As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative resources for use in a variety of settings. Informal STEM learning opportunities are often rare in rural locations where the early childhood education system is also under-resourced. Through partnerships with educational researchers, early math educators, pediatric health experts, and pediatric clinics, this project will develop and study a new opportunity for informal math learning. The project will work with pediatric clinics that serve rural immigrant families who are racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse. The project leverages the high levels of trust many caregivers have in their child’s pediatrician to improve math learning during critical early years. This project will build on a previous program where physician text messages to caregivers supported youth literacy development. In this instance the project will support caregivers’ math interactions with their 3- and 4-year-olds to cultivate children's math knowledge and skills. The text messaging program will be grounded in research in child development, mathematics learning, parenting practices, and adult behavior change. Texts will also provide caregiver supports for how to engage their children in mathematical activates in their everyday lives and provide information about the important skills children are developing. Text messages will be co-developed with caregiver input, and focus on content underlying mathematical development such as Number Sense, Classification and Patterning, Measurement, Geometry, and Reasoning. Caregivers will receive text messages from their pediatric clinics three times a week for eight months. For example, three related texts supporting Number Sense include: “FACT: Kids enjoy counting and it prepares them for K! Mealtimes are a fun time to practice counting objects;” “TIP: At a meal, say: Can you count all the cups on the table? All the plates? What else can you count? (Forks) Tell them: Great job!” and “GROWTH: You are helping kids to count & get ready for K. At the park, ask: How many bikes are there? How many birds? Count together & find out!” Throughout the planning and implementation phases of the project the team will work closely with early education math experts, key advisors, and caregivers to ensure the text messaging program is tailored to meet the cultural, linguistic, and contextual needs of rural caregivers and children.
The project will research impacts of the text messaging program on children, caregivers, and clinical staff. First, the project will investigate the impact of the texting program on children through a randomized trial, and pre-and-post measures of early childhood math skills and abilities. Second, using interviews at baseline and in a 9-month follow-up, the project will study the texting program’s impact on caregivers’ perceptions regarding the importance of math learning for young children. Third, the project will explore the impact of the text messaging program on health professionals’ understanding of math learning in early childhood by collecting qualitative data and assessing attitudes about the clinic’s role in supporting early math. Caregivers and clinic staff will also participate in focus groups to better understand impacts for each of these groups. The project will reach 1000 families, who will be randomly assigned to treatment or control groups through block-randomization, stratified by caregiver language and child’s age. This parent-informed project will build evidence toward new approaches to promoting early math in the pediatric clinic, an informal environment that can reach all families and can leverage innovative technology. Findings will be shared widely though a communication and engagement plan that includes children, caregivers, physicians and clinic staff, informal STEM educators, researchers, and policy makers.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Lisa ChamberlainSusanna LoebJaime Peterson
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Data science is ever-present in modern life. The need to learn with and about data science is becoming increasingly important in a world where the quantity of data is constantly growing, where one’s own data are often being harvested and marketed, where data science career opportunities are rapidly increasing, and where understanding statistics, data sources, and data representation is integral to understanding STEM and the world around us. Museums have the opportunity to play a critical role in introducing the public to data science concepts in ways that center personal relevance, social connections and collaborative learning. However, data science and statistics are difficult concepts to distill and provide meaningful engagement with during the brief learning experiences typical to science museums. This Pilot and Feasibility study brings together data scientists, data science educators, and museum exhibit designers to consider these questions:
What are the important data science concepts for the public to explore and understand in museum exhibits?
How can museum exhibits be designed to support visitors with diverse backgrounds and experiences to engage with these data science concepts?
What principles can shape these designs to promote broadening participation in data science specifically and STEM more broadly?
This Pilot and Feasibility project combines multidisciplinary expert convening, feasibility testing, and early exploratory prototyping around the focal topic of data science exhibits. Project partners, TERC, the Museum of Science, Boston, and The Tech Interactive in San Jose will engage in an iterative process to develop a theoretical grounding and practical guidance for museum practitioners. The project will include two convenings, bringing together teams of experts from the fields of data science, data science education and museum exhibit design. Prior to the first convening, an initial literature summary and a survey of convening participants will be conducted, culminating in a preliminary list of big ideas about data science. Periodically, participants will have the opportunity to rank, annotate and expand this list, as a form of ongoing data collection. During the convenings, participants will explore the preliminary list, share related work from the three disciplines, engage with related data science activities in small groups, and work together to build consensus around promising data science topics and approaches for exhibits. Participant evaluation will allow for iterative improvement of the convenings and the capture of missed points or overlooked topics. After each convening, museum partners will create prototypes that respond to the convening conversations. Prototypes will be pilot tested (evaluated) with an intentionally recruited group of families that includes both frequent visitors and those who are less likely to visit the museum; diversity in terms of race, languages and dis/ability will be reflected in selection. Pilot data collection will consist of structured observations and interviews. Results from the first round of prototyping will be shared with convening participants as a way to modify the list of big ideas and to further interrogate the feasibility of communicating these ideas in an exhibit format. Results from the convenings and from both rounds of prototyping will be combined in a guiding document that will be shared on all three partner websites, and more broadly with the informal STEM learning field. The team will also host a workshop for practitioners interested in designing data science exhibits, and present at a conference focused on museum exhibits and their design.
We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in the United States, focusing on the role of inventive ability (“nature”) vs. environment (“nurture”). Using deidentified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records, we first show that children’s chances of becoming inventors vary sharply with characteristics at birth, such as their race, gender, and parents’ socioeconomic class. For example, children from high-income (top 1%) families are ten times as likely to become inventors as those from below-median income families. These gaps persist even
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alex BellRaj ChettyXavier JaravelNeviana PetkovaJohn Van Reenen
This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and is supported by SBE's Developmental Sciences program and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources' (EHR) Advancing Informal STEM Learning program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Sandra D. Simpkins at the University of California, Irvine, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist exploring high-quality and culturally responsive, math afterschool program (ASP) practices for under-represented minority (URM) youth. Mathematical proficiency is the foundation of youth's STEM pursuits. Yet today, far too many youth do not pursue STEM based on a perception that they are "not good at math". Students need to engage in contexts that spark their interest and their continued mastery and growth. ASPs are settings for such dynamic opportunities, particularly for URM students such as Latinos who attend lower quality schools and do not feel supported. In college, URM students often struggle with uninspiring and culturally incongruent STEM learning environments. The intergenerational nature of university-based STEM ASPs, whereby younger students are paired with undergraduate (UG) mentors, are opportunities to support both K-12 and UG students' motivational beliefs in math and STEM more broadly. This project will examine these intergenerational developmental processes in the context of a math enrichment ASP located at a Hispanic-Serving Institution. By studying how ASPs can serve as an important lever for promoting URM students' access and success in STEM, this project seeks to meaningfully inform efforts to broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in these fields.
This project seeks to understand how participating in a math enrichment ASP supports both youth participants' and UG mentors' motivational beliefs in math; to describe high-quality and culturally responsive practices; and to understand how to support the effectiveness of youth-staff relationships. To accomplish these research objectives, data will be collected from both youth participants and UG mentors through multiple methods including surveys, in-depth interviews, participant-observations, and video observations of youth-staff interactions. This project will add to our understanding of university-ASP partnerships. Further, the knowledge gained from this study will impact the larger landscape of practice and research on STEM ASPs by 1) addressing critical gaps in the current literature on high-quality and culturally responsive STEM ASP practices and 2) informing ASP staff development training. Overall, this mixed methods project will provide critical and rich information on the ways that ASPs can effectively deliver on its promise of promoting positive development for all youth, especially URM youth who may need and benefit from these spaces the most. The invaluable insight garnered from this study will be disseminated to traditional academic audiences to advance knowledge, as well as to local, state, and national organizations to inform the larger landscape of practice in STEM ASPs.
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.
In this NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot the institutions of "Building on Strengths" propose to build and pilot the infrastructure, induction process, and early implementation of the Mathematician Affiliates of Color network. This network will consist of mathematicians of color from across academia and industry who want to invest time in, share their expertise with, and learn from students of color and their teachers. Building on Strengths will draw on basic needs cognitive theory to support these interactions and will focus narrowly on short and moderate term collaborations (from one month to a semester) between visiting mathematicians, students, and collaborating teachers that will involve three specific types of interactions: doing mathematics together as a habits-of-mind practice, talking about the discipline of mathematics and the experiences of mathematicians of color in that discipline, and relationship-building activities. The foundational infrastructure developed in the project will include systems for recruitment, selection and induction, a process for pairing affiliate mathematicians with classrooms, and support structures for the collaborations. To support the goals of the network a prototype virtual space will be developed in which real-time artifacts can be collected and shared from the classroom interactions. While Building on Strengths will pilot this program in the secondary context, once a viable model is established, scaling to K-16, as well as to other STEM fields, will be possible.
The research study in the project uses an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design and will be conducted in two phases. In the first, quantitative, phase of the study the following questions will be addressed: (1) Is the teacher-mathematician collaboration associated with a change for students in perception of basic human needs being met, mathematical or racial identities, or beliefs about mathematics or who can do mathematics? (2) Is the teacher-mathematician collaboration associated with a change for adults in perceptions of the role of basic needs or in adults' identities or beliefs about mathematics or who can do mathematics? In the second, qualitative, phase of the study, two types of interactions will be selected for in-depth qualitative study, identifying cases where groups of students experienced changes in their needs, identity, and beliefs. In this qualitative case-centered phase, the following questions will be explored: (1) What is the nature of the mentor-student interaction? (2) What aspects of the intervention do students feel are most relevant to them? (3) How did the implementation of the intervention differ from the anticipated intervention? The results of the study will help improve the infrastructure for, and better support the interactions between, mathematicians of color, students of color and their mathematics teachers; the outcomes will also shed light on how students experience their interactions.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Michael YoungMaisha MosesAlbert CuocoEden Badertscher
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
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative resources for use in a variety of settings. This proposed effort embraces broad participation by the three Ute tribes, History Colorado, and scientists in the field of archaeology to investigate and integrate traditional ecological knowledge and contemporary Western science. The project will preserve knowledge from the Ute peoples of Colorado and Utah, including traditional technology, ethnobotany, engineering and math. Results from this project will inform educational efforts in similar communities.
This project will build on the long-standing collaborations between History Colorado (HC), the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and Ute Indian Tribe, Uintah & Ouray Reservation, and the Dominguez Archaeological Research Group DARG). HC will implement and evaluate a regional informal learning collaboration focused on Ute traditional and contemporary STEM knowledge serving over 128,000 learners through tribal programs, local history museums and educational networks. This project will advance the understanding of integrated knowledge and the role of Ute people as STEM learners and practitioners. This Informal Science Learning project will increase lifelong STEM learning in rural communities and create a replicable model for collaboration among tribes, history museums, and scientists.
This presentation given at the 2013 Materials Research Society (MRS) Spring Meeting examines evidence for the effectiveness of STEM education programs at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.
Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF),The STEM Pathways project focused on exploring strategies through which at-risk and incarcerated Hispanic youth could be engaged around STEM careers, understand the education, training, and skills they would need to attain them, and think that such a path was a future possibility. To this end, the project and evaluation teams collaborated on a literature review, the development of a logic model, and the design, implementation, and evaluation of a diverse set of program activities that included media, art, and flash mentoring with STEM role models
Blackside, Inc. is producing a television series and an outreach component about minority scientists. The goals of the six-hour prime-time series, "Breakthrough: People of Color in Science," are to raise the consciousness of the general public that is largely unaware of the significant contribution of scientists of color and to provide role models that will encourage young people to consider science and engineering careers. The programs will feature the work of contemporary African-American, Latino and Native American scientists and engineers who are active in cell biology, astrophysics, applied mathematics and other fields of science. The stories of their scientific achievements will present both women and men, old and young, at different stages of their careers, and will explore the professional, educational and social worlds they live and work in. Viewers will have immediate access to a comprehensive follow-up effort that will connect them with local, regional and national opportunities in informal science education. Blackside will collect information from existing resources and institutions as well using source material from several extensively researched databases geared toward minority students. Using all of this information, Blackside will create a metadatabase that will connect teachers, parents, mentors, and students to a rich variety of educational programs: extracurricular classes, mentoring programs, national science contests, teacher training workshops, and a myriad of on-line services. To ensure immediate access and, where possible, to customize the information to viewers needs, Blackside will disseminate it through a variety of means: an 800-number with a direct fax-back capability, an on-line service, a CD-ROM, and a printed packet delivered by mail. A principal target audience is gatekeepers in students' lives: parents, teachers, and scientists interested in becoming mentors. The target audience also includes students from fourth th rough twelfth grades. Joseph Blatt will serve a PI for this project and co-executive producer for the television series. His previous experience include serving as executive producer of "Scientific American FRONTIERS" and as a producer/director for several NOVA programs. He also has been executive producer for three television series/college credit courses in mathematics. Henry Hampton will be the other co-executive producer. He was the creator and executive producer of the 14-hour, award winning series, "Eyes on the Prize," about America's civil rights movement. The principal educational consultant will be Ceasar McDowell, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Michael Ambrosino, the original executive producer of NOVA, will be the principal science television consultant.
Having developed the concept of near-peer mentorship at the middle school/high school level and utilized it in a summer science education enhancement program now called Gains in the Education of Mathematics and Science or GEMS at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), it is now our goal to ultimately expand this program into an extensive, research institute-based source of young, specially selected, near-peer mentors armed with kits, tools, teacher-student developed curricula, enthusiasm, time and talent for science teaching in the urban District of Columbia Public Schools (specific schools) and several more rural disadvantaged schools (Frederick and Howard Counties) in science teaching. We describe this program as a new in-school component, involving science clubs and lunch programs, patterned after our valuable summer science training modules and mentorship program. Our in-house program is at its maximum capacity at the Institute. Near-peer mentors will work in WRAIR's individual laboratories while perfecting/adapting hands-on activities for the new GEMS-X program to be carried out at McKinley Technology HS, Marian Koshland Museum, Roots Charter School and Lincoln Junior HS in DC, West Frederick Middle School, Frederick, MD and Folly Quarter Middle School and Glenelg HS, in Howard County, MD. Based on local demographics in these urban/rural areas, minority and disadvantaged youth, men and women, may choose science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) careers with increasing frequency after participating, at such an early age, in specific learning in the quantitative disciplines. Many of these students take challenging courses within their schools, vastly improve their standardized test scores, take on internship opportunities, are provided recommendations from scientists and medical staff and ultimately are able to enter health professions that were previously unattainable. Relevance to Public Health: The Gains in the Education of Mathematis and Science (GEMS) program educates a diverse student population to benefit their science education and ultimately may improve the likelihood of successfully entry into a health or health-related professions for participating individuals. Medical education has been show to improve public health.