Given the growth of technology in the 21st century and the growing demands for computer science skills, computational thinking has been increasingly included in K-12 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Computational thinking (CT) is relevant to integrated STEM and has many common practices with other STEM disciplines. Previous studies have shown synergies between CT and engineering learning. In addition, many researchers believe that the more children are exposed to CT learning experiences, the stronger their programming abilities will be. As programming is a
In November 2016, within an Environmental studies course at the University of Venice, students carried out an experiment aimed at collecting scenarios of the Venetian coast's future starting from lessons learnt during the episode of storm surge 50 years ago (Aqua Granda ‘flood’). The students built scenarios able to anticipate the effect of sea level rise on coastal areas in Venice, based not only on scientific input but also on a methodology called “Futurescape city Tours” (FCT) involving inhabitants of the barrier islands of Lido and Pellestrina. This paper will explore three main questions
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alba L’AstorinaAlessia GhezziStefano GuerzoniEmanuela Molinaroli
Computational Thinking (CT) is a relatively new educational focus and a clear need for learners as a 21st century skill. This proposal tackles this challenging new area for young learners, an area greatly in need of research and learning materials. The Principal Investigators will develop and implement integrated STEM+C museum exhibits and integrate CT in their existing engineering design based PictureSTEM curriculum for K-2 students. They will also pilot assessments of the CT components of the PictureSTEM curriculum. This work will make a unique contribution to the available STEM+C learning materials and assessments. There are few such materials for the kindergarten to second grade (K-2) population they will work with. They will research the effects of the curriculum and the exhibits with a mixed methods approach. First, they will collect observational data and conduct case studies to discover the important elements of an integrated STEM+C experience in both the formal in-school setting with the curriculum and in the informal out-of-school setting with families interacting with the museum exhibits. This work will provide a novel way to understand the important question of how in- and out-of-school experiences contribute to the development of STEM and CT thinking and learning. Finally, they will collect data from all participants to discover the ways that their activities lead to increases in STEM+C knowledge and interest.
The Principal Investigators will build on an integrated STEM curriculum by integrating CT and develop integrated museum exhibits. They base both activities on engineering design implemented through challenge based programming activities. They will research and/or develop assessments of both STEM+C integrated thinking and CT. Their research strategy combines Design Based Research and quantitative assessment of the effectiveness of the materials for learning CT. In the first two years of their study, they will engage in iterations on the design of the curriculum and the exhibits based on observation and case-study data. There will be 16 cases that draw from each grade level and involve data collection for the case student in both schools and museums. They will also use this work to illuminate what integrated STEM+C thinking and learning looks like across formal and informal learning environments. Based in some part on what they discover in this first phase, they will conduct the quantitative assessments with all (or at least most) students participating in the study
Engineering is a critical yet understudied topic in early childhood. Previous research has shown that even young children can engage in (versions of) engineering design practices and processes that are similar to those of adult engineers and designers. In this session, we will share and discuss current research projects to explore how different in-school and out-of-school contexts and activities support 3- to 8-year-old children as they engage in engineering design. We will consider ways that the different characteristics of the activities and spaces, as well as the practices of teachers
Today’s digital and online media demand an approach to learning keyed to a networked and interconnected world. The growth of online communities, social and online media, open educational resources, ubiquitous computing, big data, and digital production tools means young people are coming of age with a growing abundance of access to knowledge, information, and social connection. These shifts are tied to a host of new opportunities for interest-driven learning, creative expression, and diverse forms of contribution to civic, political, and economic life. Even learning of traditional academic
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
In this article we explore how activity design and learning contexts can influence youth failure mindsets through a case study of five youth who described failure as sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad thing (a perspective we characterize as Failure as Mosaic, described in the article). These youth and their descriptions of failure-positive and failure-negative experiences offer a unique opportunity to identify how experiences can be designed to support learning and persistence. In order to understand differing views of failure among youth, we researched the following questions:
One way to motivate young people from diverse backgrounds to pursue engineering careers is to enlist them as educators who can help the general public understand how engineers help respond to the challenges of everyday life. The New York Hall of Science, which serves a large and diverse audience, is an ideal setting for testing the promise of this strategy. Youth educators and curators of public programs at the Hall of Science will mentor two groups of high school- and early college-aged youth, who will contribute to the design and facilitation of engineering-focused events and activities for museum visitors. They will work together to develop engineering programming for the public that emphasizes the cultural and interpersonal dimensions of engineering practices. This group of young people will be recruited from the Hall of Science's more than 100 Explainers, a very diverse group of young people who work part-time at the Hall of Science and engage with visitors as they explore the museum. Researchers will track participants' experiences and document their impact on museum visitors' perceptions of engineering. The expectation is that creating and delivering these experiences for visitors will have a positive impact on the youth participants' understanding of the engineering disciplines, and on visitors' perceptions of engineering and its relationship to everyday life.
The project will use observations, interviews, journaling, and the Engineering Professional Skills Assessment to explore youth experience, and visitor exit surveys and interviews to probe visitor perceptions. Both the skills assessment and visitor surveys are NSF-funded instruments. Data coding will be grounded in the engineering habits of mind defined by the National Research Council's Committee on Understanding and Improving K-12 Engineering Education in the United States (2009). The project will capture evidence regarding which habits of mind the Fellows are most frequently engaged with. The effort will also explore how interactions with peers (as colleagues), with experts (as learners, such as with Designers in Residence) and with visitors (as teachers and leaders) may be associated with different combinations of the habits of mind over the course of the project. Visitor data and assessment data will allow the project to begin to make analytic connections between participating young people's increased understanding of culturally-situated engineering challenges, and their impact on the experiences of museum visitors who engage with engineering programming at the Hall of Science.
For nearly 20 years, the UAB Center for Community OutReach Development (CORD) has conducted SEPA funded research that has greatly enhanced the number of minority students entering the pipeline to college and biomedical careers, e.g., nearly all of CORD’s Summer Research Interns since 1998 (>300) have completed/are completing college and most of them are continuing on to graduate biomedical research and/or clinical training and careers. CORD’s programs that focused on high and middle school students have drawn many minority students into biomedical careers, but a low percentage of minority students benefit from these programs because far too many are already left behind academically in grades 4-6, due, at least in part, to a significant drop in science grades between grades 4 and 6, a drop from which most students never recover. A major contributor to this effect is that most grade 4-6 teachers in predominantly minority schools lack significant formal training in science and often are not fully aware of the great opportunities offered by biomedical careers.
In SEEC II, CORD will deliver intensive inquiry-based science training to grade 4-6 teachers, providing them with science content and hands-on science experiences that will afford their student both content and skills that will make them excited about, and competitive for, the advanced courses needed to move into biomedical research careers. SEEC II will also link teachers together across the elementary/middle school divide and bring the teachers together with administrators and parents, who will experience firsthand the excitement that inquiry learning brings and the significant advancement it provides in science and in reading and math. At monthly meetings and large annual celebrations, the parents, teachers and administrators will learn about the opportunities that biomedical careers can provide for the student who is well prepared. They will also consider the financial and educational steps required to ensure that students have the ability to reach these professions.
SEEC II will also expand CORD’s middle school LabWorks and Summer Science Camps to include grade 4-5 students and provide the teachers with professional learning in informal settings. During summer training, in small groups, the teachers will expand one of the inquiry-based science activities that they complete in the training, and they will use these in their classrooms and communicate with the others in their group to perfect these experiences in the school year. Finally, the teachers and grade 4-5 students will develop science and engineering fair-type research projects with which they will compete both on the school level and at the annual meeting. Thus, the students will share with their parents the excitement that science brings. The Intellectual Merit of SEEC II will be to test a model to enhance grade 4-6 teacher development and vertical alignment, providing science content, exposure to biomedical scientists and training in participatory science experiments, thus positioning teachers to succeed. The Broader Impacts will include the translation and testing of a science education model to assist minority students to avoid the middle school plunge and reach biomedical careers.
The employment demands in STEM fields grew twice as fast as employment in non-STEM fields in the last decade, making it a matter of national importance to educate the next generation about science, engineering and the scientific process. The need to educate students about STEM is particularly pronounced in low-income, rural communities where: i) students may perceive that STEM learning has little relevance to their lives; ii) there are little, if any, STEM-related resources and infrastructure available at their schools or in their immediate areas; and iii) STEM teachers, usually one per school, often teach out of their area expertise, and lack a network from which they can learn and with which they can share experiences. Through the proposed project, middle school teachers in low-income, rural communities will partner with Dartmouth faculty and graduate students and professional science educators at the Montshire Museum of Science to develop sustainable STEM curricular units for their schools. These crosscutting units will include a series of hands-on, investigative, active learning, and standards-aligned lessons based in part on engineering design principles that may be used annually for the betterment of student learning. Once developed and tested in a classroom setting in our four pilot schools, the units will be made available to other partner schools in NH and VT and finally to any school wishing to adopt them. In addition, A STEM rural educator network, through which crosscutting units may be disseminated and teachers may share and support each other, will be created to enhance the teachers’ ability to network, seek advice, share information, etc.
Research that seeks to understand classroom interactions often relies on video recordings of classrooms so that researchers can document and analyze what teachers and students are doing in the learning environment. When studies are large scale, this analysis is challenging in part because it is time-consuming to review and code large quantities of video. For example, hundreds of hours of videotaped interaction between students working in an after-school program for advancing computational thinking and engineering learning for Latino/a students. This project is exploring the use of computer-assisted methods for video analysis to support manual coding by researchers. The project is adapting procedures used for computer-aided diagnosis systems for medical systems. The computer-assisted process creates summaries that can then be used by researchers to identify critical events and to describe patterns of activities in the classroom such as students talking to each other or writing during a small group project. Creating the summaries requires analyzing video for facial recognition, motion, color and object identification. The project will investigate what parts of student participation and teaching can be analyzed using computer-assisted video analysis. This project is supported by NSF's EHR Core Research (ECR) program, the STEM+C program and the AISL program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. The project is funded by the STEM+Computing program, which seeks to address emerging challenges in computational STEM areas through the applied integration of computational thinking and computing activities within disciplinary STEM teaching and learning in early childhood education through high school (preK-12). 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.
The video analysis systems will provide video summarizations for specific activities which will allow researchers to use these results to quantify student participation and document teaching practices that support student learning. This will support the analysis of large volumes of video data that are often time-consuming to analyze. The video analysis system will identify objects in the scene and then use measures of distances between objects and other tracking methods to code different activities (e.g., typing, talking, interaction between the student and a facilitator). The two groups of research questions are as follows. (1) How can human review of digital videos benefit from computer-assisted video analysis methods? Which aspects of video summarization (e.g., detected activities) can help reduce the time it takes to review the videos? Beyond audio analytics, what types of future research in video summarization can help reduce the time that it takes to review videos? (2) How can we quantify student participation using computer-assisted video analysis methods? What aspects of student participation can be accurately measures by computer-assisted video analysis methods? The video to be used for this study is drawn from a project focused on engineering and computational thinking learning for Latino/a students in an after-school setting. Hundreds of hours of video are available to be reviewed and analyzed to design and refine the system. The resulting coding will also help document patterns of engagement in the learning environment.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Marios PattichisSylvia Celedon-PattichisCarlos LopezLeiva
K-12 informal engineering education can support student confidence, interest, and awareness of the field of engineering. Studies have suggested that K-12 informal learning can influence students’ awareness of the fields of engineering as potential career opportunities. Researchers have also found that engineering activities outside of school can engage youth in disciplines of which they are unfamiliar because of a lack of engineering opportunity in K12 formal education. In this paper, we provide a rich case study of one lesson’s implementation in a 5th-6th grade girls afterschool program. Our