Environmental health literacy (EHL) has recently been defined as the continuum of environmental health knowledge and awareness, skills and self-efficacy, and community action. In this study, an interdisciplinary team of university scientists, partnering with local organizations, developed and facilitated EHL trainings with special focus on rainwater harvesting and water contamination, in four communities with known environmental health stressors in Arizona, USA. These participatory trainings incorporated participants’ prior environmental health risk knowledge and personal experiences to co
This three-year project focuses on professional research experiences for middle and high school STEM teachers through investigations of the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI). Each year 10 teachers (in diverse fields including biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, and oceanography) and three to five professional paleontologists will participate in a four-phase process of professional development, including: a (1) pre-trip orientation (May); (2) 12 days in Panama in July collecting fossils from previously reported, as well as newly discovered, sites; (3) a post-trip on-line (cyber-enabled) Community of Practice; and (4) a final wrap-up at the end of each cohort (December). In addition, some of the teachers may also elect to partner with scientists in their research laboratories, principally located in California, Florida, and New Mexico. The partners in Panama are from the Universidad Autónoma de Chiriquí (UNACHI), including faculty and students, as well as STEM teachers from schools in Panama. Teachers that participate in this RET will develop lesson plans related to fossils, paleontology, evolution, geology, past climate change, and related content aligned with current STEM standards.
The GABI, catalyzed by the formation of the Isthmus of Panama during the Neogene, had a profound effect on the evolution and geography of terrestrial organisms throughout the Americas and marine organisms globally. For example, more than 100 genera of terrestrial mammals dispersed between the Americas, and numerous marine organisms had their interoceanic distributions cut in half by the formation of the Isthmus. Rather than being considered a single event that occurred about 4 million years ago, the GABI likely represents a series of dispersals over the past 10 million years, some of which occurred before full closure of the Isthmus. New fossil discoveries in Panama resulting from the GABI RET (Research Experiences for Teachers) are thus contributing to the understanding of the complexity and timing of the GABI during the Neogene.
This award is being co-funded with the Office International and Integrative Activities.
WCS Education is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive movement of conservation advocates. We do this by creating equitable pathways to increased scientific literacy, engagement in conservation advocacy, and lasting connection with animals and nature.
One of the programs that incorporates all of these strategies is Project TRUE (Teens Researching Urban Ecology). Project TRUE is a partnership between WCS and Fordham University that is both a social science research study and a youth development program designed to support youth in STEM career pathways. Teams of high school students
This Smart and Connected Community (SCC) project will partner with two rural communities to develop STEMports, an innovative Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) learning game for workforce development. The game's activities will take players on localized Augmented Reality (AR) missions to both engage in STEM learning challenges and discover emerging STEM careers in their community, specifically highlighting innovations in the fields of sustainable agriculture and aquaculture, forest products, and renewable energy. Community Advisory Teams (CATs) and co-design teams, including youth, representatives from the targeted emerging STEM economies, and decision-makers will partner with project staff to co-design STEMports that reflect the interests, cultural contexts, and envisioned STEM industries of the future for each community.
The project will: (a) design and pilot an AR game for community STEM workforce development; (b) develop and adapt a community engagement process that optimizes community networking for co-designing the gaming application and online community; and (c) advance a scalable process for wider applications of STEMports. This project is a collaboration between the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance and the Field Day Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to both build and research the co-designing of a SCC based within an AR environment. The project will contribute knowledge to the informal STEM learning, community development, and education technology fields in four major ways:
Deepening the understanding of how innovative technological tools support rural community STEM knowledge building as well as STEM identity and workforce interest.
Identifying design principles for co-designing the STEMports community related to the technological design process.
Developing social network approaches and analytics to better understand the social dimensions and community connections fostered by the STEMport community.
Understanding how participants' online and offline interactions with individuals and experiences builds networks and knowledge within a SCC.
With the scaling of use by an ever-growing community of players, STEMports will provide a new AR-based genre of public participation in STEM and collective decision making. The research findings will add to the emerging literature on community-wide education, innovative education technologies, informal STEM learning (especially place-based learning and STEM ecosystems), and participatory design research.
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.
Nature-based playgrounds—known as playscapes—offer numerous opportunities for young children to learn about nature. In the current study, we focus on teacher talk on playscapes, namely to capture the spontaneous utterances teachers offer when engaging with young children during playscape visits. Two different playscapes were contrasted, both of which featured loose parts, native plants, and running water. The difference in playscape was whether it featured ecosystems: While the rural playscape had a natural forest and a wetland, the urban playscape had a man-made stream and a garden. Ten
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Heidi KloosCatherine MaltbieRhonda BrownVictoria Carr
resourceevaluationProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The attached evaluation is of the A2A (Awareness to Action) Planning Workshop held February 21-23 in two locations simultaneously connected by internet: the University of Colorado, Boulder and Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. It was made possible thanks to a collaboration of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and EcoArts Connections, with additional assistance from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. A2A brought together 39 natural and social scientists, artists, urban planners, “sustainablists” (e.g. sustainability professionals working in a variety
The attached Briefing Booklet was created collaboratively by A2A (Awareness to Action) Planning Workshop facilitators and organizers in advance of the February 2018 convening and was available to participants.
The workshop's primary goal was to establish an operational strategy for knowledge sharing across entities, networks, and associations designed to strengthen communities of practice nationally to better conceive, conduct, and evaluate projects for the public, working at the intersection of science, arts, and sustainability.
The booklet contains an overview of the workshop purpose
The field of ecology is poised to substantially contribute to the creation of a socially and environmentally equitable urban future. To realize this contribution, the field of ecology must create strategies that ensure inclusion of underrepresented minorities so that a broad array of experiences and ideas collectively address challenges inherent to a sustainable urban future. Despite efforts to recruit and retain underrepresented racial minorities (URM) in the sciences, graduation rates have only slightly increased over the last several decades. While research mentoring programs at the
Under the Arctic: Digging into Permafrost, a 2,000 square foot museum exhibition, engaged visitors in real and simulated experiences related to the nature of permafrost, permafrost research, and the impact of climate change on permafrost. Development of the exhibition was part of a larger National Science Foundation Advancing Informal STEM Learning grant, Hot Times in Cold Places: The Hidden World of Permafrost, awarded to the University of Alaska Fairbanks in partnership with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.
Two related evaluation studies led us to our conclusions. First, we
In this study, we explored how science teacher candidates construct ideas about science teaching and learning in the context of partnerships with urban community-based organizations. We used a case study design focusing on a group of 10 preservice teachers' participation in educational programming that focused on environmental racism and connected science to larger social issues in an economically dispossessed Mexican community in Chicago. Using theoretical lenses of humanistic science education, justice-centered science pedagogy, and structure-agency dialectic, we studied how preservice high
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Maria VarelasDaniel Morales-DoyleSyeda RazaDavid SeguraKaren CanalesCarole Mitchener
The summative evaluation documents and articulates what SCIENCES has improved or changed, and in what ways. The final design of the summative evaluation was based on findings from the front-end and formative evaluations, including using participatory evaluation techniques to engage community members in discussing their experience with the programs and assessment of community needs and assets at the close of the project.
The goal of the summative evaluation was to address discrete program impacts in the context of the project, as well as the cross-program impact of providing a thematically