The Adler Planetarium will expand access to STEM programs for African American and Latinx Chicago teens through a progressive series of entry-point, introductory, intermediate, and advanced level programs. Students in grades 7–12 will be invited to join teams of scientists, engineers, and educators to undertake authentic scientific research and solve real engineering challenges. In collaboration with schools and community-based organizations, Adler will develop and implement new participant recruitment and retention strategies to reach teens in specific neighborhoods. The initiative will help address the underrepresentation of Latinx and African Americans in engineering.
This Innovations in Development project supports racially and ethnically diverse youth in learning about climate resilience in informal settings, including community centers, afterschool programs, and museums. The project aims to: (1) build the capacity of community organizations to implement youth programming on climate resilience; (2) increase youth knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy associated with climate resilience (also referred to as environmental health literacy for climate resilience); and (3) explore how collaborating research universities and community organizations engage diverse youth in informal STEM learning. Project partners include the UNC Institute for the Environment, the University of Washington-Interdisciplinary Center for Exposures, Diseases, Genomics and Environment, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Juntos NC, and the Duwamish River Community Coalition (DRCC). Juntos NC and DRCC actively engage Latino and Indigenous youth in their programming and seek to implement resilience-focused programming that supports youth science learning and leadership development.
Together, informal educators and participating youth will develop locally relevant solutions to climate impacts in their communities. Youth will interact with university-based climate scientists and educators to collect and analyze data and will participate in resilience-focused dialogue, planning, and actions in their communities. Youth will share what they learn with their families and peers through family events and teen summits. The project will engage dozens of educators in community organizations and at least 250 youth, who will share what they learn with their families and communities, reaching hundreds more people through communications and local action projects. Mixed-methods assessment will provide insight into the extent participating youth (a) develop environmental health literacy for climate resilience, and (b) take action to address resilience in their home communities. The team will assess how these outcomes vary by location, and the implications of any variation on potential for project replication. A participatory evaluation, led by an external evaluator, will provide insight into empowerment outcomes. Findings will be disseminated to professional audiences at local and national conferences; and curricular materials from this project will be disseminated through the project website.
Hands-on tinkering experiences can help promote more equitable STEM learning opportunities for children from diverse backgrounds (Bevan, 2017; Vossoughi & Bevan, 2014). Latine heritage families naturally engage in and talk about engineering practices during and after tinkering in a children’s museum (Acosta & Haden, in press). We asked how the everyday practice of oral stories and storytelling could be leveraged during an athome tinkering activity to support children’s informal engineering and spatial learning.
The U.S. urgently needs the perspective and knowledge of females who are Latinx and African American in STEM fields. Providing early STEM interest pathways for these populations that are historically underrepresented in STEM fields is critical to creating gender equity in the STEM workforce. There are profound inequities in STEM fields for women of color that impact their interest and persistence in these fields. This Research in Service to Practice project will build important knowledge about early pathways for reducing these inequities by developing early interest in STEM. Gender stereotypes around who can do STEM are one of the sociocultural barriers that contributes to girls’ loss of interest in STEM. These stereotypes emerge early and steer young women away from STEM studies and pursuits. Exposing girls to role models is an effective strategy for challenging stereotypes of who belongs and succeeds in STEM. This project will explore how an afterschool program that combines narrative and storytelling approaches, STEM role models, and family supports, sparks elementary-age girls’ interest in STEM and fosters their STEM identity. The project targets K-5 students and families from underrepresented groups (e.g., Latinx and African American) living in poverty. The project will evaluate an inquiry-based, afterschool program that serves both elementary school girls and boys and explores if adding storytelling components to the out-of-school time (OST) learning will better support girls’ interest in STEM. The storytelling features include: 1) shared reading of books featuring females in STEM; 2) students’ own narratives that reminisce about their STEM experiences; and 3) video interviews of female parents and community members with STEM careers. A secondary aim of this project is to build capacity of schools and afterschool providers to deliver and sustain afterschool STEM enrichment experiences. Museum-based informal STEM experts will co-teach with afterschool providers to deliver the Children’s Museum Houston (CMH) curriculum called Afterschool Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math (A’STEAM). Although A’STEAM has been implemented in over 100 sites and shows promise, to scale-up this and other promising afterschool programs, the team will evaluate how professional development resources and the co-facilitation approach can build afterschool educators' capacity to deliver the most promising approaches.
Researchers at the Children’s Learning Institute (CLI) at UTHealth will partner with Museum-based informal STEM educators at CMH, YES Prep, a high performing charter school serving >95% of underrepresented groups, and other afterschool providers serving mostly underrepresented groups experiencing poverty. Storytelling components that highlight females in STEM will be added to an existing afterschool program (A'STEAM Basic). This derivative program is called A’STEAM Stories. Both instantiations of the afterschool programs (Basic and Stories) include an afterschool educator component (ongoing professional development and coaching), a family component (e.g., home extension activities, in-person, and virtual family learning events), and two age-based groups (K-G2 and G3-G5). Further, the A’STEAM Stories professional development for educators includes training that challenges STEM gender stereotypes and explains how to make science interesting to girls. The 4-year project has four phases. In Phase 1, researchers, CMH, and afterschool educators will adapt the curriculum for scalability and the planned storytelling variation. During Phase 2, the research team will conduct an experimental study to evaluate program impacts on increasing STEM interest and identity and reducing STEM gender stereotypes. To this end, the project’s team will recruit 36 sites and 1200 children across Kindergarten through Grade 5. This experimental phase is designed to produce causal evidence and meet the highest standards for rigorous research. The researchers will randomly assign sites to one of three groups: control, A’STEAM Basic, or A’STEAM Stories. During Phase 3, researchers will follow-up with participating sites to understand if the inclusion of afterschool educators as co-facilitators of the program allowed for sustainability after Museum informal science educator support is withdrawn. In Phase 4, the team will disseminate the afterschool curriculum and conduct two training-of-trainers for local and national afterschool educators. This study uses quantitative and qualitative approaches. Data sources include educator and family surveys, focus groups, and interviews as well as observations of afterschool program instructional quality and analysis of parent-child discourse during a STEM task. Constructs assessed with children include STEM interest, STEM identity, and STEM gender stereotype endorsement as well as standardized measures of vocabulary, science, and math. Findings will increase understanding of how to optimize OST STEM experiences for elementary-age girls and how to strengthen STEM interest for all participants. Further, this project will advance our knowledge of the extent to which scaffolded, co-teaching approaches build capacity of afterschool providers to sustain inquiry-based STEM programs.
This Research in Service to Practice project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.
This Innovations in Development 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 Designing Our Tomorrow project will develop a framework for creating exhibit-based engineering design challenges and expand an existing model of facilitation for use in engineering exhibits. The project seeks to broaden participation in engineering and build capacity within the informal science education (ISE) field while raising public awareness of the importance of sustainable engineering design practices. The project focuses on girls aged 9-14 and their families and is co-developed with culturally responsive strategies to ensure the inclusion and influence of families from Latino communities. The project will conduct research resulting in theory-based measures of engineering proficiencies within an exhibit context and an exhibit facilitation model for the topic area of engineering. Based on the research, the project will develop an engineering design challenge framework for developing design challenges within an exhibit context. As the context for research, the project will develop a bilingual English/Spanish 2,000-square foot traveling exhibition designed to engage youth and families in engineering design challenges that advance their engineering proficiencies from beginner to more informed, supported by professional development modules and a host-site training workshop introducing strategies for facilitating family engineering experiences within a traveling exhibition. The project is a collaboration of Oregon Museum of Science and Industry with the Biomimicry Institute, Adelante Mujeres, and the Fleet Science Center.
Designing Our Tomorrow builds on a theory-based engineering teaching framework and several previous NSF-funded informal education projects to engage families in compelling design challenges presented through the lens of sustainable design exemplified by biomimicry. Through culturally-responsive co-development and research strategies to include members of Latino communities and provide challenges that highlight the altruistic, creative, personally relevant, and collaborative aspects of engineering, the Designing Our Tomorrow exhibition showcases engineering as an appealing career option for women and helps families support each other's engineering proficiencies. To better understand and promote engineering learning in an ISE setting, the project will conduct two research studies to inform and iteratively develop effective strategies. In the first study, measurement development will build on prior research and practice to design credible and reliable measures of engineering proficiency, awareness, and collaboration, as well as protocols for use in exhibit development and the study of facilitation at engineering exhibits, and future research. The second study will explore the effects of facilitation on the experience outcomes.
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.