This article summarizes key findings of the American Association of University Women (AAUW)'s research report, "Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics" (2010). The report profiles research that demonstrates how social and environmental factors—including stereotypes, cultural beliefs, and implicit bias—act as barriers to girls’ and women’s full participation in these fields. This article provides a brief explanation of their findings and recommends what science centers and museums can do to promote girls' participation in science and math. The full report is
This project is a collaboration by the Children's Museum, Museum of Science, and Franklin Park Zoo designed to provide hands-on science activities and increase interest in science as a career for children in grades 6-8 who attend community agency after school programs. Groups of 20-25 students will attend 8-week courses at each institution, rotating to all three during the year. After completing the courses, selected students will become interns for summer training and work at the institutions. The goals of the project are to offer engaging science to underserved children and motivate them to further study; to build a bridge to community groups from the three institutions; to bolster science programs at community centers through training their staff; and to create a replicable model for other science centers, children's museums and nature centers to work with community agencies and to involve parents in their children's activities. Videotapes, to be produced by WGBH-PBS will be distributed to science centers: tapes will document finding effective ways to work in the children, the particular experiences of the three institutions, and the children's experiences with and attitudes toward science. A summer institute will be held for museum professionals from other institutions.
Approximately 8.4 million children in the United States participate annually in out-of-school time (OST) programs with a science component. These programs have been shown to have a wide range of impacts on scientific literacy, school achievement, and career interest. Because such programs take place outside of home and school, they offer participants learning flexibility and a sense of agency that otherwise do not exist in traditional science learning contexts. However, current research on OST is largely limited to evaluation-level data that has not been synthesized, making it difficult to draw definite conclusions. As seen in other fields, a larger evidence base is needed for the OST field to grow or else non-evidence-based policies will be imposed upon the field by outside forces. The project team will conduct an experimental, longitudinal research project to address these issues. This Research-in-Service to Practice 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. The study uses a sophisticated design with a wide variety of measures to follow three cohorts of adolescent youth (~200) over a 4-year period to address the primary research question: How does participation of adolescent youth from traditionally underrepresented groups in a well-established, out-of-school time science program affect their career choices and attitudes towards science as they mature into early adulthood? While each measure is rooted in established literature and methodology, putting it all together using a comprehensive, complementary approach has not yet been done in the OST field. The research studies will be looking at a number of variables in order to measure program impact including: demographic and experiential background of program participants, STEM attitudes, career interest/choices, scientific engagement, and participation. Data will be collected via survey, observation, interviews, and document review. The program practitioners will contribute diary and field note data to the study. This project will provide STEM education practitioners with the evidence-based information they need to develop better programs for underrepresented minority (URM) youth so program and policy decisions are not made in a vacuum. Operationally, findings will have an impact on OST and URM science education researchers by generating new research methodology and techniques. Tactically, it will benefit greater URM communities by investigating how OST programs can support science learning and scientific interest among their adolescent youth. Strategically, the study impacts the nation by providing evidence about the validity of OST programs as a critical partner to address the issue of URM involvement in the STEM workforce. Also, the corpus of raw data will be made public, providing a large and varied data set for others to explore. This research is being conducted by the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, and the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative resources for use in a variety of settings. This research project leverages ongoing longitudinal research to investigate whether, and if so how, youth from ages 10 to 15 in a diverse, under-resourced urban community become interested and engaged in STEM. The project addresses a global issue; fewer youth choose to major in scientific fields or take science coursework at high school or university levels. These declining numbers result in fewer STEM professionals and fewer scientifically literate citizens who are able to function successfully in an increasingly scientific and technological society. These declines are observed for youth as a whole, but are most pronounced for girls and particular non-white ethnic minorities. Data collected from youth in this community of study, including non-white ethnic minorities, mirrors this decline. NSF funding will support a five-year systematic and systemic process in which project researchers work collaboratively with existing informal and formal educational partners (e.g., museums, libraries, afterschool providers, schools) to develop sets of customized, connected, and coordinated learning interventions, in and out of school, for youth with different backgrounds, needs, and interests, all with the goal of averting or dampening this decline of STEM interest and participation during early adolescence. In addition to new research and community STEM networks, this project will result in a Community Toolkit that includes research instruments and documentation of network-building strategies for use by other researchers and practitioners nationally and internationally. This mixed methods exploratory study has two distinct but interrelated populations - youth and educators from across informal and formal institutions. To develop a clearer understanding of the factors that influence youths' STEM interest development over time, particularly among three youth STEM Interest Profiles identified in a secondary analysis (1-Dislike Math, 2-Like all STEM, 3-Dislike all STEM), the design combines surveys with in-depth interviews and observations. To study educators and institutions, researchers will combine interviews, focus groups, and observations to better understand factors that influence community-wide, data-driven approaches to supporting youth interest development. Research will be conducted in three phases with the goal of community-level change in youth STEM interest and participation. In Phase 1 (Years 1 & 2) four educational partners will develop interventions for a 6th and 7th grade youth cohort that will be iteratively refined through a design-based approach. Educational partners and researchers will meet to review and discuss interest and participation data and use these data to select content, as well as plan activities and strategies within their programs (using a simplified form of conjecture mapping). By Phase 2 (Years 3 & 4) four additional partners will be included, more closely modeling the complex system of the community. With support from researchers support and existing partners, new educational partners will similarly review and discuss data, using these to select content, as well as plan activities consistent with program goals and strategies. Additional interventions will be implemented by the new partners and further assessed and refined with a new 6th and 7th grade cohort, along with the existing interventions of the first four partners. In Phase 3 (Year 5) data will be collected on pre-post community-level changes in STEM interest and participation and the perceived effectiveness of this approach for youth. These data will inform future studies.
KY-H.E.R.O.S. (Health Education Rural Outreach Scientists) is a health science education program that partners the largest science center in Kentucky with Science Heroes-- important regional biomedical research scientists. The Science Heroes, their stories and their studies serve as inspiration to our rural audience. The project objectives are to: (1) Convey the relevance of health science research to people's daily lives and promote awareness of healthy lifestyle choices and wellness; (2) Promote understanding of the fundamental principles of the scientifc process and inspire K-12 teachers to incorporate current research into their teaching of health science; and (3) Encourage students to pursue advanced science education and increase awareness of the wide range of health science related careers. The Science Center, working with the distinguished Science Heroes, their research teams and a group of 15 knowledgeable professional advisors will develop the new KY-H.E.R.O.S. science education program. The program will include new hands-on labs and demonstrations, teacher training workshops, career exploration activities, interactive videoconferencing distance learning links, and innovative public programs. Using museum-based exhibits and a wet lab, traveling exhibit components, telelinking (distance learning), an interactive website and printed and electronic materials, we will present information about the work of the Science Heroes and its relevance to the lives of participants. The focus of the program will change every two years to feature three different scientists and their work. A total of nine scientists will be included during the 5 year period covered by the SEPA grant. As the focus changes every two years to a different three scientists, all the programs and exhibits will be changed accordingly. KY-H.E.R.O.S. will be designed to serve audiences composed of school groups on field trips; teachers in workshops; classes in remote areas of the state participatng through videoconferencing; underserved groups including economically disadvantaged, minorities and young women; and the family audience that makes up about 60% of the Science Center's annual attendance. Formative and summative evaluation will be conducted by an outside firm to ensure effectiveness.
The Massachusetts Linking Experiences and Pathways Follow-on (M-LEAP2) is a three-year longitudinal empirical research study that is examining prospectively how early formal and informal STEM education experiences are related to gender-based differences in STEM achievement-related choices in middle and high school. M-LEAP2 serves as a complement to - and extension of - a prior NSF-funded study, M-LEAP, which was a largely quantitative research study that followed overlapping cohorts of 3rd - 6th grade female and male students for three years. M-LEAP surveyed over 1,600 students, 627 student-parent pairs, and 134 second parents in 8 diverse public schools across Massachusetts. In contrast, M-LEAP2 is a heavily qualitative three-year study using in-depth interviews with a diverse range of 72 of these students and their families to study how formal and informal science experiences shape the students' science-related beliefs, interests, and aspirations as they progress though middle and high school.
This ethnographic case study illustrates what happens when informal educators introduce science concepts in non-scientific contexts, such as a program focused on youth culture and girls’ empowerment. Helping young people find the science in their everyday lives can build science trajectories and identities for youth from backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in the sciences.
This Stocklmayer, Rennie, and Gilbert article outlines current challenges in preparing youth to go into science careers and to be scientifically literate citizens. The authors suggest creating partnerships between informal and formal education to address these challenges in school.
Having developed the concept of near-peer mentorship at the middle school/high school level and utilized it in a summer science education enhancement program now called Gains in the Education of Mathematics and Science or GEMS at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), it is now our goal to ultimately expand this program into an extensive, research institute-based source of young, specially selected, near-peer mentors armed with kits, tools, teacher-student developed curricula, enthusiasm, time and talent for science teaching in the urban District of Columbia Public Schools (specific schools) and several more rural disadvantaged schools (Frederick and Howard Counties) in science teaching. We describe this program as a new in-school component, involving science clubs and lunch programs, patterned after our valuable summer science training modules and mentorship program. Our in-house program is at its maximum capacity at the Institute. Near-peer mentors will work in WRAIR's individual laboratories while perfecting/adapting hands-on activities for the new GEMS-X program to be carried out at McKinley Technology HS, Marian Koshland Museum, Roots Charter School and Lincoln Junior HS in DC, West Frederick Middle School, Frederick, MD and Folly Quarter Middle School and Glenelg HS, in Howard County, MD. Based on local demographics in these urban/rural areas, minority and disadvantaged youth, men and women, may choose science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) careers with increasing frequency after participating, at such an early age, in specific learning in the quantitative disciplines. Many of these students take challenging courses within their schools, vastly improve their standardized test scores, take on internship opportunities, are provided recommendations from scientists and medical staff and ultimately are able to enter health professions that were previously unattainable. Relevance to Public Health: The Gains in the Education of Mathematis and Science (GEMS) program educates a diverse student population to benefit their science education and ultimately may improve the likelihood of successfully entry into a health or health-related professions for participating individuals. Medical education has been show to improve public health.
As part of a grant from the National Science Foundation, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) is conducting regional STEM workshops, entitled NFB STEM2U, for blind youth [youth], grades 3 – 6. During this first regional workshop in Baltimore, the NFB operated three different programs simultaneously: one program for youth, a second program for their parents/caregivers, and a third program for a group of teachers who work with visually impaired students. A fourth program, for Port Discovery museum staff, was conducted earlier to prepare the museum staff to assist with the youth program
There are a growing number of informal science education (ISE) programs in Native communities that engage youth in science education and that are grounded in Native ways of knowing. There is also a growing body of research focusing on the relationship between culture, traditional knowledge, and science education. However, there is little research documenting how these programs are being developed and the ways in which culture and Western science are incorporated into the activities. This study outlines effective practices for using Native ways of knowing to strengthen ISE programs. These
DATE:
TEAM MEMBERS:
Elizabeth MackHelen AugareLinda Different Cloud-JonesDavid DominiqueHelene Quiver GaddieRose HoneyAngayuqaq KawagleyMelissa Little Plume-WeatherwaxLisa Lone FightGene MeierPete TachiniJames Rattling LeafElvin Returns from ScoutBonnie Sachatello-SawyarHi'ilani ShibataShelly ValdezRachel Wippert
This summative evaluation of the University of Washington Botany Greenhouse K-12 Education Outreach Program analyzed the contents of 468 thank-you notes written by program participants using the National Science Foundation’s Framework for Evaluating Impacts of Informal Science Education Projects. Strong evidence was found for impacts in three STEM learning categories: Awareness, Knowledge or Understanding, Engagement or Interest, and Skills.