In partnership with the Pasadena and Los Angeles Unified School Districts, the Armory Center for the Arts will develop and implement comprehensive visual art-math and visual art-science curricula for grades two through five at Title I elementary schools. The curricula will be developed in conjunction with Armory teaching artists and educators, and will align with the Common Core Standards for math and science, and with the National Core Visual Arts Standards. The museum will deliver the program in 48 classrooms over a three-year period. Professional development, paired with in-class program modeling, will enable participating teachers to implement arts integration strategies into their teaching practice, with an overall goal of creating a sustainable and long-term impact on student learning. An external evaluator will oversee program assessment in the schools. The museum will post sample lessons from each curriculum online to demonstrate the style and scope of the program for possible use by additional school districts.
This is a story about learning STEM content and practices while making objects. It is also a story about how that learning is contextualized in one young man’s disruption of racism simply by trying to learn how gears work. Our project, Investigating STEM Literacies in MakerSpaces (STEMLiMS), focuses on how adults and youth use representations to accomplish tasks in STEM disciplines in formal and informal making spaces (Tucker-Raymond, Gravel, Kohberger, & Browne, 2017). Making is an interdisciplinary endeavor that may involve mechanical and electrical engineering, digital literacies and
This paper describes the development of a Female-Responsive Design Framework for Informal Science Education (ISE). The FRD Framework translates ideas from Culturally Responsive Pedagogy to discover and recommend pedagogical strategies that apply to females and design. This paper describes our synthesis of prior research about females’ social, historical, and cultural practices in STEM learning from a variety of fields. The paper further details our process of developing the FRD Framework with the help of museum practitioners, female youth, researchers, and experts from the fields of design
Data are the workhorses of the scientific endeavor and their use is rapidly evolving (Haendel, Vasilevsky, and Wirz 2012). Ask almost any scientist about their work, and the conversation will involve the data they collect and analyze. The use of data in science is often captured in science classrooms as an ill-defined link between math and science that may not reflect authentic data practices (Tanis Ozcelik and McDonald 2013). Students often find themselves collecting data to confirm obvious conclusions within highly structured labs, and data become a way for students to demonstrate the
The Sustainability Teams Empower and Amplify Membership in STEM (S-TEAMS), an NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot project, will tackle the problem of persistent underrepresentation by low-income, minority, and women students in STEM disciplines and careers through transdisciplinary teamwork. As science is increasingly done in teams, collaborations bring diversity to research. Diverse interactions can support critical thinking, problem-solving, and is a priority among STEM disciplines. By exploring a set of individual contributors that can be effect change through collective impact, this project will explore alternative approaches to broadly enhance diversity in STEM, such as sense of community and perceived program benefit. The S-TEAMS project relies on the use of sustainability as the organizing frame for the deployment of learning communities (teams) that engage deeply with active learning. Studies on the issue of underrepresentation often cite a feeling of isolation and lack of academically supportive networks with other students like themselves as major reasons for a disinclination to pursue education and careers in STEM, even as the numbers of underrepresented groups are increasing in colleges and universities across the country. The growth of sustainability science provides an excellent opportunity to include students from underrepresented groups in supportive teams working together on problems that require expertise in multiple disciplines. Participating students will develop professional skills and strengthen STEM- and sustainability-specific skills through real-world experience in problem solving and team science. Ultimately this project is expected to help increase the number of qualified professionals in the field of sustainability and the number of minorities in the STEM professions.
While there is certainly a clear need to improve engagement and retention of underrepresented groups across the entire spectrum of STEM education - from K-12 through graduate education, and on through career choices - the explicit focus here is on the undergraduate piece of this critical issue. This approach to teamwork makes STEM socialization integral to the active learning process. Five-member transdisciplinary teams, from disciplines such as biology, chemistry, computer and information sciences, geography, geology, mathematics, physics, and sustainability science, will work together for ten weeks in summer 2018 on real-world projects with corporations, government organizations, and nongovernment organizations. Sustainability teams with low participation by underrepresented groups will be compared to those with high representation to gather insights regarding individual and collective engagement, productivity, and ongoing interest in STEM. Such insights will be used to scale up the effort through partnership with New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability (NJHEPS).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Amy TuiningaAshwani VasishthPankaj Lai
There is a growing need for citizens to be able to work with data and consider how data is represented. This work employs a design, make, play framework to create data modeling learning experiences for young children and their caregivers in an informal setting. The project develops and tests a curriculum for a workshop series for 5-8 year old children to engage them in playful exploration of data modeling. Children engage in data collection, data representation, and data analysis by drawing on their own experiences of museum exhibitions. The curriculum supports developing children's interest and engagement with data science and data literacy, which are foundational knowledge for a range of STEM careers and disciplines. This project advances 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).
The project is grounded in a theoretical framework for young children's learning that focus on playful exploration, design, and building on children's own experiences and questions. The research examines how the curriculum needs to be designed to support families in data modeling, foster engagement in data modeling by both younger (ages 5-6) and older (ages 7-8) children, and provide evidence of active approaches to learning about STEM. The design and development project tests and investigates the materials using a design-based research framework. Children who participate in the workshop series should increase their confidence in solving problems, taking initiative, and drawing on available resources to pursue their own questions and respond to novel challenges. Data collected includes interviews with participants, artifacts of children's work throughout the series, and an observational instrument to document families' problem solving, persistence, and engagement with data science concepts.
The Montana Girls STEM Collaborative brings together organizations and individuals throughout Montana who are committed to informing and motivating girls to pursue careers in STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. The Collaborative offers professional development, networking and collaboration opportunities to adults who offer and/or support STEM programs for girls and other youth typically under-represented in STEM. The vision of Montana Girls STEM is that every young person in Montana has the opportunity to learn about STEM careers and feels welcome pursuing any dream they
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Suzi TaylorRay CallawayCathy Witlock
WNET, working with Education Development Center, will lead a small scale Innovations in Development effort to develop, research, and evaluate a new model to engage underserved families in STEM learning. The new endeavor, Cyberchase: Mobile Adventures in STEM, will build on the proven impact of the public media mathematics series Cyberchase and the growing potential of mobile technology and texting to reach underserved parents. WNET will produce two new Cyberchase episodes for 6-9 year olds, focused on using math to learn about the environment. Drawing on these videos and an existing Cyberchase game, the team will produce a bilingual family engagement campaign that will combine an in-person workshop followed by a 6-8 week "text to parent" campaign, in which parents receive weekly text messages suggesting family STEM activities related to the media content. The engagement model will be piloted in three cities with large low-income/Latino populations, along with one texting campaign offered without the workshop. This project will build knowledge about how to deploy well-designed public media assets and text messaging to promote fun, effective STEM learning interactions in low-income families. While past research on educational STEM media has tended to focus on children, especially preschool age, this project will focus primarily on text messaging for parents, and on learners age 6-9, and the wider scope of parent/child STEM interactions possible at that age.
The primary goal of the project will be to develop, test and refine a family engagement model that includes a face-to-face workshop, rich narrative Cyberchase content, and text-message prompts for parents to engage in short, playful STEM activities with children. The project team will explore which features of the mobile text-and-media program have most value for low-income and Latino families and prompt STEM learning interactions, including a comparison of workshop-based and text-only variants. The project will have three phases: needs assessment and preliminary design; an early-stage test in New York and development and testing of media; and three late-stage tests in contrasting locations, two including workshops and one "text-only," and analysis of findings. Ultimately, the project will share knowledge with the field about the opportunities and challenges of using mobile texting and public media to reach underserved families effectively. This knowledge will also inform a future proposal for production and outcomes research, which, based on the study results, may include a scaled-up version in ten locations and a ten-city Randomized Control Test. 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.
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. This Research in Service to Practice project will address the issues around Informal Education of rural middle school students who have high potential regarding academic success in efforts to promote computer and IT knowledge, advanced quantitative knowledge, and STEM skills. Ten school districts in rural Iowa will be chosen for this study. It is anticipated that new knowledge on rural informal education will be generated to benefit the Nation's workforce. The specific objectives are to understand how informal STEM learning shapes the academic and psychosocial outcomes of rural, high-potential students, and to identify key characteristics of successful informal STEM learning environments for rural, high-potential students and their teachers. The results of this project will provide new tools for educators to increase the flow of underserved students into STEM from economically-disadvantaged rural settings.
The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology predicts a rapid rise in the number of STEM jobs available in the next decade, describing an urgent need for students' educational opportunities to prepare them for this workforce. In 2014, 62% of CEOs of major US corporations reported challenges filling positions requiring advanced computer and information technology knowledge. The project team will use a mixed methods approach, integrating comparative case study and mixed effects longitudinal methods, to study the Excellence program. Data sources include teacher interviews, classroom observations, and student assessments of academic aptitude and psychosocial outcomes. The analysis and evaluation of the program will be grounded in understanding the local efforts of school districts to build curriculum responsive to the demands of their high-potential student body. The project design, and subsequent analysis plan, utilizes a mixed methods approach, incorporating case study and longitudinal quantitative methods to analyze naturalistic data and build robust evidence for the implementation and impact of this program. This project will provide significant insights in how best to design, implement, and support informal out-of-school learning environments to broaden participation in the highest levels of STEM education and careers for under-resourced rural students.
Utah Valley University (UVU) with partners Weber State University (WSU) and American Indian Services (AIS) are implementing UTAH PREP (PREParation for STEM Careers) to address the need for early preparation in mathematics to strengthen and invigorate the secondary-to-postsecondary-to-career STEM pipeline. As the preliminary groundwork for UTAH PREP, each partner currently hosts a PREP program (UVU PREP, WSU PREP, and AIS PREP) that identifies low-income, under-represented minority, first-generation, and female students entering seventh grade who have interest and aptitude in math and science, and involves them in a seven-week, three-year summer intensive program integrating STEM courses and activities. The course content blends skill-building academics with engaging experiences that promote a clear understanding of how mathematical concepts and procedures are applied in various fields of science and engineering. Courses are enhanced through special projects, field trips, college campus visits, and the annual Sci-Tech EXPO. The purpose of the program is to motivate and prepare participants from diverse backgrounds to complete a rigorous program of mathematics in high school so that they can successfully pursue STEM studies and careers, which are vital to advancing the regional and national welfare.
UTAH PREP is based on the TexPREP program that originated at the University of Texas at San Antonio and which was named as one of the Bright Spots in Hispanic Education by the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics in 2015. TexPREP was adapted by UVU for use in Utah for non-minority serving institutions and in regions with lower minority populations, but with great academic and college participation disparity. With NSF funding for a two-year pilot program, the project partners are building UTAH PREP through a networked improvement community, collective impact approach that, if demonstrably successful, has the ability to scale to a national level. This pilot program's objectives include: 1) creating a UTAH PREP collaboration with commitments to a common set of objectives and common set of plans to achieve them; 2) strengthening existing PREP programs and initiating UTAH PREP at two or three other institutions of higher education in Utah, each building a sustainable local support network; 3) developing a shared measurement system to assess the impact of UTAH PREP programs, adaptations, and mutually reinforcing activities on students, including those from groups that are underrepresented in STEM disciplines; and 4) initiating a backbone organization that will support future scaling of the program's impact.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Daniel HornsAndrew StoneVioleta Vasilevska
This NSF INCLUDES pilot addresses the challenge of broadening participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) among minoritized youth in grades 5-8 and their access to computer science (CS), which is recognized as integral to all STEM disciplines. This project will specifically focus on developing and understanding computing experiences intentionally designed to strengthen mathematical skills utilizing culturally responsive pedagogy. Culturally responsive pedagogy integrates knowledge relevant to students' identities and communities with computational learning activities, and maximizes the potential for increasing engagement, competence, and belonging of underrepresented youth in computing. This pilot will be situated in community-based organizations, including Boys and Girls Clubs and Public Libraries, with the support of industry partners and the local Department of Education. Given the role of community-based organizations and libraries across the nation for community engagement and educational enrichment, this work represents an exciting opportunity for spreading into thousands of libraries and community centers across the nation, thereby having collective impact that materializes CS for All.
This project will engage minoritized youth in grades 5-8. The overarching vision is to establish a scalable model for providing these students with recurrent opportunities to create computational artifacts that are culturally-responsive to their community contexts. In addition, there will be an explicit and simultaneous focus on strengthening students' mathematical skills. The project has four goals: (1) facilitate culturally-responsive learning of key CS concepts and practices; (2) build youth and community knowledge around positive impacts of computing on local communities; (3) increase participants' knowledge, confidence and interest in becoming creators of computing innovations; and (4) strengthen mathematical skills through intentional computing experiences. The project will adapt and implement CS modules from the NSF-funded Exploring Computer Science curriculum, and will intentionally reinforce mathematics skills and community engagement. It will design and implement a culturally-responsive training model for establishing community instructors who can support CS project learning. Finally, it will create instruments for monitoring project goals and participant outcomes. Due to the collaboration with community-based organizations present in cities across the nation, the model has strong potential to scale up regionally and nationally.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Lori PollockChrystalla MouzaJohn PeleskoRosalie Rolon-Dow
Portal to the Public: Expanding the National Network (PoP: ENN) is implementing around the county the successful NSF-funded Portal to the Public model in which researchers are trained to communicate and interact with the general public at informal science education (ISE) institutions about the research that they are conducting. The project, which follows on a thorough evaluation of the model at eight sites and current implementation at an additional fifteen sites, will incorporate twenty new ISE sites into the growing network, provide training and mentorship to ISE professionals on the use and adaptation of the PoP implementation manual and toolkits, and develop an enhanced network website that will serve as a communication and innovation hub. The work is responsive to the needs and activities of ISE organizations which continue to expand their missions beyond presenting to the public established science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and are working to become places where visitors can also experience the process and promise of current research via face-to-face interactions with researchers. The project is expanding both the kind and number of institutions involved around the country and is facilitating their capacity to develop a knowledge base, share experiences and best practices.