding through an asset-based approach could lead to a more sustainable implementation. SPRINT will use design-based research methods to study (a) how creating NGSS-aligned, practice-rich investigations from teachers' existing resources provides them with experiences for three-dimensional science learning and (b) how engaging in these investigations and reflecting on classroom practice can support teachers in understanding and implementing NGSS learning experiences.
Many people believe that both public policy and personal action would improve with better access to “reliable knowledge about the natural world” (that thing that we often call science). Many of those people participate in science education and science communication. And yet, both as areas of practice and as objects of academic inquiry, science education and science communication have until recently remained remarkably distinct. Why, and what resources do the articles in this special issue of JRST give us for bringing together both the fields of practice and the fields of inquiry?
The fields of science education and science communication share the overarching goal of helping non-experts and non-members of the professional science community develop knowledge of the content and processes of scientific research. However, the specific audiences, methods, and aims employed in the two fields have evolved quite differently and as a result, the two fields rarely share findings and theory. Despite this lack of crosstalk, one theoretical construct—framing—has shown substantial analytic power for researchers in both fields. Specifically, both fields have productively made use of
Recent decades have seen an increasing emphasis on linking the content and aims of science teaching to what the average citizen requires in order to participate effectively in contemporary society, one that is heavily dependent on science and technology. However, despite attempts to define what a scientific education for citizenship should ideally involve, a comprehensive set of key aspects has yet to be clearly established. With this in mind, the present study sought to determine empirically the extent of any consensus in Spain regarding the principal aspects of scientific competence that
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Angel Blanco-LopezEnrique Espana-RamosFrancisco Jose Gonzalez-GarciaAntonio Joaquin Franco-Mariscal
In the 1920s, John Dewey and Walter Lippmann both wrote important books examining whether the public was capable of playing a constructive role in policy, particularly when specialized knowledge was involved. This essay uses the Lippmann–Dewey debate to identify new challenges for science education and to explore the relationship between science education and science communication. It argues that science education can help foster democracy in ways that embody Habermas' ideal of the public sphere, but only if we as a field pay more attention to (1) the non-scientific frames and narratives that
In some senses, both science education and science communication share common goals. Both seek to educate, entertain and engage the public with and about science. Somewhat surprisingly, given their common goals, they have evolved as disparate academic fields where each pays little attention to the other.1 The purpose of this special issue, therefore, is an attempt some form of rapprochement—to contribute to building a better awareness of what each has to contribute to the other and the value of the scholarship conducted in both fields.