This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Collaborative robots – cobots – are designed to work with humans, not replace them. What learning affordances are created in educational games when learners program robots to assist them in a game instead of being the game? What game designs work best?
Many Black youth in both urban and rural areas lack engaging opportunities to learn mathematics in a manner that leads to full participation in STEM. The Young People’s Project (YPP), the Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP), and the Education for Liberation Network (EdLib) each have over two decades of experience working on this issue. In the city of Baltimore, where 90% of youth in poverty are Black, and only 5% of these students meet or exceed expectations in math, BAP, a youth led organization, develops and employs high school and college age youth to provide after-school tutoring in Algebra 1, and to advocate for a more just education for themselves and their peers. YPP works in urban or rural low income communities that span the country developing Math Literacy Worker programs that employ young people ages 14-22 to create spaces to help their younger peers learn math. Building on these deep and rich experiences, this Innovations in Development project studies how Black students see themselves as mathematicians in the context of paid peer-to-peer math teaching--a combined social, pedagogical, and economic strategy. Focusing primarily in Baltimore, the project studies how young people grow into new self-definitions through their work in informal, student-determined math learning spaces, structured collaboratively with adults who are experts in both mathematics and youth development. The project seeks to demonstrate the benefits of investing in young people as learners, teachers, and educational collaborators as part of a core strategy to improve math learning outcomes for all students.
The project uses a mixed methods approach to describe how mathematical identity develops over time in young people employed in a Youth-Directed Mathematics Collaboratory. 60 high school aged students with varying mathematical backgrounds (first in Baltimore and later in Boston) will learn how to develop peer- and near-peer led math activities with local young people in informal settings, after-school programs, camps, and community centers, reaching approximately 600 youth/children. The high school aged youth employed in this project will develop their own math skills and their own pedagogical skills through the already existing YPP and BAP structures, made up largely of peers and near-peers just like themselves. They will also participate in on-going conversations within the Collaboratory and with the community about the cultural significance of doing mathematics, which for YPP and BAP is a part of the ongoing Civil Rights/Human Rights movement. Mathematical identity will be studied along four dimensions: (a) students’ sequencing and interpretation of past mathematical experiences (autobiographical identity); (b) other people’s talk to them and their talk about themselves as learners, doers, and teachers of mathematics (discoursal identity); (c) the development of their own voices in descriptions and uses of mathematical knowledge and ideas (authorial identity); and (d) their acceptance or rejection of available selfhoods (socio-culturally available identity). Intended outcomes from the project include a clear description of how mathematical identity develops in paid peer-teaching contexts, and growing recognition from both local communities and policy-makers that young people have a key role to play, not only as learners, but also as teachers and as co-researchers of mathematics education.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jay GillenMaisha MosesThomas NikundiweNaama LewisAlice Cook
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.
Techbridge Girls’ mission is to help girls discover a passion for science, engineering, and technology (SET). In August 2013, Techbridge Girls was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation grant to scale up its afterschool program from the San Francisco Bay Area to multiple new locations around the United States. Techbridge Girls began offering afterschool programming at elementary and middle schools in Greater Seattle in 2014, and in Washington, DC in 2015.
Education Development Center is conducting the formative and summative evaluation of the project. To assess the implementation
Techbridge Girls’ mission is to help girls discover a passion for science, engineering, and technology (SET). In August 2013, Techbridge Girls was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation grant to scale up its afterschool program from the San Francisco Bay Area to multiple new locations around the United States. Techbridge Girls began offering afterschool programming at elementary and middle schools in Greater Seattle in 2014, and in Washington, DC in 2015.
Education Development Center is conducting the formative and summative evaluation of the project. To assess the implementation
Techbridge Girls’ mission is to help girls discover a passion for science, engineering, and technology (SET). In August 2013, Techbridge Girls was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation grant to scale up its after-school program from the San Francisco Bay Area to multiple new locations around the United States. Techbridge Girls began offering after-school programming at elementary and middle schools in Greater Seattle in 2014, and in Washington, DC in 2015.
Education Development Center is conducting the formative and summative evaluation of the project. To assess the
In 2017, Concord Evaluation Group (CEG) conducted a summative evaluation of Design Squad Global (DSG). DSG is produced and managed by WGBH Educational Foundation. WGBH partnered with FHI 360, a nonprofit human development organizations working in 70 countries, to implement DSG around the globe.
In the DSG program, children in afterschool and school clubs explored engineering through hands-on activities, such as designing and building an emergency shelter or a structure that could withstand an earthquake. Through DSG, children also had the chance to work alongside a partner club from another
This brief discusses the PLUM LANDING Explore Outdoors Toolkit, a new set of free, public media resources designed to help informal educators and parents infuse science learning into outdoor recreation. Developed by trusted media producer WGBH in partnership with researchers at Education Development Center (EDC), the Toolkit aims to get children (ages 6–9) from low-income, urban communities outside so they can explore the environment around them while debunking the myth that nature is something that only exists beyond city limits.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Marion GoldsteinElizabeth PiersonJamie KynnLisa Famularo
This is an Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research supporting research in Smart and Connected Communities. The research supported by the award is collaborative with research at the University of Colorado. The researchers are studying the use of technologies to enable communities to connect youth and youth organizations to effectively support diverse learning pathways for all students. These communities, the youth, the youth organizations, formal and informal education organizations, and civic organizations form a learning ecology. The DePaul University researchers will design and implement a smart community infrastructure in the City of Chicago to track real-time student participation in community STEM activities and to develop mobile applications for both students and adults. The smart community infrastructure will bring together information from a variety of sources that affect students' participation in community activities. These include geographic information (e.g., where the student lives, where the activities take place, the student transportation options, the school the student attends), student related information (e.g., the education and experience background of the student, the economic status of the student, students' schedules), and activity information (e.g., location of activity, requirements for participation). The University of Colorado researchers will take the lead on analyzing these data in terms of a community learning ecologies framework and will explore computational approaches (i.e., recommender systems, visualizations of learning opportunities) to improve youth exploration and uptake of interests and programs. These smart technologies are then used to reduce the friction in the learning connection infrastructure (called L3 for informal, formal, and virtual learning) to enable the student to access opportunities for participation in STEM activities that are most feasible and most appropriate for the student. Such a flexible computational approach is needed to support the necessary diversity of potential recommendations: new interests for youth to explore; specific programs based on interests, friends' activities, or geographic accessibility; or programs needed to "level-up" (develop deeper skills) and complete skills to enhance youths' learning portfolios. Although this information was always available, it was never integrated so it could be used to serve the community of both learners and the providers and to provide measurable student learning and participation outcomes. The learning ecologies theoretical framework and supporting computational methods are a contribution to the state of the art in studying afterschool learning opportunities. While the concept of learning ecologies is not new, to date, no one has offered such a systematic and theoretically-grounded portfolio of measures for characterizing the health and resilience of STEM learning ecologies at multiple scales. The theoretical frameworks and concepts draw together multiple research and application domains: computer science, sociology of education, complexity science, and urban planning. The L3 Connects infrastructure itself represents an unprecedented opportunities for conducting "living lab" experiments to improve stakeholder experience of linking providers to a single network and linking youth to more expanded and varied opportunities. The University of Colorado team will employ three methods: mapping, modeling, and linking youth to STEM learning opportunities in school and out of school settings in a large urban city (Chicago). The recommender system will be embedded into youth and parent facing mobile apps, enabling the team to characterize the degree to which content-based, collaborative filtering, or constraint based recommendations influence youth actions. The project will result in two measurable outcomes of importance to key L3 stakeholder groups: a 10% increase in the number of providers (programs that are part of the infrastructure) in target neighborhoods and a 20% increase in the number of youth participating in programs.
This is an Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research supporting research in Smart and Connected Communities. The research supported by the award is collaborative with research at DePaul University. The researchers are studying the use of technologies to enable communities to connect youth and youth organizations to effectively support diverse learning pathways for all students. These communities, the youth, the youth organizations, formal and informal education organizations, and civic organizations form a learning ecology. The DePaul University researchers will design and implement a smart community infrastructure in the City of Chicago to track real-time student participation in community STEM activities and to develop mobile applications for both students and adults. The smart community infrastructure will bring together information from a variety of sources that affect students' participation in community activities. These include geographic information (e.g., where the student lives, where the activities take place, the student transportation options, the school the student attends), student related information (e.g., the education and experience background of the student, the economic status of the student, students' schedules), and activity information (e.g., location of activity, requirements for participation). The University of Colorado researchers will take the lead on analyzing these data in terms of a community learning ecologies framework and will explore computational approaches (i.e., recommender systems, visualizations of learning opportunities) to improve youth exploration and uptake of interests and programs. These smart technologies are then used to reduce the friction in the learning connection infrastructure (called L3 for informal, formal, and virtual learning) to enable the student to access opportunities for participation in STEM activities that are most feasible and most appropriate for the student. Such a flexible computational approach is needed to support the necessary diversity of potential recommendations: new interests for youth to explore; specific programs based on interests, friends' activities, or geographic accessibility; or programs needed to "level-up" (develop deeper skills) and complete skills to enhance youths' learning portfolios. Although this information was always available, it was never integrated so it could be used to serve the community of both learners and the providers and to provide measurable student learning and participation outcomes. The learning ecologies theoretical framework and supporting computational methods are a contribution to the state of the art in studying afterschool learning opportunities. While the concept of learning ecologies is not new, to date, no one has offered such a systematic and theoretically-grounded portfolio of measures for characterizing the health and resilience of STEM learning ecologies at multiple scales. The theoretical frameworks and concepts draw together multiple research and application domains: computer science, sociology of education, complexity science, and urban planning. The L3 Connects infrastructure itself represents an unprecedented opportunities for conducting "living lab" experiments to improve stakeholder experience of linking providers to a single network and linking youth to more expanded and varied opportunities. The University of Colorado team will employ three methods: mapping, modeling, and linking youth to STEM learning opportunities in school and out of school settings in a large urban city (Chicago). The recommender system will be embedded into youth and parent facing mobile apps, enabling the team to characterize the degree to which content-based, collaborative filtering, or constraint based recommendations influence youth actions. The project will result in two measurable outcomes of importance to key L3 stakeholder groups: a 10% increase in the number of providers (programs that are part of the infrastructure) in target neighborhoods and a 20% increase in the number of youth participating in programs.