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 engaging in hands-on field experience, laboratory/project-based entrepreneurship tasks and mentorship experiences.
Twin Cities Public Television project on Gender Equitable Teaching Practices in Career and Technical Education Pathways for High School Girls is designed to help career and technical education educators and guidance counselors recruit and retain more high school girls from diverse backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) pathways, specifically in technology and engineering. The project's goals are: 1) To increase the number of high school girls, including ethnic minorities, recruited and retained in traditionally male -STEM pathways; 2) To enhance the teaching and coaching practices of Career and Technical Education educators, counselors and role models with gender equitable and culturally responsive strategies; 3) To research the impacts of strategies and role model experiences on girls' interest in STEM careers; 4) To evaluate the effectiveness of training in these strategies for educators, counselors and role models; and 5) To develop training that can easily be scaled up to reach a much larger audience. The research hypothesis is that girls will develop more positive STEM identities and interests when their educators employ research-based, gender-equitable and culturally responsive teaching practices enhanced with female STEM role models. Instructional modules and media-based online resources for Minnesota high school Career and Technical Education programs will be developed in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and piloted in districts with strong community college and industry partnerships. Twin Cities Public Television will partner with STEM and gender equity researchers from St. Catherine University in St. Paul, the National Girls Collaborative, the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-Boulder), the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System.
The project will examine girls' personal experiences with equitable strategies embedded into classroom STEM content and complementary mentoring experiences, both live and video-based. It will explore how these experiences contribute to girls' STEM-related identity construction against gender-based stereotypes. It will also determine the extent girls' exposure to female STEM role models impact their Career and Technical Education studies and STEM career aspirations. The study will employ and examine short-form autobiographical videos created and shared by participating girls to gain insight into their STEM classroom and role model experiences. Empowering girls to respond to the ways their Career and Technical Education educators and guidance counselors guide them toward technology and engineering careers will provide a valuable perspective on educational practice and advance the STEM education field.
The Space and Earth Informal STEM Education (SEISE) project, led by the Arizona State University with partners Science Museum of Minnesota, Museum of Science, Boston, and the University of California Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science and Space Sciences Laboratory, is raising the capacity of museums and informal science educators to engage the public in Heliophysics, Earth Science, Planetary Science, and Astrophysics, and their social dimensions through the National Informal STEM Education Network (NISE Net). SEISE will also partner on a network-to-network basis with other existing coalitions and professional associations dedicated to informal and lifelong STEM learning, including the Afterschool Alliance, National Girls Collaborative Project, NASA Museum Alliance, STAR_Net, and members of the Association of Children’s Museums and Association of Science-Technology Centers. The goals for this project include engaging multiple and diverse public audiences in STEM, improving the knowledge and skills of informal educators, and encouraging local partnerships.
In collaboration with the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD), SEISE is leveraging NASA subject matter experts (SMEs), SMD assets and data, and existing educational products and online portals to create compelling learning experiences that will be widely use to share the story, science, and adventure of NASA’s scientific explorations of planet Earth, our solar system, and the universe beyond. Collaborative goals include enabling STEM education, improving U.S. scientific literacy, advancing national educational goals, and leveraging science activities through partnerships. Efforts will focus on providing opportunities for learners explore and build skills in the core science and engineering content, skills, and processes related to Earth and space sciences. SEISE is creating hands-on activity toolkits (250-350 toolkits per year over four years), small footprint exhibitions (50 identical copies), and professional development opportunities (including online workshops).
Evaluation for the project will include front-end and formative data to inform the development of products and help with project decision gates, as well as summative data that will allow stakeholders to understand the project’s reach and outcomes.
This article focuses on the efforts of the Collaborative for Early Science Learning (CESL), a group of six museums led by the Sciencenter in Ithaca, New York, that partner with their local Head Start programs to provide training for teachers and opportunities for family engagement. These efforts address the gap between children’s readiness to explore science through everyday experiences and adults’ support. CESL believes that hands-on professional development (PD) opportunities for teachers and families can reduce adult discomfort with facilitating science programming and increase their
Designing Our World (DOW) was a four-year NSF-funded initiative in which the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) sought to promote girls’ pursuit of engineering careers through community-based programming, exhibition development, and identity research. The overarching aim of DOW was to engage girls ages 9–14 with experiences that illuminate the social, personally relevant, and altruistic nature of engineering. In addition to programming for girls, the project also included workshops for parents/caregivers, professional development for staff from community partners; and an exhibition
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.
This ChangeMakers project builds on a 2016 National Academies report finding that scientific literacy can be understood at a community level as opposed to a traditional focus on the individual. This is important since scientific knowledge is often seen as abstract and distant from the daily concerns of average citizens. A community focus shifts the spotlight away from individual learning to collective learning facilitated by trusted cultural institutions serving as social assets. This work brings together scientific expertise and community organizations to advance operational science literacy--scientific ways of problem-solving--for community leaders and functional science literacy--information and skills people can use in their daily lives--among their service populations. This will be done by gathering and sharing knowledge and developing skills and abilities to contribute to the community's overall well-being.
The New England Aquarium (NeAq) and Aquarium of the Pacific (AoP) will apply a community engagement model involving active listening, documentation, alignment of concerns and goals, and co-development of shared solutions that serves the needs of all participants. As part of the Advancing Community Science Literacy (ACSL) project, multi-disciplinary teams from NeAq, AoP and their regional partners will participate in training on the model. They will apply that training to build and implement action plans to advance community-driven responses to local environmental issues. Teams will be assessed with respect to how they use tools from their shared training, along with peer support and coaching, to make progress in engaging diverse community stakeholders. Results of the evaluation will offer insights and recommendations for informal science learning centers to serve their communities more effectively as engagement facilitators and change agents to support science literacy development and action. By applying techniques developed for cultural institutions to communicate about climate science, and combining those with techniques developed for libraries and other organizations to help meet emergent community concerns, such as storm surges and coastal flooding, it is possible to redefine the role informal science learning centers can play as part of a community culture.
ACSL is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program which supports projects that provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advances innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and develops understandings of deeper learning by participants.
Increasingly, the prosperity, innovation and security of individuals and communities depend on a big data literate society. Yet conspicuously absent from the big data revolution is the field of teaching and learning. The revolution in big data must match a complementary revolution in a new kind of literacy, through a significant infusion of STEM education with the kinds of skills that the revolution in 21st century data-driven science demands. This project represents a concerted effort to determine what it means to be a big data literate citizen, information worker, researcher, or policymaker; to identify the quality of learning resources and programs to improve big data literacy; and to chart a path forward that will bridge big data practice with big data learning, education and career readiness.
Through a process of inquiry research and capacity-building, New York Hall of Science will bring together experts from member institutions of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub to galvanize big data communities of practice around education, identify and articulate the nature and quality of extant big data education resources and draft a set of big data literacy principles. The results of this planning process will be a planning document for a Big Data Literacy Spoke that will form an initiative to develop frameworks, strategies and scope and sequence to advance lifelong big data literacy for grades P-20 and across learning settings; and devise, implement, and evaluate programs, curricula and interventions to improve big data literacy for all. The planning document will articulate the findings of the inquiry research and evaluation to provide a practical tool to inform and cultivate other initiatives in data literacy both within the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub and beyond.
The scientific community has been under increasing pressure from policymakers and the public to explain how research contributes to the public good. The community has emphasized two distinct approaches to explaining its operations and value. The first is the use of narratives that can make the work of science more accessible and engaging to nonscientists. The other is the use of new data mining and analysis methods to document quantitatively the complex paths by which research progresses and eventually contributes to a variety of societal goals. While both of these approaches have proved useful, the goal of this workshop is to explore ways that they might be combined into a hybrid approach that will be even more effective.
This workshop will assemble experts in the narrative and data-driven science communication approaches with leading science researchers to discuss how these various perspectives can be merged to define a template for a type of communication that encompasses the appeal of narrative, the rigor of new analytic data, and the understanding of how science works in practice.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kevin Finneran
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
How should we convey science—both its findings and its value to society—to the many members of the public who lack either scientific training or intense interest in scientific progress? In October 2016 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop to explore ways of better presenting science—both specific findings and the processes of discovering and confirming—to the public. Participants discussed ways to develop data-enriched narratives that communicate to the public and policy makers in an engaging and rigorous way the work of basic research. They also
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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
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.
This is a two-year "Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science" (INCLUDES) Design and Development Launch Pilot targeting high school students in the Hudson Valley, including the New York Metropolitan Area. It will support a network of institutional partners that are committed to providing internship and mentoring opportunities to youths interested in authentic research projects. The proposed work will build on a current research immersion program--the Secondary School Field Research Program (SSFRP) at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. SSFRP serves high school students, mainly from underrepresented and underserved communities, who work with college students, science teachers, and researchers around a specific science problem. Over the past decade, the program has had demonstrable impact, including attendance to college, and students' selection of STEM majors. Tracking data indicates that retention rates of its alumni in four-year colleges are well above the norm, and a significant fraction of early participants are now in graduate programs in science or engineering. The program has surpassed all expectations in its effectiveness at engaging underserved populations in science and promoting entry into college, recruitment into STEM majors, and retention through undergraduate and into graduate studies. Hence, the project's overall goal will be to extend and adapt the research-immersive summer internship model through an alliance with peer research institutions, school districts and networks, public land and resource management agencies, private funding agencies, informal educational institutions, and experts in pedagogical modeling, metrics, and evaluation. Focused on earth and environmental sciences, the summer and year-round mentoring model will allow high school students to work in research teams led by college students and teachers under the direction of research scientists. The mentoring model will be multilayered, with peer, near-peer, and researcher-student relationships interweaving throughout the learning process.
The project has formulated a set of testable explanatory hypotheses: (1) Beyond specific subject knowledge, success rests on increased student engagement in a community of practice, with near-peer mentors, teachers, and scientists in the context of scientific research; (2) The intensity of engagement also shifts the students' vision of their future to include higher education, and specifically to imagine and move toward a STEM career; and (3) Early engagement, before students attend college, is critical because high school is where students form patterns of engagement and capacities related to science learning. Thus, the immediate goal of the two-year plan will be to create approximately 11 research internship programs focused on earth and environmental sciences, and to build the networks for growth through engagement with a wider community of educational partners. The main focus of this approach will be removing barriers between high school students and STEM organizations, and adapting the current mentoring model at Columbia University to the specific cultures of other research groups and internship programs throughout the lower Hudson Valley. The team has already assembled a diverse set of partners committed to broadening participation in STEM using a collective impact approach to early engagement in project-based learning. Research partners will provide the mentors, research projects, and laboratory facilities. The educational network partners will provide access for students, particularly those from under-resourced communities to participate, as well as participation opportunities for interested teachers. Informal learning organizations will provide access to field and research sites, along with research dissemination opportunities. In Year 1, the project will conduct a series of development workshops for partners already in place and foster the formation of new partnership clusters according to shared interest, complementary resources and geographic proximity. The workshops will provide a forum for partners to learn about each other's visions, values, challenges, and existing structures, while working through theoretical and practical issues related to STEM engagement for young investigators. In Year 2, the project will target the implementation of the internship programs at various sites according to the agreed-upon goals, program model, research projects, recruitment and retention strategy, staff training, data collection, and evaluation plans. An external evaluator will address both the formative and summative evaluation of the effort directed toward examining the three project's hypotheses concerning the educational impacts of scientific research on student engagement, extent of the immersion, and overall effectiveness of the programs.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Robert NewtonLuo Cassie XuMargie TurrinEinat LevMatthew Palmer
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Most experimental studies in the behavioral sciences rely on college students as participants for reasons of convenience, and most take place in North America and Europe. As a result, studies are only sampling from a narrow range of human experiences. The results of these studies have limited generalizability, failing to reflect the full range of mental and behavioral phenomena across diverse cultures and backgrounds. However sampling from broader populations is challenging, due to limited opportunities and access, heightened cost, and the need for specific knowledge about how to adapt research protocols to different communities. The goal of this workshop is to develop some tools and guidelines to help researchers overcome barriers to broader sampling, and to incentivize doing so through better institutional support.
The goal of this workshop is to develop tools to support and encourage increased robustness and generalizability in the experimental behavioral sciences. The meeting is dedicated to identifying and developing potential solutions to the so-called "WEIRD people" problem: the fact that most experimental behavioral science research is conducted with members of WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich Democracies). The discovery that much of this research fails to generalize to broader populations and fails to capture the range of human patterned variation in thought and behavior creates a pressing need for research approaches to be more inclusive. Although there are researchers throughout the world who have developed effective models for overcoming these limitations, there are significant barriers to achieving robust and generalizable experimental behavioral research for most researchers. This workshop will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines whose research represents positive case studies of how to overcome these barriers. The participants aspire to accomplish three goals: 1) develop tools and training materials to help researchers enhance diversity in their research populations, 2) develop infrastructure solutions for connecting researchers across diverse contexts and populations, and 3) develop a set of recommendations for institutional changes to support enhancing diversity in experimental behavioral science through manuscript, grant, and tenure review.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Douglas MedinDaniel HruschkaLera BoroditskyCristine Legare