SCC: I4all (Interests for All): A Smart Socio-Technical Infrastructure to Identify, Cultivate, and Sustain Youth STEAM Interests in a Diverse Midsized American City

This project is a Smart and Connected Communities award. The community is part of Evanston, Illinois and is composed of the lead partners described below:

• EvanSTEM which is a in-school/out of school time (OST) program to improve access and engagement for students in Evanston who have underperformed or been underrepresented in STEM.
• McGaw YMCA which consists of 12,000 families serving 20,000 individuals and supporting technology and makerspace activities (MetaMedia) in a safe community atmosphere.
• Office of Community Education Partnerships (OCEP) at Northwestern University which provides support for the university and community to collaborate on research, teaching, and service initiatives.

This partnership will develop a new approach to learning enagement through the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) interests of all young people in Evanston. This project is entitled Interests for All (I4All) and builds upon existing research results of the two Principal Investigators (PIs) and previous partnerships between the lead partners (EvanSTEM and MetaMedia had OCEP as a founding partner). I4All also brings together Evanston school districts, OST prividers, the city, and Evanston's Northwestern University as participants.

In particular the project builds on PI Pinkard's Cities of Learning project and co-PI Stevens' FUSE Studios project. Both of these projects have explicit goals to broaden participation in STEAM pursuits, a goal that is significantly advanced through I4All. In this project, I4All infrastructure will be evaluated using quantitative metrics that will tell the researchers whether and to what degree Evanston youth are finding and developing their STEAM interests and whether the I4All infrastructure supports a significantly more equitable distribution of opportunities to youth. The researchers will also conduct in depth qualitative case studies of youth interest development. These longitudinal studies will complement the quantitative metrics of participation and give measures that will be used in informing changes in I4All as part of the PIs Design Based Implementation Research approach. The artifacts produced in I4All include FUSE studio projects, software infrastructure to guide the students through OST and in-school activities and to provide to the students actionable information as to logistics for participation in I4All activities, and data that will be available to all stakeholders to evaluate the effectiveness of I4All. Additionally, this research has the potential to provide for scaling this model to different communities, leveraging the OST network in one community to begin to offer professional development more widely throughout the school districts and as an exemplar for other districts. These research results could also affect strategies and policies created by local school officials and community organizations regarding how to work together to create local learning environments to create an ecosystem where formal and informal learning spaces support and reinforce STEAM knowledge.

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.

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