This Innovations in Development project aims to foster the development of STEM identity among a diverse group of middle school students and, in turn, motivate them to pursue in STEM interests and careers. Vegas STEM Lab, led by a team of investigators from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, will employ a mix of online and on-site activities to introduce students to engineering methods in the context of the entertainment and hospitality (E&H) industry that is the lifeblood of Las Vegas. Investigators will collaborate with local resorts, multimedia designers, and arts institutions to offer field experiences for students to interview, interact with, and learn from local experts. The Lab will help youth overcome prevailing beliefs of STEM as boring and difficult, boost their confidence as STEM-capable individuals, and expose them to the exciting STEM careers available in their hometown. UNLV engineering undergrads will serve as near-peer mentors to the middle school students, guiding them through Lab activities and acting as role models. Investigators will measure student learning and engagement over the course of the Vegas STEM Lab experience with the aim of understanding how the Lab model—with its rich set of activities and interpersonal interactions set in the local E&H industry—can cultivate STEM identity development and encourage students to pursue STEM pathways. Despite the project’s hyperlocal focus on the Las Vegas community, if successful, other cities and towns may learn from and adapt the Lab model for use in their youth development programs.
Vegas STEM Lab will provide online materials for students’ STEM learning during the academic year followed by on-site visits and hands-on project development during a three-week summer experience. The Lab will run for three years with cohorts of 40 students each (N=120) with the aim of iteratively improving its activities and outcomes from year to year. The local school district will help recruit middle school students who have demonstrated low interest in STEM to participate in the Lab, ensuring that participants reflect the demographic makeup of the Las Vegas community in terms of race and ethnicity, socio-economic status, and gender. Summer activities will take students behind the scenes of the city’s major E&H venues; investigate the workings of large-scale displays, light shows, and “smart hospitality” systems; and then build their own smaller scale engineering projects. Investigators will employ the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI) framework to study how intentionally designed Lab experiences shape students’ understanding of themselves, their future aspirations, and their grasp of the scientific enterprise. Summer activities will be integrated into the online learning platform at the end of each year of Vegas STEM Lab, and in the final year of the project, workshops will train local educators to use the platform in either formal or informal learning settings. Materials and research findings produced through this work will be disseminated to middle school teachers and afterschool care providers, and shared with researchers through academic publications and conferences.
This Innovations in Development project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Emma RegentovaVenkatesan MuthukumarJonathan HilpertSi Jung Kim
Mentoring is a widely accepted strategy for helping youth see how their interests and abilities fit with education and career pathways; however, more research is needed to better understand how different approaches to mentoring impact youth participants. Near-peer mentoring can be a particularly impactful approach, particularly when youth can identify with their mentors. This project investigates three approaches to near-peer mentoring of high-school-aged Hispanic youth by Hispanic undergraduate mathematics majors. Mentoring approaches include undergraduates' visits to high school classrooms, mathematics social media, and a summer math research camp. These three components of the intervention are aimed at facilitating enjoyment of advanced mathematics through dynamic, experiential learning and helping high school aged youth to align themselves with other doers of mathematics on the academic stage just beyond them, i.e., college.
Using a Design-Based Research approach that involves mixed methods, the research investigates how the three different near-peer mentoring approaches impact youth participants' attitudes and interests related to studying mathematics and pursuing a career in mathematics, the youth's sense of whether they themselves are doers of mathematics, and the youth's academic progress in mathematics. The project design and research study focus on the development of mathematical identity, where a mathematics identity encompasses a person's self-understanding of himself or herself in the context of doing mathematics, and is grounded in Anderson (2007)'s four faces of identity: Engage, Imagine, Achieve, and Nature. The study findings have the potential to uncover associations between informal interactions involving the near-peer groups of high school aged youth and undergraduates seen to impact attitudes, achievement, course selection choices, and identities relative to mathematics. It also responds to an important gap in current understandings regarding effective communication of mathematics through social media outlets, and results will describe the value of in-person mathematical interactions as well as online interactions through social media. The study will result in a model for using informal near-peer mentoring and social media applications for attracting young people to study and pursue careers in STEM. This project will also result in a body of scripted MathShow presentations and materials and Math Social Media content that will be publicly available to audiences internationally via YouTube and Instagram.
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. 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 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:
Aaron WilsonSergey GrigorianXiaohui WangMayra Ortiz
Developing and maintaining a diverse, innovative workforce in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (known as STEM) is critical to American competitiveness in the world, but national surveys report a current and future shortage of highly qualified STEM professionals in the US. One problem creating this shortage is that more than half of all college students who declare a major in STEM fields drop out or change their majors in the first two years of their post-secondary education. This problem is particularly acute for first generation college students. If we could increase the STEM degree completion rate by just 25%, we would make up 75% of the additional workforce needed over the next decade.
Our project aims to increase the STEM persistence of first generation college students and focuses on rural students in West Virginia. Project partners including scientists from National Labs, college faculty, local school system staff, informal educators, State Department of Education officials, and West Virginia college students will collaborate to develop summer and academic year activities that support young undergraduates majoring in STEM. Activities that we will pilot include early opportunities to do science research, academic year courses that develop science, math and communication skills, and the formation of Hometown STEM Ambassadors; undergraduate STEM students that encourage younger students back in their hometown schools. We will study the impact of these activities on students' persistence in STEM majors.
Our Project is called FIRST TWO: Improving STEM Persistence in the First Two Years of College (FIRST TWO).
Technical Details:
During the Development Launch Project, partners will create and pilot components of two courses that will confer college credit to students in two and four year schools. Each course will have as its center piece a research and development internship. By the end of the Project Development Pilot, FIRST TWO course modules will be integrated into courses the State, and be transferable between community colleges and four-year schools.
An innovative component of FIRST TWO is the creation of Hometown STEM ambassadors--students who participate in both courses will be prepared to mentor their peers, and also conduct outreach in their home school districts. They will make presentations to hometown K-12 students, and will discuss STEM college readiness issues with local education leaders. We believe reconnecting post-secondary students with their home communities and providing place-based relevance to their STEM education will have a positive impact on their persistence, as well as the added benefit of encouraging K-12 students to envision themselves as future STEM professionals.
FIRST TWO will:
- integrate early experience in STEM internships, online communities of practice and STEM skills development into a discovery-based "principles of research and development" college seminar for first year students;
- sustain engagement through a second service learning course, called STEM Leadership that will develop communication and mentoring skills and produce peer mentors who will mentor younger students, join in the efforts to change the STEM education experience at their schools, and conduct outreach in their hometown communities during the students? second year and third years.
- secure state-wide adoption and transferability of these courses, or course materials, and ultimately scale the program across the Appalachian region and to other states with large rural student populations.
- collaborate with National Labs to determine the feasibility of a National STEM Persistence Alliance partnering National Lab internship programs with 2 and 4-year schools who serve FGC students.
Finally, there are many studies that inquire into the factors that correlate with post-secondary retention in general, and with STEM attrition specifically but few that focus on rural students. FIRST TWO will fully articulate a rigorous educational research project aimed at advancing understanding of the factors affecting rural students' entry into and persistence in STEM career pathways. This research will study the impact FIRST TWO program components make on rural FGC students' persistence in STEM majors. Instruments will be developed and validated that test the components proposed in FIRST TWO interventions. As we scale the program to a larger Alliance, so will the research study scale, providing a unique opportunity to inform the education community about the rural students' experience.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Sue HeatherlyKaren ONeilErica Harvey
Within the UNAM (The National Autonomous University of Mexico) there is an institution, the Dirección General de Divulgación de la Ciencia (DGDC) devoted to the popularization of science through different media such as museums, exhibitions, journals, books, radio and TV programs, internet, workshops for children, demos, shows, plays, summer courses and outreach programs. Most of these products and materials are planned, designed and manufactured by a multidisciplinary team of professionals in the DGDC. Some of our most outstanding projects are: the creation and operation of two science museums
The Magnet Lab has a strong commitment to education. Through the Center for Integrating Research & Learning, the lab supports educational programming at all academic levels: K-12, technical, undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral. Please explore the links listed to the left to find out more about the depth of our educational resources for the community, for teachers and for students as well as our unique research offerings. Our programs are designed to excite and educate students, teachers and the general public about science, technology and the world around them. All of our programs are developed in close collaboration with research scientists and educators. Housed at and partly funded by the MagLab, the Center is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the excellent resources, connections, world-class facilities and cutting-edge science the lab has to offer. We also receive generous support from the National Science Foundation and the State of Florida. The Center maintains a rigorous research agenda designed to investigate how Center programs and materials affect teachers and students. Our Mission Statement is to expand scientific literacy and to encourage interest in and the pursuit of scientific studies among educators and students of all ages through connections between the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and the National Science Foundation, the community of Tallahassee, the State of Florida and the nation.