This award supports the collaborative efforts of the National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity Education Foundation, FSG, the Aspen Institute, the Collective Impact Forum, 100Kin10, National Girls Collaborative Project, Women in Engineering Pro-Active Network, MentorNet, Science Museum of Minnesota, Changing Communities, National GEM Consortium, American Society for Engineering Education and the Education Development Center to implement a project to inform the design of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Inclusion across the National of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science(INCLUDES)Initiative. The NSF INCLUDES program supports models, networks, partnerships and research to ensure the broadening participation in STEM of women, members of racial and ethnic groups that have been historically underrepresented, persons of low socio-economic status, and people with disabilities. The purpose of this conference is to inform the most critical design features of the structures and supports needed so that the NSF INCLUDES Alliance mini-backbones and the National backbone can work effectively and build the capacity to transform the STEM ecosystem.
This conference will bring together the most qualified current experts in inter-organizational collaboration, intersectionality and broadening participation in STEM to apply their collective wisdom to the design of the support structures of the NSF INCLUDES Alliances and National Network. Applying the understanding of complexity theory, adaptive leadership, intersectionality and collaboration models to the field of broadening participation in STEM has the potential to disrupt the current system enough to build capacity to create impactful Alliances. The outcomes of this convening have the potential to advance knowledge for all organizations working to broaden impact in STEM as well as those applying inter-organizational collaboration to the field of social innovation. Using intersectionality as a lens in developing more effective collaborative efforts that are responsive to the organizational partners and the context of the communities they serve can add a critical element to this field. The diverse members of the organizing committee can disseminate the results of this work to multiple networks where the results can impact the practice of inter-organizational collaboration and broadening participation in STEM.
SRI International and the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching will jointly lead a workshop with the dual goals of supporting INCLUDES (Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners that have been Underrepresented for Diversity in Engineering and Science) Launch Pilots during their first year and contributing to plans for a National Backbone. The workshop will strengthen and deepen the potential for rapid, continuous improvement cycles within and across INCLUDES networks. To do so, they will combine the expertise of SRI and Carnegie in improvement science, rapid analytics, and fostering networks of researchers and practitioners to engage participants in conducting a complete improvement cycle within and across INCLUDES Launch Pilots.
The workshop will have three phases. A first phase, conducted online, will share expertise related to each of the four parts of a complete improvement cycle: (1) problem definition, (2) data collection, (3) formative evaluation, and (4) effective communication. This first phase will combine an initial presentation with facilitated, online opportunities to interactively engage in the topics. A second phase, conducted face-to-face, will work intensively with teams from INCLUDES networks to improve their operational and long-term plans. The third phase will reflect and report on the workshop and contribute plans to build capacities for the National Backbone organization. Through the combination of these three phases, they will support the first-year work of INCLUDES teams and also refine understanding of how a national network could combine online and face-to-face elements to advance INCLUDES efforts. The workshop team will create and disseminate resources that are immediately useful to INCLUDES and related projects, and the workshop will openly coordinate with other workshops to achieve synergies. The online offerings will be open, broadly advertised, and permanently available. The lessons learned regarding plans for a national backbone will be disseminated broadly. In addition to participants from INCLUDES networks, additional stakeholders will be invited to both phases so as to shape the future plans to achieve broader impacts aligned with overall INCLUDES goals.
Northern Michigan University's Center for Native American Studies and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion will lead this Design and Development Launch Pilot about culturally inclusive K-16 STEM education for American Indian and Native Alaskan (AIAN) students. This project was created in response to the NSF 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 undergraduate STEM achievement and the graduation gap between NAAIs and non-native Americans. This project, the NSF INCLUDES: Indigenous Women Working Within the Sciences (IWWS), has the potential to advance knowledge, instructional pedagogy and practices to improve the performance of NAAI high school students and undergraduate students in STEM.
This project team will work to: (1) pilot activities and coursework to train K-16 STEM educators about American Indian inclusive methods and materials, (2) to provide AIAN high school students with STEM college preparatory experience using inclusive STEM practices, and (3) to provide a cohort of female AIAN high school students additional university experiences and mentors as these students transition to postsecondary education. Activities include a five-day summer educators institute for 40 K-16 STEM educators, an additional weekend workshop for 20 K-16 STEM educators, a summer STEM academy for 96 AIAN high school students, a STEM weekend workshop for female AIAN high school students, and a mentoring program for AIAN high school students.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
April LindalaJessica CruzMartin Reinhardt
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This collaboration between two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) will form a networked improvement community located within the Piedmont Region of North Carolina. In close partnership with community colleges and civic organizations, the project will reach families and students that lead to broader participation of underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. The overall goal is to build and sustain a scalable, inquiry-based network with the purpose of increasing the academic success of underrepresented ethnic minorities and women in the STEM continuum. By engaging in culturally relevant socio-environmental frameworks, project outcomes will positively impact student retention, knowledge, and quantitative skills in STEM across socio-economic divides and STEM disciplines.
The Launch Pilot phase will focus on evidence-based teaching and learning approaches for middle school students. The core structure of the network will serve as a platform to launch and guide other age- and level-specific educational instruction, research, and assessment initiatives. Student understanding of the nature of science will be enhanced by adapting structure, behavior, and function (SBF) theory and system thinking hierarchical (STH) models. Ultimately, the network will represent a driver for social innovation that positively impacts broadening participation in STEM.
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.
This evaluator reflection was provided to stimulate conversation at the June 20-21, 2013 CAISE Evaluation Convening. It reflects on the nature of learning and challenges assumptions of outcomes from engaging in informal learning experiences.
This funder reflection was provided to stimulate conversation at the June 20-21, 2013 CAISE Evaluation Convening. It describes the importance of evaluation to funders, and provides some prompts and questions for thinking about evaluation with relation to funding.
This leadership reflection was provided to stimulate conversation at the June 20-21, 2013 CAISE Evaluation Convening. It provides an organizational leadership perspective on evaluation.
This practitioner reflection was provided to stimulate conversation at the June 20-21, 2013 CAISE Evaluation Convening. It discusses improving practice through reflection.
Because of the siloed nature of formal educational curricula, students who opt out of STEM coursework, for whatever reason, lose the opportunity to engage with the domain of science almost entirely, thereby closing the door to the STEM workforce pipeline. This disproportionately impacts students of color and women. This project advances an alliance that consists of a consortium of community-engaged partners, including university and k-12 educational agencies, community colleges, community organizations, cultural institutions and local businesses. The project built around this alliance will leverage interdisciplinary spaces in the curriculum, particularly the humanities and social sciences, across academic levels, as a forum for integrating and applying STEM to bear on the practical, social, economic and political issues of modern life. The PIs establish a physical Community STEM Center as an anchoring institution for STEM engagement. This Center will be situated within the community that the alliance serves, bringing STEM opportunities and engagement to students instead of asking them to come where STEM education is currently provided. The activities enacted through the Community STEM Center will focus on enduring problems experienced by the communities, where students, community residents, teachers, and experts from higher education, industry and other community-based entities can come together to work on understanding them and developing evidenced centered advocacy as a means for addressing them. To facilitate the work at the Community STEM Center, the project creates a Community Ambassadors Program (CAP), leveraging participation across alliance members in partnership with the community. This Design and Development Launch Pilot will cultivate the necessary knowledgebase to develop a scalable model for implementation across diverse urban communities.
Technical Summary
This Design and Development Launch Pilot focuses on shifting the narrative of STEM education away from a solitary focus on formalized educational experiences and targets STEM content. This project develops and facilitates a parallel set of activities designed to engage under-represented students in learning how and why STEM is relevant to their lives, and approached through new and non-traditional educational dimensions. The five main objectives of this proposed pilot are to: (1) Develop a pilot alliance of community-engaged partners, including university and k-12 educational agencies, community colleges, community organizations, cultural institutions and industry;(2)Establish a physical Community STEM Advocacy Center as an anchoring institution for change embedded within the community that the pilot alliance serves; (3) Leverage interdisciplinary spaces in curricula, across academic levels, particularly the humanities and social sciences, as a forum for integrating and applying STEM to bear on the practical, social, economic and political issues of modern life; (4) Create a Community Ambassadors Program (CAP), leveraging participation across higher education pilot alliance members in partnership with the community; and (5)Conduct an evaluation of project initiatives and research regarding the usability and feasibility of a systemic approach to developing community-based, interdisciplinary pathways to broaden STEM participation pathways. Efforts to examine the impact of this community-based, interdisciplinary approach concentrates on the proximal outcomes related to STEM interest, self-efficacy and identity. Data will be collected in pre/post format across our three constituent samples: 1) Community STEM Advocacy Center participants; 2) k-12 students; and, 3) postsecondary students. Analysis of data will be conducted through MANCOVAs to account for potential co-variation among construct scores. Qualitative data will also be collected to contextualize findings and enable the development of a rich case study. At least two observations will be conducted in the Community STEM Advocacy Center and the two classroom implementations to document engagement, participant interactions and level of STEM content.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kimberly LawlessDonald WinkLudwig Carlos NitscheAixa AlfonsoJeremiah Abiade
"Strengthening Networks, Sparking Change: Museums and Libraries as Community Catalysts" combines findings from a literature scan and input from the library, museum and community revitalization fields with case studies about the experiences and vision of museums and libraries working to spur change in their communities. It describes the complementary conceptual frameworks of social wellbeing and collective impact and explains how libraries and museums can use these concepts to partner with community-based organizations, government agencies and other cultural or educational organizations. It
Libraries across the country have been reimagining their community role and leveraging their resources and public trust to strengthen community-based learning and foster critical thinking, problem solving, and engagement in STEM. What started some years ago as independent experiments has become a national movement. The Space Science Institute's National Center for Interactive Learning (NCIL), in partnership with the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), received funding from the National Science Foundation for the first-ever Public Libraries & STEM conference, at the Sheraton Denver Downtown