The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will amplify its partnership with Hart Magnet School, a Title 1 elementary school in urban Stamford, Connecticut, by increasing exposure and access to the arts for first-fifth graders, their families, and educators. A new program model, leveraging the museum's artist exhibitions, will focus on technology and an inquiry-based approach to science. Students, educators, and families will be encouraged to see and think in new ways through on-site STEAM tours at the museum, artist-led workshops at Hart, teacher professional development, and afterschool family activities. Outside evaluators will work with the project team to develop goals and associated metrics to measure how the model of museum-school partnership can enhance student achievement, engage families more deeply in their child's school experience and community, and contribute to teacher professional development. The evaluator will also train museum staff on best practices for program assessment.
PEEP Family Science is designed for parents and their three- to five-year-old children, especially those from low-income families who are served by home visiting organizations. A media-based project featuring the preschool public television science program PEEP and the Big Wide World, it includes animated stories, live-action videos with real children, hands-on science activities, and educational resources designed to support parents and home visiting educators. PEEP Family Science comes in the form of four apps, one for each science unit: ramps, colors, sounds, and shadows. Once downloaded
For at-risk children who cannot attend preschool, accessing science activities depends almost entirely on parents—but many parents have limited skills for supporting such learning. PBS station WGBH has recently launched a series of free family apps based on the Emmy Award-winning preschool science series, PEEP and the Big Wide World. The apps were developed to be used jointly by parent and child for a shared learning experience. Available on Google Play and the App Store in both Spanish and English, PEEP Family Science apps cover the topics of shadows, sound, color, and ramps, respectively.
To engage parents and young children in exploring science together, media producers from WGBH (Boston’s public media station) and researchers from Education Development Center (EDC) collaborated with two home-visiting organizations—Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY USA) and AVANCE—to design and test PEEP Family Science, an app-based intervention with science-focused digital media resources and associated supports for diverse, low-income families. Both organizations target families whose children do not attend preschool. These home visiting organizations play a unique
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.
In December of 2019, TERC and the University of Notre Dame convened 21 early childhood reading, family learning, and informal STEM education experts to explore the role of children’s fiction books as a tool for supporting STEM learning with young children and their families. Through the discussions, the group developed a series of recommendations for future research and practice, with a particular focus on integrating diversity and equity perspectives into the use of storybooks.
In December of 2019, TERC and the University of Notre Dame convened a group of 21 early childhood reading, family learning, and informal STEM education experts to explore the role of children’s fiction books as a tool for supporting STEM learning with young children and their families. Participants included educators and researchers from across the country representing a broad range of learning contexts, professional roles, audience focus areas, and STEM discipline expertise. Through the discussions, the group developed a series of recommendations for future work, with a particular focus on
Playscapes are intentionally designed nature-focused play environments for young children where children learn through exploration, discovery, play and adult supported provocations. The primary objective of this ongoing research-in-service to practice project is to engage in a collaborative mixed methods study to investigate aspects of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning with regard to playscape design, teacher efficacy, children’s learning, and dosage effects. It builds upon a previous NSF Pathways study.
The goal of this poster is to showcase the usable research and
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Victoria CarrRhonda BrownHeidi KloosLeslie KochanowskiSue SchlembachCatherine Maltbie
This research investigates how eight undergraduate African American women in science, math, and engineering (SME) majors accessed cultural capital and informal science learning opportunities from preschool to college. It uses the multiple case study methodological approach and cultural capital as frameworks to better understand the participants’ opportunities to engage in informal science learning or free-choice learning. The article demonstrates that African American women have access to cultural capital and informal science learning inside and outside of home and school environments in P-16
There is growing evidence that science capital (science-related forms of social and cultural capital) and family habitus (dispositions for science) influence STEM career decisions by youth. This study presents reliability and validity evidence for a survey of factors that influence career aspirations in science. Psychometric properties of the NextGen Scientist Survey were evaluated with 889 youth in grades 6–8. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) found four factors (Science Expectancy Value, Science Experiences, Future Science Task Value, and Family Science Achievement Values). Using
This video presents reflections on SCIENCES: Supporting a Community’s Informal Education Needs—Confidence and Empowerment in STEM. SCIENCES brought together Eden Place Nature Center and the Chicago Zoological Society to collaboratively support environmental conservation and lifelong scientific learning in the Fuller Park neighborhood of Chicago.
The SCIENCES project began in 2013 and focused on adapting existing educational programs into a suite of environmentally focused science learning opportunities for professional, student, and public audiences in the Fuller Park neighborhood
Program evaluators from the Education Development Center (EDC) used a mixed-methods, quasi-experimental design to evaluate the impact on girls’ awareness and interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). After the final year of the project, EDC delivered a summative report to Techbridge Girls (TBG), which was based on data collected during the five-year grant period, with a particular focus on the final year that grant funds supported programming (2017-18). Data included pre- and post-surveys with TBG participants and comparison students, participant focus groups, and