The Harvard Museums of Science and Culture will improve the ability of middle school teachers to use museum-based digital resources to support classroom instruction aligned with state and national science standards. Working with advisory teachers from five collaborating school districts, the museum will co-create classroom activities, based on digital resources from its collections, along with associated teacher professional development programs at three sites across urban and rural Massachusetts. The project will provide schools with access to classroom-ready resources that successfully support student learning. Teachers will learn how to use these materials, integrate them into their teaching, and enhance their skills to teach science content and practice. External evaluators will assess the project's effectiveness by measuring teacher implementation of the digital resources in the classroom, requests for information and assistance, and changes in teachers' confidence and comfort levels.
Wireless radio communications, such as Wi-Fi, transmit public and private data from one device to another, including cell phones, computers, medical equipment, satellites, space rockets, and air traffic control. Despite their critical role and prevalence, many people are unfamiliar with radio waves, how they are generated and interact with their surroundings, and why they are the basis of modern communication and navigation. This topic is not only increasingly relevant to the technological lives of today’s youth and public, it is critical to the National Science Foundation’s Industries of the Future activities, particularly in advancing wireless education and workforce development. In this project, STEM professionals from academia, industry and informal education will join forces to design, evaluate, and launch digital apps, a craft-based toolkit, activity guides, and mobile online professional learning, all of which will be easily accessed and flexibly adapted by informal educators to engage youth and the public about radio frequency communications. Experiences will include embodied activities, such as physically linking arms to create and explore longitudinal and transverse waves; mobile experiences, such as augmented reality explorations of Wi-Fi signals or collaborative signal jamming simulations; and technological exploration, such as sending and receiving encrypted messages.
BSCS Science Learning, Georgia Tech, and the Children’s Creativity Museum (CCM) with National Informal STEM Education Network (NISE Net) museum partners will create pedagogical activity designs, digital apps, and a mobile online professional learning platform. The project features a rigorous and multipronged research and development approach that builds on prior learning sciences studies to advance a learning design framework for nimble, mobile informal education, while incorporating the best aspects of hands-on learning. This project is testing two related hypotheses: 1) a mobile strategy can be effective for supporting just-in-time informal education of a highly technical, scientific topic, and 2) a mobile suite of resources, including professional learning, can be used to teach informal educators, youth, and the general public about radio frequency communications. Data sources include pre- and post- surveys, interviews, and focus groups with a wide array of educators and learners.
A front-end study will identify gaps in public understanding and perceptions specific to radio frequency communications, and serve as a baseline for components of the summative research. Iterative formative evaluation will incorporate participatory co-design processes with youth and informal educators. These processes will support materials that are age-appropriate and culturally responsive to not only youth, with an emphasis on Latinx youth, but also informal educators and the broader public. Summative evaluation will examine the impact of the mobile suite of resources on informal educators’ learning, facilitation confidence and intentions to continue to incorporate the project resources into their practice. The preparation of educators in supporting public understanding of highly technological STEM topics can be an effective way for supporting just-in-time public engagement and interests in related careers. Data from youth and museum visitors will examine changes to interest, science self-efficacy, content knowledge, and STEM-related career interest. If successful, this design approach may influence how mobile resources are designed and organized effectively to impact future informal education on similarly important technology-rich topics. All materials will be released under Creative Commons licenses allowing for widespread sharing and remixing; research and design findings will be published in academic, industry, and practitioner journals.
This project is co-funded by two NSF programs: The Advancing Informal STEM Learning 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. The Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program, which supports projects that build understandings of practices, program elements, contexts and processes contributing to increasing students' knowledge and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and information and communication technology (ICT) careers.
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.
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.
Across the United States, individuals, organizations, and communities are wrestling with a wide array of challenging and persistent science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-related problems. A few examples include ensuring more equitable access to STEM careers; building capacity for rural libraries to support STEM learning; and supporting greater cyber literacy among youth. The good news is that thousands of individuals, organizations, and communities are coming up with great ideas for how to confront these problems; many of them supported by the NSF. Unfortunately, most will encounter significant roadblocks to success along the way, but not because of bad ideas. Most change agents falter along the lengthy and often convoluted pathway between idea and successful execution because they bump up against barriers they do not expect or know how to overcome. This Pilot and Feasibility Study will create Learning Solutions, a multi-platform program designed to support those people and entities engaged in work that cultivates the public's understanding of, engagement with, and interest in STEM fields and STEM-related information. First, the project will systematically identify the real, but often unspoken issues that individuals, organizations, and communities run into as they work to bring about significant and impactful STEM-related change. Then, the project will assemble, curate, and make digitally available a collection of tools, resources and strategies designed to help someone understand and resolve these kinds of issues if and when they arise. By better understanding the experiences of change agents, the challenges they face, and the creative learning solutions they enact, this project will ensure that more change agents successfully access the learning know-how they need, when they need it, in curated, easy-to-digest formats. This award is funded by the Advanced Informal STEM Learning program which contributes to STEM engagement and literacy, workforce development, and educational success via supporting new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of STEM learning in informal environments. Learning Solutions will build capacity and will help more professionals successfully bring more good ideas to fruition.
The target audience for this Pilot & Feasibility phase of Learning Solutions will be STEM professionals working at the intersection of STEM and society across diverse sectors. It will focus on change agents -- individuals who want to be or who already are engaged in community-based, action-oriented STEM-related change projects, whether acting on their own, within an organization, or as part of a broader community of organizations. To achieve the goal of making STEM-related change easier to accomplish, Learning Solutions will implement a multi-step process. With input from five Critical Advisors, 20 Key Informants, and ultimately hundreds of change agents, project staff will: 1) Utilize an iterative process of in-depth interviews and broadly disseminated surveys to identify the major understandings, skills and processes that current and past STEM-related change agents have experienced as impediments to their success; 2) Determine how best to describe and categorize these issues across diverse problem spaces; 3) Select twelve issues, based on which are the most frequently mentioned and/or perceived to be the most critical or challenging, and research and curate the best and most authoritative resources responsive to these dozen issues; and finally, 4) Use a variety of platforms (e.g., social media, traditional media, digital and in print publications, podcasts, panels, and group presentations) and utilization metrics to ensure effective digital delivery of potential solutions to the selected issues. By the project's end, we will have identified some of the key challenges the STEM-related change agents who work in communities across America regularly encounter, as well as the feasibility of developing a mechanism for helping those change agents discover preexisting and readily accessible resources to assist them in resolving those challenges.
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.
DATE:
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TEAM MEMBERS:
John H FalkElysa CorinStacey Sheehan
This project will teach foundational computational thinking (CT) concepts to preschoolers by creating a series of mobile apps to guide families through sequenced sets of videos and hands-on activities. To support families at home it would also develop a new library model to build librarians' computational thinking content knowledge and self-efficacy so they can support parents' efforts with their children. Computational thinking is a an increasingly critical skill for learning and success in the workforce. It includes the ability to identify problems, brainstorm and generate solutions and processes that can be communicated and followed by computers or humans. There are few projects that introduce computational thinking to young children. Very little research has been done on the ways that parents can facilitate children's engagement in CT skills. And developing a model that trains and supports librarians to become virtual coaches of parents as they engage with their children in CT, will leverage and build the expertise of librarians. The project's target audience includes parents and children living in rural areas where access to CT learning may be very limited. Project partners include the EDC, a major research organization, the American Library Association, and BUILD, a national association that promotes collaborations across library, kindergarten readiness, and public media programming.
The formative research study asks: 1) What supports do parents of preschoolers in rural communities need in order to effectively engage in CT with their children at home? and 2) How can libraries in rural communities support joint CT exploration in family homes? The summative research study asks: 3) how can an intervention that combines media resources, mobile technology, and library supports foster sustained joint parent/child engagement and positive attitudes around CT? Researchers will develop a parent survey, adapting several scales from previously developed instruments that ask parents to report on children's use of CT-related vocabulary and CT-related attitudes and dispositions. Survey scales will assess librarians' attitudes towards CT, as well as their self-efficacy in supporting parents in CT in a virtual environment. During the formative study, EDC will pilot-test survey scales with 30 parents and 6 librarians in rural MS and KY. Analyses will be primarily qualitative and will be geared toward producing rapid feedback for the development team. Quantitative analyses will be used on parent app use, using both time query and back-end data, exploring factors associated with time spent using apps. The summative study will evaluate how the new media resources and mobile technology, in combination with the library virtual implementation model, support families' joint engagement with CT, and positive attitudes around CT. The researchers will recruit 125 low-income families with 4- to 5-year-old children in rural MS and KY to participate in the study. They will randomly assign families within each library to the full intervention condition, including media resources, mobile technology, and library support delivered through the virtual implementation model, or the media and mobile-technology-only condition. This design will allow researchers to understand more fully the additional benefit of library support for rural families' sustained engagement, and conversely, see the comparative impact of a media- and mobile-technology only intervention, given that some families might not be able to access virtual or physical library support.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program 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 project is co-funded by the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program, which supports projects that build understandings of practices, program elements, contexts and processes contributing to increasing students' knowledge and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and information and communication technology (ICT) careers.
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.
Upon entering the STEM learning landscape, science museums enjoyed marked growth in public utilization and impact. However, since the turn of the century, reductions in visitor numbers, aging infrastructures and pedagogical approaches have made many in the sector question how these institutions might best evolve to stay relevant in a changing world. Although there have been numerous discussions around re-thinking practices and even some movement towards actualizing much of this rhetoric, overall, most institutions have largely continued business as usual. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic introduced additional challenges and created an important inflection point for science museums, a moment when all can and should seriously address not just the immediate future, but also the longer-term future of the next decade and beyond. This convening will meet this opportunity by virtually bringing together 50-60 diverse (expertise and role, background, demographics, geography) thoughtful STEM learning professionals to collaboratively re-imagine the future of the science museum community, in particular the particularly vulnerable small to medium size science museum sector. Participants will be asked to think strategically (rather than just tactically) about how science museums in the coming decade(s) can fulfill their STEM learning missions while truly serving the needs of all segments of their communities; particularly those who have been historically under-represented. The project will involve participants in an 8-step process involving pre-meeting readings, online discussions, large and small-group meetings, written and online dissemination efforts; with opportunities for local and national input throughout. The Science Museum Futures project represents an opportunity for the science museum community to seriously and collectively address its future; not just the very short-term future, but the longer-term future of the next decade and beyond.
To remain an important part of the STEM learning landscape, the future demands that science museums re-think how they fulfill their STEM education roles in four key areas:
Understanding -- facilitating STEM learning so all users can more clearly understand how an understanding of science and technology supports both a healthier and richer life;
Future Actions -- supporting evidence-based solutions to challenges that currently face every community;
Social Cohesion -- making it possible for all sectors of society to experience STEM learning as a natural an integral part of their family, group and community's heritage and life experience; and
Physical Security -- ensuring that all users have opportunities to gather (physically or virtually), interact, explore and learn STEM within a safe, healthy, anxiety-free and restorative environment. Going forward, science museums will need to re-envision how all four of areas can be addressed, not just individually, but collectively as core, interdependent goals.
To ensure broad applicability and inclusion, diverse community voices and responses will be integrated throughout the process through a series of online focus groups and conversations with both members of the science museum community and the wider public science museums seek to serve. The Science Museum Futures project will create an initial Science Museums Futures Action Plan that will provide science museum practitioners with new approaches, processes and tools designed to enhance the ways they support STEM learning. All materials will be both vetted and disseminated with the aid of project partners through on-line webinars, focus groups, blog posts on social media such as LinkedIn and Facebook, conference presentations and organizational newsletters. This project seeks to help initiate an on-going effort to support science museums, allowing them to rethink and reshape their STEM learning offerings in ways that ensure that they are increasingly relevant and central to the lives of ALL members of their communities.
This conference grant 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. One of AISL's five priority goals is to invest in projects that seek to build infrastructure and/or capacity in the field, including efforts supporting collaborations, connections, and professional networks within and across sectors of informal STEM education. This project is also supported by the Education and Human Resources directorate's Accelerating Discovery in Education efforts to enable research in fundamental topics addressing persistent issues in the learning and teaching of STEM content as well as frontier topics that envision STEM learning environments of the future, push the boundaries of the use of technology in learning, and examine how learning will change because of advances in technology and developments in Industries of the Future.
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.
This RAPID award is made by the AISL program in the Division of Research on Learning in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, using funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. COVID-19 presents a national threat to the health of children and families, presenting serious implications for the mental and physical health of children. This project addresses two critical aspects of the impact on COVID-19 on families: (a) the large-scale shift to at-home learning based on nationwide school closures and (b) the critical need for families to understand the basic science of virus transmission and prevention. To address these needs, the project team will develop a series of STEM activities for families with children in grades K-6 that make use of items readily available in most households. The activities help children and their families learn about viruses, virus transmission, and virus prevention while also developing other STEM-skills, particularly related to engineering design. Importantly, the project team also considers the emotional well-being of children and families during the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Led by researchers from Indiana University and Binghamton University, and experts in educational resource development from Science Friday (a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the public's access to science and scientific information through podcasts, digital videos, original web articles, and educational resources for teachers and informal educators) the project is further supported by partnerships with the New York Hall of Science, Amazeum (AR), the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (ME), The Tech Museum of Innovation (CA), the Indiana State Museum, and Kopernik Observatory Science Center (NY). The activities will be shared with families through live-streamed web sessions that introduce the activity, give tips to adults for facilitation, share a bit on related STEM careers and engage the audience in dialog about the activity and their current experiences. Versions of the sessions that are recorded will be edited and include closed-captioning and subtitles in multiple languages before being posted on platforms such as YouTube.
This project uses a design-based research approach to investigate strategies for enabling families to actively engage with STEM while home and away from their traditional institutions during a period of crisis. The research components focus on:
Engagement: How do families engage in the activity tasks, in terms of processes, practices, and use of resources? Who participated, why did they choose to participate and how did they engage (including modification of activities)? What barriers prevented interested families from completing activities?
Impact: How did the activities change participants? feelings of: a) efficacy around STEM and b) connectedness/ isolation, during extended school closures?
The Activities: Which activities had the greatest uptake? How many activity ideas were submitted by those outside of the team? What was the age/content focus of each of these activities?
The researchers will analyze social media data (including data on resource downloads and use of tracked links, YouTube and Facebook views, comment threads during livestreams and Likes/Shares/Follows across social media sites) to refine and improve the activities and programming as well as learn about the ways families are engaging in the activities. The researchers will solicit survey responses from website visitors to gather more information on participants, why they participated, how they engaged and how the activities impacted participants? efficacy around STEM and their feelings of connectedness or isolation. The researchers will also ask participants to submit images, videos and text that describes what they are making and their process along the way. Analysis of this data would lead to insights on how children and families use STEM language and practices; how children and families ask questions and use COVID-19-related and other information as part of their design work; and how ideas are formed, shaped and refined as families engage in design and making. While the project focuses on a unique opportunity to collect data on family STEM engagement as families respond to disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, this project and its findings will provide a knowledge base that can be utilized to inform future responses to national emergencies, other work aimed at promoting family learning at home, and approaches to supporting children in open-ended problem solving.
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.
We found that the learners seeking out resources to teach themselves to code were generally college educated women who were motived either by the desire to be able to read and understand the code written by hired developers or the desire to become developers themselves. The importance of a female-focused learning setting was mixed; while most women acknowledged a more comfortable atmosphere created by such a setting, very few cited that as a primary reason for joining the group.
All learner participants in this study persisted through the ten weeks of the Women’s Coaching and Learning
In 2016, ETR received a National Science Foundation grant to study, under Principal Investigator Louise Ann (“Lou Ann”) Lyon, PhD, a newly formed, real-world organization dedicated to helping women in the workforce learn to write computer code. This project formed a partnership between a research team with experience in computer science (CS) education and learning sciences research and a newly fashioned practitioner team focused on building a grassroots, informal, volunteer group created to help women help themselves and others learn to write computer code. This research-practitioner
Twin Cities PBS BRAINedu: A Window into the Brain/Una ventana al cerebro, is a national English/Spanish informal education project providing culturally competent programming and media resources about the brain’s structure and function to Hispanic middle school students and their families. The project responds to the need to eliminate proven barriers to Hispanic students’ STEM/neuroscience education, increase Hispanic participation in neuroscience and mental health careers and increase Hispanic utilization of mental health resources.
The program’s goals are to engage Hispanic learners and families by
empowering informalSTEM educators to provide culturally competent activities about the brain’s structure and function;
demonstrating neuroscience and mental health career options; and
reducing mental health stigma, thus increasing help-seeking behavior.
The hypothesis underpinning BRAINedu’s four-year project plan is that participating Hispanic youth and families will be able to explain how the brain works and describe specific brain disorders; demonstrate a higher level of interest of neuroscience and mental health careers and be more willing to openly discuss and seek support for brain disorders and mental health conditions.
To achieve program goals, Twin Cities PBS (TPT) will leverage existing partnerships with Hispanic-serving youth educational organizations to provide culturally competent learning opportunities about brain health to Hispanic students and families. TPT will partner with neuroscience and mental health professionals, cultural competency experts and Hispanic-serving informal STEM educators to complete the following objectives:
Develop bilingual educational resources for multigenerational audiences;
Provide professional development around neuroscience education to informal educators, empowering them to implement programming with Hispanic youth and families, and
Develop role model video profiles of Hispanic neuroscience professionals, and help partner organizations produce autobiographical student videos.
We will employ rigorous evaluation strategies to measure the project’s impact on Hispanic participants: a) understanding of neuroscience and brain health, particularly around disorders that disproportionately affect the Hispanic community; b) motivation to pursue neuroscience or mental health career paths; and c) mental health literacy and help-seeking behavior. The project will directly reach 72 Hispanic-serving informal STEM educators and public health professionals, and 200 children and 400 parents in underserved urban, suburban and rural communities nationwide.
Fostering greater inclusion in science creates benefits for both science and society. In this Innovations and Development project, the University of Utah will investigate how to sustain and scale the STEM Ambassador Program (STEMAP), begun in 2016 with AISL funding. STEMAP developed an innovative process to train scientists to engage members of the public, who cannot or do not gain access to science via conventional science education venues (such as museums, schools, zoos), by implementing activities in non-traditional settings. The 65 scientists trained by the initial STEMAP effort effectively engaged in over 45 settings including an affordable housing development, a youth residential treatment center, a state prison, a cooking class, a daycare facility, and several senior centers. The number of scientists applying to the program quickly exceeded STEMAP's capacity. Other institutions expressed interest in replicating the training. This project will explore strategies for scaling and sustaining public engagement training to support more scientists who can engage more people in more venues. Outcomes will serve to inform the broader implementation of STEMAP and the efforts of other public engagement programs, many of which face similar scaling and sustainability challenges.
Scaling and sustaining public engagement of science (PES) programs is a central challenge for many in the informal science learning community. This project will explore strategies to scale and sustain the STEM Ambassador Program. Research questions include: (1) How do different program formats increase or restrict program capacity and engagement outcomes? (2) What benefits accrue to scientists and their institutions by participating in public engagement in science activities that might serve as motivators to continue these activities? (3) Are funding and organizational models developed in business and other professional settings applicable to sustaining these programs? To address scalability, this project will explore the effectiveness of three dissemination formats: (1) the creation of a mentorship program for in-person trainees, (2) a train-the-trainer approach, and (3) online training with in-person mentorship. The project team will create an evaluation toolkit with participant surveys, rubrics for observers, and "on-the-spot" assessment tools developed under AISL Award 1811022 to assess the effectiveness of engagement activities delivered by trainees in each of the three formats. To address sustainability, the project team will document the values of public engagement training to both the participating scientists and their institutions via surveys and interviews. Consultants from the business sectors will create a PES Campus Council to explore possible financial, organizational, and leadership plans that will help sustain engagement efforts. Outcomes will be published in peer-reviewed journals and compiled into a dissemination framework to inform actions to scale and sustain STEMAP and other public engagement of science programs to engage more hard-to-reach audiences. Inverness Research will serve as the project's external evaluator.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.