The NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot: American STEM Alliance Network Improvement Community focuses on the broadening participation challenge of providing equitable access to STEM education in high-need, majority Hispanic and Native American communities. The project will apply both collective impact and network improvement community collaborative change strategies in their effort with three school districts in the Southwest serving majority Hispanic and Native American communities (San Antonio, TX, Farmington, NM, and Andarko, OK). The proposed model of collaborative change for this project combines the stakeholder engagement focus of collective impact with the strategic, iterative improvement emphasis of the networked improvement community approaches. The American Institutes of Research (AIR) and the American STEM Alliance (ASA) provide leadership for this effort. A key feature of this project is that it brings new ways of community engagement, data driven decision making, and institutional collaboration to an existing Alliance with an established reputation with the target population. The rapid cycle study design proposed by this project will contribute to understanding how communities can develop stronger, more evidence based approaches to addressing the grand challenge of broadening participation across a variety of contexts.
The goal of this project is to develop and test a contextually, and culturally relevant approach to addressing inequities in STEM education. The project proposes to promote equitable access to a coherent continuum of support in STEM education pathways. The Carnegie STEM Excellence Pathway provides the tools and resources for the participating districts to identify a problem of practice and create an intervention to address that problem using a data-driven framework, proven tools/techniques, and continuous feedback. The project evaluation focuses on documenting the collaborative change strategies, continuous improvement cycles, and their contribution to the changes in institutional policy and practice required to create increased access to rigorous STEM courses for Hispanic and Native American high school students.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Melissa DodsonMichael MarderRaul ReynaAdam ChavarriaToney Begay
Many urban universities offer precollege STEM programs aimed at broadening participation in STEM. These programs are designed to increase students' scientific content knowledge and skills, promote STEM engagement, increase self-efficacy, and prepare underserved and underrepresented minority high school students for success in undergraduate programs. However, even after demonstrating significant knowledge gains and success in these programs, students are often unable to authenticate their knowledge gains to receive favorable consideration on college applications. In fact, there is currently no systematic credentialing mechanism to assess and validate the scientific rigor of and competency gains within STEM precollege programs for college admissions purposes. This NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot seeks to address this gap by developing and testing credentialing and badging processes for four STEM precollege programs. Working with College Admissions Officers and project partners, the University of Pittsburgh endeavors to employ a collaborative impact approach to build and document the collaborative infrastructure needed to support STEM precollege program authentication processes. This will seed the development of a networked improvement community that supports all aspects of the work from participant support to the collaborative impact to the greater network of urban education university ecosystems involved in the pilot.
Over a two-year period, this pilot will examine a mechanism to strengthen the STEM pathway for disadvantaged and underrepresented minority students to enter postsecondary STEM programs and eventually STEM careers. Building on two social innovation theories, the technical approach will focus on four specific aims: (1) create a community engagement framework to recruit underserved and underrepresented high school students to STEM precollege programs, (2) develop a STEM Success Matrix that identifies student competencies acquired in precollege programs that prepare students for collegiate success in STEM, (3) credential precollege programs using the STEM Success Matrix, and (4) develop a student badging system for precollege program participants using the STEM Success Matrix. Four University of Pittsburgh STEM precollege programs will serve as the context for development and testing with support from a range of partners representing the broader Pittsburgh STEM ecosystem. Approximately 300 high school students are expected to participate in the pilot, across the four precollege programs. Data will be collected via participant surveys and interviews. Formative and summative evaluations will be conducted by an experienced, external evaluator. Shareable metrics, tools, and processes will be developed and disseminated using various platforms and mechanisms. If successful, this pilot could be transformative - changing admissions considerations by credentialing STEM precollege programs and increasing student interest and motivation in STEM through student badging. It would also transform the STEM ecosystem of underserved and underrepresented minority students by creating an important STEM pathway from precollege to undergraduate admissions and ultimately, STEM Careers. This pilot could serve as a baseline for a more expansive alliance with other urban education ecosystems or assisting others interested in establishing their own collaborative infrastructure and networked improvement community model to achieve similar results.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alison Slinskey LeggJennifer IritiDavid BooneAlaine AllenLori Delale-O'Connor
The University of Guam (UOG) NSF INCLUDES Launch Pilot project, GROWING STEM, addresses the grand challenge of increasing Native Pacific Islander representation in the nation's STEM enterprise, particularly in environmental sciences. The project addresses culturally-relevant and place-based research as the framework to attract, engage, and retain Native Pacific Islander students in STEM disciplines. The full science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) pathway will be addressed from K-12 to graduate studies with partnerships that include the Guam Department of Education, Humatak Community Foundation, Pacific Post-Secondary Education Council, the Guam Science and Discovery Society, the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) and the University of Alaska-Fairbaanks. As the project progresses, the project anticipates further partnerships with the current NSF INCLUDES Launch Pilot project at the University of the Virgin Islands.
Pilot activities include summer internships for high school students, undergraduate and graduate research opportunities through UOG's Plant Nursery and the Humatak Community Foundation Heritage House. STEM professional development activities will be offered through conference participation and student research presentations in venues such as the Guam Science and Discovery Society's Guam Island-wide Science Fair and SACNAS. Faculty will be recruited to develop a mentoring protocol for the project participants. Community outreach and extension services will expand public understanding in environmental sciences from the GROW STEM project. Project metrics will include monitoring the diversity of partners, increases in community engagement, Native Pacific Islander participation in STEM activities, the number of students who desire to attain terminal STEM degrees and the number of community members reached by pilot STEM extension and outreach activities. Dissemination of the GROWING STEM pilot project results will occur through the NSF INCLUDES National Network, partner annual conferences, and local, regional and national STEM conferences.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
John PetersonCheryl SanguezaElse DemeulenaereAustin Shelton
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This is a project to offer the Forum on Inclusive STEMM Entrepreneurship (FISE), a novel effort to broaden the participation of underrepresented minority women in STEMM entrepreneurship and to enhance the diversity of the science and engineering workforce. Through a convening of educators, entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, industry leaders, investors and policy experts, entrepreneurial education thought leaders, and intersectionality scholars the PI proposes to use this conference as a platform for building capacity in the preparation and development of future entrepreneurs from underrepresented groups. The PI also seeks to contribute to the emerging field of research that bridges tech entrepreneurship and education policy.
The proposed forum has the potential to advance knowledge in the field of entrepreneurship education and engineering education. Given the dearth of research-based interventions to broaden participation in tech entrepreneurship, this conference offers an opportunity for participants to contribute to the leading edge of research and interventions in this field.
The convening and associated activities will leverage the social capital of knowledgeable experts in the academy and industry, investors, entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs to address critical needs of the nation that relate to enhanced global competitiveness, an improved national economy, and the participation of underrepresented cohorts in entrepreneurship and commercialization.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Gilda Barabino
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
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 Algebra Project, in partnership with the Young People's Project, will convene a conference on inclusion in science, technology, engineering and mathematics(STEM) higher education in support of the National Science Foundation's Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (NSF INCLUDES) initiative. The conference will examine a critical question: What roles and structures are needed for a mini-backbone organization in order to scale a "bottom up" model of social change into an organized, full scale collective impact model? Additionally, the conference will develop participants' capacity to link action on the various design challenges, and backbone structures, to future actions that meet the needs of a potential Alliance on this Broadening Participation Challenge and others facing similar challenges.
Five pre-conference design teams will focus on key components to improve education of students from underrepresented and disadvantaged populations over a four-month period prior to the convening of the stakeholders in St. Louis, Missouri in 2017.
This article discusses Purdue University's Center for Global Soundscapes' five-day camp program for students with visual impairments. The program follows an inquiry-based learning approach to explore concepts fundamental to soundscape ecology.
This brief discusses the PLUM LANDING Explore Outdoors Toolkit, a new set of free, public media resources designed to help informal educators and parents infuse science learning into outdoor recreation. Developed by trusted media producer WGBH in partnership with researchers at Education Development Center (EDC), the Toolkit aims to get children (ages 6–9) from low-income, urban communities outside so they can explore the environment around them while debunking the myth that nature is something that only exists beyond city limits.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Marion GoldsteinElizabeth PiersonJamie KynnLisa Famularo
This is the solicitation for proposals to the NSF 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 opportunities for the public in informal environments; provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.
There is a growing need for citizens to be able to work with data and consider how data is represented. This work employs a design, make, play framework to create data modeling learning experiences for young children and their caregivers in an informal setting. The project develops and tests a curriculum for a workshop series for 5-8 year old children to engage them in playful exploration of data modeling. Children engage in data collection, data representation, and data analysis by drawing on their own experiences of museum exhibitions. The curriculum supports developing children's interest and engagement with data science and data literacy, which are foundational knowledge for a range of STEM careers and disciplines. This project advances efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM).
The project is grounded in a theoretical framework for young children's learning that focus on playful exploration, design, and building on children's own experiences and questions. The research examines how the curriculum needs to be designed to support families in data modeling, foster engagement in data modeling by both younger (ages 5-6) and older (ages 7-8) children, and provide evidence of active approaches to learning about STEM. The design and development project tests and investigates the materials using a design-based research framework. Children who participate in the workshop series should increase their confidence in solving problems, taking initiative, and drawing on available resources to pursue their own questions and respond to novel challenges. Data collected includes interviews with participants, artifacts of children's work throughout the series, and an observational instrument to document families' problem solving, persistence, and engagement with data science concepts.
The Crowd & The Cloud, a three-year project, developed by Passport To Knowledge and funded by the National Science Foundation, uses multimedia to engage different audiences around citizen science and crowdsourcing. The project team created four episodes of a broadcast television series, which appeared on PBS stations and via PBS.org, an interactive website, and a robust social media presence in an attempt to reach three target audiences: the general public, scientists, and citizen scientists. Rockman et al (REA), an independent educational research and evaluation firm, conducted an external
The Montana Girls STEM Collaborative brings together organizations and individuals throughout Montana who are committed to informing and motivating girls to pursue careers in STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. The Collaborative offers professional development, networking and collaboration opportunities to adults who offer and/or support STEM programs for girls and other youth typically under-represented in STEM. The vision of Montana Girls STEM is that every young person in Montana has the opportunity to learn about STEM careers and feels welcome pursuing any dream they
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Suzi TaylorRay CallawayCathy Witlock
resourceresearchProfessional Development and Workshops
This multiple case study analysis investigates the perceptions of four science teachers who are repeat attendees at professional development programs coordinated by a university center. Adult learning theory provided a lens to view the motivated participants of the study and each of the five assumptions were present. Findings revealed three themes: (1) these science teachers perceive dual identities as both an educator and a scientist: as a professional educator they are focused on developing new lessons to bring relevant and engaging materials to their students while at the same time they
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Julie R. BokorKent CrippenMary Jo Koroly