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
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. In the fall of 2014, Techbridge Girls began offering after-school programming at five elementary and two middle schools in the Highline Public School district, located near Seattle, WA.
Education Development Center is conducting the formative and summative evaluation of the
During the school year of 2017-2018, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (Fairchild) implemented the second year of a four-year project entitled: Growing Beyond Earth (GBE). NASA is providing funding support for project implementation as well as an external project evaluation. The evaluation activities conducted this year were focused on understanding project implementation and assessing project outcomes using data collected between September 2017 and May 2018. This report’s findings and accompanying recommendations inform next year’s project implementation and evaluation activities.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Catherine RaymondMarion LitzingerCarl LewisAmy Padolf
A science-based companion guide to 46 feature films—including HIDDEN FIGURES, THE MARTIAN, PRIMER, and THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT. Each film received development or distribution support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation because of its scientific content. The guide indexes each film by scientific subject matter and provides supplemental science content, meant to encourage audiences inspired by films to explore the scientific subject matter further. It also includes links to how to watch the film. The guide is available to access online or download as a PDF.
The Sloan Science & Film Teacher's Guide indexes by scientific subject matter over 50 short fiction films funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, that can be streamed for free anytime. The Guide offers an introduction, teaching framework, study questions, and additional resources. Each film is correlated with Next Generation Science Standards as well as New York City Science Standards. The Guide can be viewed online or downloaded as a PDF.
There are many reasons to be curious about the way people learn, and the past several decades have seen an explosion of research that has important implications for individual learning, schooling, workforce training, and policy.
In 2000, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition was published and its influence has been wide and deep. The report summarized insights on the nature of learning in school-aged children; described principles for the design of effective learning environments; and provided examples of how that could be implemented in the classroom.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
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. This exploratory Pilot study project brings together a diverse set of partners that include the Watertown Children's Theatre (WCT) which is west of Boston, and, from Boston College a team of science educators, learning science researchers, and positive youth development experts. The goal is to design and develop a project for middle school-aged youth. The pilot project, which integrates hands-on science learning experiences, experiments, and field trips with the student-led production of short plays, will engage youth in expressing their beliefs, passions, and their own identities about STEM by examining how the intersection of skills and practices used in both domains (science and theatre) can enable them to learn about science concepts, principles and methods as well as to develop science-focused identities. Middle-school youth will be engaged in a three-week summer program where they will be led by science teachers, playwrights, and high school students to conduct hands-on investigations in science in conjunction with developing original, ten-minute plays around a specific scientific theme relevant to their life experience, for example, the potential impact on their lives of heavy metals in water and poor air quality. After a science theme is chosen, the principal investigators will identify the big ideas that are important for youth to understand and be able to explain. Upon identification of the key science ideas, youth will then engage in pertinent science activities, visits to local sites, reading current news articles and then in identifying the local impacts and how the underlying science relates to those local impacts. The youth will perform their ten-minute plays at the end of the summer program. Following this showcase event, they will engage in additional science learning experiences and also revise their productions throughout the academic year in preparation for a youth science festival, where their creations will be performed by professional adult actors as a part of the Cambridge Science Festival taking place in the spring. The broader impact of the work focuses on broadening participation in STEM, specifically, the engagement of youth from under-represented populations in the sciences, such as African-Americans, Latinxs, and women with partner Boston Public Schools. The Pilot study will investigate the student learning and organizational dimensions of the model being developed.
The Boston College researchers will study youth's sense of purpose and identity toward science, particularly how youth's identity discrepancy changes through participation in the project. The work places youth voice at the center of the creation of STEM-based theatre plays. The theoretical foundation of the work is grounded in part in the concept of "path to purpose." The major research questions are: How do youth perceptions (interest, science anxiety, identity) toward science shift as they participate in the project? What is the residual impact on parents (family members) and youth on their discussions about science, and how does participation in the project impact those discussions? Research methods include surveys, interviews and observations. The external evaluation study will focus on understanding project implementation and progress toward meeting the project goals, in particular, how well the initiative works to establish a model for the informal STEM learning field that the team and others can apply beyond the Pilot study.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Meghan Hill
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches and resources for use in a variety of settings. A frequently overlooked but significantly under-represented STEM audience is people who live in rural settings. The proposed conference is the first of its kind to bring together key innovators and experts in rural Informal STEM education, to address this question: How can we build on recent innovations to create more effective and scalable pathways for informal STEM learning in rural communities?
The conference will focus primarily on advancing informal STEM education for rural youth, but will also include some participants who cross boundaries, to situate the work in an ecosystem perspective: informal-formal education, childhood-adult education, rural ecosystems and economic drivers for STEM related jobs. The provisional list of topics will be refined through a pre-conference survey of participants, and will be followed with a report that includes survey responses, conference discussion, and final recommendations by participants. The conference will be held in Washington D.C. to enable policymakers to attend.
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 Indianapolis / City as Living Laboratory (I/CaLL) project was a civic collaboration that used the city of Indianapolis as an informal science learning (ISL) environment. The 21 Urban Water Science Concepts Resource Handbook is designed for all people who are interested in exploring science topics related to urban waterways, particularly in Indianapolis. Specifically, educators, artists, and community members in Indianapolis may find this publication useful. With a small amount of extra research for examples in their area of interest, urban environmental educators across the country will
The Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) aims to help member institutions inform and educate the public about science through a global lens. The World Biotech Tour (WBT) was a three-year initiative designed to not only promote a greater understanding of biotechnology through public outreach and programming led by science centers and museums, but also as an opportunity for ASTC to collect useful data on the resources required and challenges encountered at different science museums around the world when implementing a long-term, multi-country program. The WBT involved students
Recently there have been many calls for enhanced communication between scientists and the public in order to increase scientific literacy and improve attitudes toward science. However, these educational outreach (E/O) efforts often encounter structural barriers and the processes that support attainment of the goals of E/O are not well documented. E/O is a form of Informal Science Education (ISE), but E/O literature is often published in both science education and science communication journals because of the various approaches and environments in which it occurs. This unique juxtaposition
European Researchers’ Night is an annual pan-European initiative of the European Commission held on the last Friday in September. In 2015, 1.1 million European citizens and 18,000 researchers took part in events organised in more than 300 cities within Europe and neighbouring countries. The objective of European Researchers’ Night is to encourage the wider public to visit research institutes, engage with researchers, and learn more about European research and potential career opportunities. In this paper, European Researchers’ Night in Ireland is considered through the lens of informal