We explored the potential of science to facilitate social inclusion with teenagers who had interrupted their studies before the terms set for compulsory education. The project was carried out from 2014 to 2018 within SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies), a scientific and higher education institution in physics, mathematics and neurosciences, and was focused on the production of video games using Scratch. The outcomes are encouraging: through active engagement, the participants have succeeded in completing complex projects, taking responsibilities and interacting with people
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Simona CerratoFrancesca RizzatoLucia TealdiElena Canel
Research that seeks to understand classroom interactions often relies on video recordings of classrooms so that researchers can document and analyze what teachers and students are doing in the learning environment. When studies are large scale, this analysis is challenging in part because it is time-consuming to review and code large quantities of video. For example, hundreds of hours of videotaped interaction between students working in an after-school program for advancing computational thinking and engineering learning for Latino/a students. This project is exploring the use of computer-assisted methods for video analysis to support manual coding by researchers. The project is adapting procedures used for computer-aided diagnosis systems for medical systems. The computer-assisted process creates summaries that can then be used by researchers to identify critical events and to describe patterns of activities in the classroom such as students talking to each other or writing during a small group project. Creating the summaries requires analyzing video for facial recognition, motion, color and object identification. The project will investigate what parts of student participation and teaching can be analyzed using computer-assisted video analysis. This project is supported by NSF's EHR Core Research (ECR) program, the STEM+C program and the AISL program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. The project is funded by the STEM+Computing program, which seeks to address emerging challenges in computational STEM areas through the applied integration of computational thinking and computing activities within disciplinary STEM teaching and learning in early childhood education through high school (preK-12). 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.
The video analysis systems will provide video summarizations for specific activities which will allow researchers to use these results to quantify student participation and document teaching practices that support student learning. This will support the analysis of large volumes of video data that are often time-consuming to analyze. The video analysis system will identify objects in the scene and then use measures of distances between objects and other tracking methods to code different activities (e.g., typing, talking, interaction between the student and a facilitator). The two groups of research questions are as follows. (1) How can human review of digital videos benefit from computer-assisted video analysis methods? Which aspects of video summarization (e.g., detected activities) can help reduce the time it takes to review the videos? Beyond audio analytics, what types of future research in video summarization can help reduce the time that it takes to review videos? (2) How can we quantify student participation using computer-assisted video analysis methods? What aspects of student participation can be accurately measures by computer-assisted video analysis methods? The video to be used for this study is drawn from a project focused on engineering and computational thinking learning for Latino/a students in an after-school setting. Hundreds of hours of video are available to be reviewed and analyzed to design and refine the system. The resulting coding will also help document patterns of engagement in the learning environment.
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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Marios PattichisSylvia Celedon-PattichisCarlos LopezLeiva
This pilot study will examine the effectiveness of an innovative applied social change, community and technology based program on marginalized youths' access, interest, efficacy and motivation to learn and engage in digital technology applications. Using stratified near-peer and peer-to-peer mentoring approaches, the pilot builds on extant literature that indicates that peer-supported hands-on mentoring and experiences can alleviate some barriers to youth engagement in digital technologies, particularly among underrepresented groups. In this project, undergraduate students will mentor and work collaboratively with high school youth primarily of Hispanic descent and community-based organizations to develop creative technology-based solutions to address social issues and challenges within their local communities, culminating in events called Impactathons. These community-hosted local and state-wide events set this pilot project apart from similar work in the field. The Impactathons not only provide a space for intellectual discourse and problem-solving among the undergraduate-youth-community partners but the Impactathons will also codify expertise from scientists, social scientists, technologists, community leaders, and other stakeholders to develop technology-based solutions with real world application. If successful, a distal outcome will be increased youth interest in digital technologies and related fields. In the short term, favorable findings will provide preliminary evidence of success and lay the foundation for a more extensive study in the future.
This pilot project is a collaboration between the Everett Program, a student-led program for Technology and Social Change at the University of California Santa Cruz - a Hispanic Serving Institution - and the Digital NEST, a non-profit, high-tech youth career development and collaboration space for young people ages 14-24. Through this partnership and other recruitment efforts, an estimated 70-90 individuals will participate in the Impactathon pilot program over two years. Nearly two-thirds of the participants are expected to be undergraduate students. They will receive extensive training in near-peer and peer-to-peer mentoring and serve as mentors for and co-innovation developers with the high school youth participants. The undergraduates and youth will partner with local community organizations to identify a local social challenge that can be addressed through a technology-based solution. The emergent challenges will vary and could span the spectrum of STEM and applied social science topics of interest. Working in informal contexts (i.e., afterschool. weekend), the undergraduate-youth-community partner teams will work collaboratively to develop practical technology-based solutions to real world challenges. The teams will convene three times per year, locally and statewide, at student and community led Impactathons to share their work and glean insights from other teams to refine their innovations. In parallel, the research team will examine the effectiveness of the Impactathon model in increasing the undergraduate and youths' interest, motivation, excitement, engagement and learning of digital technologies. In addition to the research, the formative and summative evaluations should provide valuable insights on the effectiveness of the model and its potential for expansion and replication.
The project is co-funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) Program and STEM +C. The AISL program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. STEM + C focuses on research and development of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to the integration of computing within STEM teaching and learning for preK-12 students in both formal and informal settings.
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 Research in Service to Practice project 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. 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 project will research the educational impact of social robots in informal learning environments, with applications to how social robots can improve participation and engagement of middle-school girls in out-of-school computer science programs in under-resourced rural and urban areas. The use of robots to improve STEM outcomes has focused on having learners program robots as tools to accomplish tasks (e.g., play soccer). An alternate approach views robots as social actors that can respond intelligently to users. By designing a programmable robot with social characteristics, the project aims to create a culturally-responsive curriculum for Latina, African American, and Native American girls who have been excluded by approaches that separate technical skill and social interaction. The knowledge produced by this project related to the use and benefits of social programmable robots has the potential to impact the many after-school and weekend programs that attempt to engage learners in STEM ideas using programmable robot curricula.
The project robot, named Cozmo, will be programmed using a visual programming language and will convey emotion with facial expressions, sounds, and movements. Middle school girls will engage in programming activities, collaborative reflection, and interact with college women mentors trained to facilitate the course. The project will investigate whether the socially expressive Cozmo improves computer science outcomes such as attitudes, self-efficacy, and knowledge among the middle school female participants differently than the non-social version. The project will also investigate whether adding rapport-building dialogue to Cozmo enhances these outcomes (e.g., when a learner succeeds in getting Cozmo to move, Cozmo can celebrate, saying "I can move! You're amazing!"). These questions will be examined research conducted with participants in multi-session after-school courses facilitated by Girl Scout troops in Arizona. The project will disseminate project research and resources widely by sharing research findings in educational and learning science journals; creating a website with open source code for programming social robots; and making project curriculum and related guidelines available to Girl Scouts and other educational programs.
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.
The goal of FLIP (Diversifying Future Leadership in the Professoriate), an NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot, is to address the broadening participation challenge of increasing the diversity of the future leadership in the professoriate in computing at research universities as a way to achieve diversity across the field. According to the 2016 CRA Taulbee Survey, only 4.3% of the tenure-track faculty at PhD-granting universities are from underrepresented minorities. This challenge is important to address because diverse faculty contributes to academia in the following critical ways: serve as excellent role models for a diverse study body, bring diverse backgrounds to the student programs and policies developed by the department, and bring diverse perspectives to the research projects and programs. Further, the focus is on research universities, because in practice, key national leadership roles, such as serving on national committees that impact thefield of computing, often come from research universities.
The shared purpose and broad vision of the FLIP launch pilot is to increase faculty diversity in computing at research universities by increasing the diversity of PhD graduates from the top producers of computing faculty. The focus is on four underrepresented groups in computing: African Americans; Hispanics; Native Americans and indigenous peoples; and Persons with Disabilities. The long-term goal is to pursue this vision through strategic partnerships with those institutions that are the top producers of computing faculty and organizations that focus on diverse students in STEM, as well as partnerships that collectively adopt proven strategies for recruiting, graduating, and preparing a diverse set of doctoral students for academic careers. The purpose of the pilot is to establish a unified approach across the different partners that will build upon proven strategies to develop novel practices for increasing the diversity of the PhD graduates from key institutions, thereby increasing the faculty diversity in computing at research universities. For the pilot, FLIP will focus on recruitment and admissions and professional development for current PhD students.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Valerie TaylorCharles IsbellJeffrey ForbesUniversity of Chicago
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
The University of California, Irvine will lead this Design and Development Launch Pilot to engage with collaborators from the Orange County CA STEM Initiative, the Orange County CA Department of Education, the Orange County CA Workforce Investment Board, the Jamboree Affordable Housing Communities, the Orangewood Foundation for Foster and Community Youth Services, OCTANE-Technology Incubator, Project Tomorrow and Growth Section. This project was created in response to the Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (NSF INCLUDES) program solicitation (NSF 16-544). The INCLUDES program is a comprehensive national initiative designed to enhance U.S. leadership in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) discoveries and innovations focused on NSF's commitment to diversity, inclusion, and broadening participation in these fields. The INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilots represent bold, innovative ways for solving a broadening participation challenge in STEM.
The full participation of all of America's STEM talent is critical to the advancement of science and engineering for national security, health and prosperity. Our nation is advancing knowledge and practices to address the computing technology education practices for recruiting, better educating, retaining and graduating a productive STEM workforce. However women who are members of underrepresented minority groups, with low socioeconomic status, historically underperform in STEM and specifically in computing technology. This project, NSF INCLUDES: Supporting Women Advancing Through Technology, has the potential to significantly advance a collaborative approach by a group of organizations to improve the success of poor, underrepresented minority women who are learning computing technology and transitioning to the STEM workforce.
The project will demonstrate the outcomes of computer science training for women, particular disenfranchised and underrepresented minority women that may be exiting foster youth services, living in low income housing, and/or having been denied access to programs particularly in technology due to their socioeconomic status. Partnering organizations will design, develop and launch a short-term, intensive training opportunity in computer science for women ages 16 to 34 who are unemployed or underemployed, and who desire to engage in upward career mobility. The program will include a replicable, custom curriculum and an educational approach that will be scalable. A boot camp will teach the fundamentals of Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, SQL, JavaScript, and AngularJS, and prepare participants for a career in web development while enabling them to keep their day jobs and have childcare provided. Educating a randomized sample treatment group of up to 150 women in this launch pilot, the partners will also offer internships and/or job shadows, where participants gain client experience, learn from more experienced developers, and continue to build their portfolios. All of the women in the program will receive information, coaching and exposure to college and career opportunities. Job placement in STEM careers is the outcome goal of this design and development launch pilot.
Lack of diversity in science and engineering education has contributed to significant inequality in a workforce that is responsible for addressing today's grand challenges. Broadening participation in these fields will promote the progress of science and advance national health, prosperity and welfare, as well as secure the national defense; however, students from underrepresented groups, including women, report different experiences than the majority of students, even within the same fields. These distinctions are not caused by the students' ability, but rather by insufficient aspiration, confidence, mentorship, instructional methods, and connection and relevance to their cultural identity. The long-term vision of this project is to amplify the impact of a successful broadening participation model at the University of Maine, the Stormwater Research Management Team (SMART). This program trains students and mentors in using science and engineering skills and technology to research water quality in their local watershed. Students engage in numerous science and technology fields: engineering design, data acquisition, analysis and visualization, chemistry, environmental science, biology, and information technology. Students also connect with a diversity of professionals in water and engineering in government, private firms and non-profits. SMART has augmented the traditional science and engineering classroom by engaging students in guided mentored apprenticeships that address community problems.
Technical
This pilot project will form a collaborative and define a strategic plan for scale-up to a national alliance to increase the long-term success rate of underrepresented minority students in science, engineering, and related fields. The collaborative of multiple and varied organizations will align to collectively contribute time and resources to a pre-college educational pathway. There are countless isolated programs that offer short-term interventions for underrepresented and minority students; however, there is lack of organizational coordination for aligning current program offerings, sharing best practices, research results or program outcomes along the education to workforce pathway. The collaborative activities will focus on the transition grades (e.g., 4-5, 8, and high school) and emphasize relationships among skills, confidence, culture and future careers. Collaborative partners will establish a centralized infrastructure in each location to coordinate recruiting of invested community leaders, educators, and parents, around a common agenda by designing, deploying and continually assessing a stormwater-themed project that addresses their location and demographic specific needs. This collaborative community will consist of higher education faculty and students, K-12 students, their caregivers, mentors, educators, stormwater districts, state and national environmental protection agencies, departments of education, and other for-profit and non-profit organizations. The collaborative will address the need for research on mechanisms for change, collaboration, and negotiation regarding the greater participation of under-represented groups in the science and technology workforce.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Mohamed MusaviVenkat BhethanabotlaCary JamesVemitra WhiteLola Brown
Designing for Diversity will establish a national Networked Improvement Community (NIC) of maker spaces and fab labs serving Black and Latino high school students and specializing in computational making programs. The project will be led by the New York Hall of Science, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a national leadership team representing universities, cultural organizations, corporations, foundations and leaders in the Maker Movement. Using a NIC methodology, the partners will identify the most promising mechanisms for ensuring that participation in computational making programs has a significant impact on participants' choices to pursue STEM focused internships, post-secondary education, and career paths. The project will extend the NIC methodology into the informal learning community, which is in need of research methods that are both rigorous and accommodating of the institutional complexities of building and sustaining high-quality informal learning environments, and it will contribute to the literature on the impact of maker spaces and fab labs in underserved communities on the diversification of the STEM pipeline. The project will also pave the way for the development of a more fully-developed network of computational making programs across the country and a more comprehensive research initiative that will influence best practices in maker spaces and fab labs and foster perceptions of the value and impact of maker experiences on young people's readiness for future educational experiences and careers.
The project builds on research indicating that computational making - programs that combine the making of artifacts with computational tools and techniques - is a powerful strategy for engaging underrepresented students in STEM learning. However, participation in such programs will not necessarily lead students to take concrete steps toward computationally-rich STEM careers in which they are currently under-represented. A range of research suggests that computational making programs need to explicitly design for and address the socio-emotional dimensions of these learning experiences in order for them to become stepping stones into these careers. Designing for Diversity will work with a network of maker programs serving high needs Black and Latino high school students to address these learning factors. During this pilot, the leadership team will accomplish three tasks: (1) establish a common framework, shared measurement objectives and guidelines that will be used to identify, recruit and support participant maker programs and their local partners; (2) develop and coordinate the NIC's capacity for scaling and disseminating its work by connecting the research efforts to broader national initiatives; and (3) recruit, train, and collect baseline data on the Designing for Diversity NIC.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Margaret HoneyKatherine McMillanPaul LeMahieuAndres Henriquez
The Mississippi Alliance for Women in Computing (MAWC) project will identify factors that influence and motivate female students and female African American students in Mississippi to enroll and persist in an undergraduate engineering- or science-based computing major. There is a particular need for programming that is inclusive of women and women of color who are from the southern region of the United States. These students typically have less access to extracurricular activities that encourage computing, and are less likely to visualize themselves in a computing major or career. This proposed research is to help girls to know that computer science exists and what jobs in computer science are available with a degree in computer science. A rich environment exists in Mississippi for an alliance focused on building co-curricular and mentorship opportunities. A scalable pipeline model, expandable to a Southern Alliance for Women in Computing (SAWC), will be developed with three major objectives: to attract women and women of color to computing, to improve retention rates of women in undergraduate computing majors, and to help postsecondary women make the transition to the computing workforce. Activities to support these objectives include: scaling the National Center for Women and Information Technology Aspirations in Computing award program in Mississippi, expanding scholarships for Aspirations winners, expanding student-led computing outreach programs, establishing a Mississippi Black Girls Code chapter, informing and collaborating with the Computer Science for Mississippi initiative, creating a summer bridge and living-learning community for women in computing majors, and increasing professional development opportunities for women in computing through conferences, lunch and learn meetings, job shadowing, and internships.
The project will analyze whether the co-curricular activities of MAWC lead to computing self-efficacy and ultimately female students selecting to pursue and persist in computing majors and careers. In order to understand student participation and efficacy changes, data collection for this research will be through demographic and background surveys administered to women entering an undergraduate engineering- or science-based computing major at a university in Mississippi and student surveys and evaluations in MAWC-sponsored programs. Using discriminate analysis methods, specific research questions to be addressed are: 1) Which pre-collegiate experiences influenced them to enroll, 2) Which stakeholders influenced these girls in their decision-making process, and 3) What programs are effective in impacting their persistence in the major. Predictor variables for each respective research question are: pre-collegiate experiences, stakeholders, and programs. Outcome variables are: (a) a female undergraduate student with no involvement with MAWC programming, (b) MAWC activity participant, or (c) a MAWC participant having graduated with a bachelor?s degree in a STEM major. Results will complement published longitudinal research on the gendered and raced dimensions of computing literacy acquisition in Mississippi as well as research on effective CS role model programming.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Sarah LeeVemitra White
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
A partnership of institutions and organizations from public and private sectors, all with an established record in advancing Hispanics in higher education, will form a networked community across regions of the United States with significant Hispanic populations to collectively adapt and adopt proven practices and apply them throughout the higher education system of two-year colleges and baccalaureate-, master's-, and doctorate-granting universities. The partnership builds on the successful NSF-funded Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI) that has emerged as a significant pipeline of new recruits into computing graduate studies, industry, and the professoriate throughout the nation. Even through the Hispanic population has reached 17% nationally, a mere 4% STEM Master's and 3% STEM doctorate degrees are awarded nationwide to Hispanics in 2012-2013. The desperate need to reach parity is clear. The shared purpose and bold vision of the effort is to achieve parity in the number of Hispanics who complete computation-based graduate studies. The focus will be on targeting the pool of talented students at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) who, for various reasons, do not choose to continue on STEM educational and career pathways. The efforts will focus on transitioning Hispanic students from associate degree programs to baccalaureate programs, and from baccalaureate programs (regardless of where they began their studies) to completion of graduate degrees.
The project will establish a common agenda that guides the vision and strategy for collective impact, conduct data collection to longitudinally track student movement across campuses, and launch a multi-site pilot to test feasibility of the full-scale plan and process for change. While prior research has identified strategies for increasing graduate program completion rates for underrepresented minorities, little attention has been paid to the role of HSIs in reducing attrition. Attention to HSIs is a critical element in developing successful pathways to STEM careers. The networked community will involve social scientists across the different regions in research on Hispanic graduate program completion, to complement existing research on undergraduate completion. Developing a comprehensive, scalable model for cross-institutional advancement of students, in particular the combination of a bilingual and bicultural student body with unique needs, is critical to grow the STEM pipeline. Through a pilot, the project will engage two-year colleges and universities to begin the initial investigation on the impact of building strong student identity, student belonging, advocacy, and preparation on accelerating the number of students entering, persisting in the major, and considering, entering, and ultimately completing graduate studies in computational areas.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Ann GatesMarjorie ZatzMohsen BeheshtiEnrico PontelliAaron Velasco
Although major growth in engineering and computing jobs is expected in the next 10 years, students are not majoring in sufficient numbers to meet this demand. These impending workforce demands cannot be met without developing the skills of racial and ethnic minorities: however, Hispanics and Black/African Americans make up only a small percentage of doctoral students in the United States. The goal of the Consortium of Minority Doctoral Scholars (CMDS) Design and Development Launch Pilot is to broaden the participation of minorities in these fields. This pilot project will create a data portal that will allow the research team to study and understand the efficacy of various mentoring strategies that might be piloted across institutions and minority doctoral scholars programs.
Part II
The Consortium of Minority Doctoral Scholars (CMDS) will unite three of the nation's oldest and most prominent minority doctoral scholars programs (GEM, SREB and McKnight); organizations with a long history of impact in increasing the numbers of minorities obtaining advanced degrees. The CMDS Design and Development Launch Pilot will conduct extensive studies using data from these three programs. The research team will conduct a mixed method analysis of the data to discover commonalities and distinctions about the three programs' mentoring efforts as compared to students not involved in the three programs. This will result in a data-driven strategy for researching the efficacy of mentoring programs that can be applied across the three CMSD member and other minority doctoral scholars programs. By utilizing data from successful programs to pinpoint effective mentoring strategies, the project will create opportunities for larger numbers of minorities to be successful. This approach has implications not only with respect to equity and access, but also the development of a workforce that will drive future advances.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Juan GilbertShaundra DailyJerlando Jackson