Museums in the US receive approximately 55 million visits each year from students in school groups. Field trip visits to an art museum have been found to positively impact critical thinking skills, empathy and tolerance - an increase that can be even more significant for youth from rural or high-poverty regions. While field trips are popular, especially at science museums, there have been no experimental studies about their impact on STEM career choices and interests, much less any which used a culturally sensitive and responsive approach. Given the resources put into field trips, this study investigates if causal links can be drawn between museum experiences and impact on youth. The Museum of Science & Industry uses a Learning Labs approach for engaging its visitors. These "Learning Labs" are facilitated experiences that run roughly an hour. Currently there are 12 lab topics. This study focuses on MedLab--one of the learning labs--as the setting for the research. MedLab is designed for on-site and online experience using ultra-sophisticated and highly versatile technology in challenges taken from research on the top healthcare issues that face adolescents in their communities.
This study is informed by research and theory on Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) and Racial and Ethnic Identity. The former describes a process many follow when thinking about career options, broadly. The latter describes how people see themselves in the world through their membership with a racial and/or ethnic group. Both processes can collectively influence STEM career choices. This study follows an embedded mixed-method design. The quantitative portion includes an experimental, pre/post/delayed post-test design of both educators and their students using multiple measures taken mostly from previously published instruments. The qualitative portion includes observation rubrics of MedLab sessions along with interviews and focus groups with staff, educators, students and families that take place both within and outside of the museum. This is an experimental study of moderate size of both heterogeneous teacher and student populations in real world settings. It involves comparing youth and educators that participate in MedLab with those who do not. By conducting research that looks at each community through the lens of their unique experiences, the research will measure their impact more sensitively and authentically, addressing a gap in current literature on informal science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) career education with diverse students.
This study is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program and the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program.
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.
The role of afterschool programs in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning ecosystem has grown over the past two decades, which has led to increasing efforts to support and improve program quality. These efforts include developing STEM programs and curricula, creating standards for facilitating informal STEM learning experiences, building networks of support, and developing tools for assessment and evaluation. However, such efforts may have limited impact in terms of ongoing quality improvement. STEM curricula vary in disciplinary focus, quality and may not apply to local contexts and needs. Many afterschool programs resort to using simple STEM kits or online activities rather than rigorous curricula with support for educators. The project will study how the California Department of Education's (CDE) efforts to change organizational culture to support continuous quality improvement (CQI) have affected the offerings and quality of afterschool STEM in the state's more than 4,500 publicly funded afterschool sites. The EPISTEMIC project will contribute new research findings on how CQI can increase access to higher quality STEM learning opportunities for underserved youth. Even more important, the project will provide new insights on how organizational culture affects participation in and implementation of afterschool CQI.
The team will use an organizational theory framework and a mixed methods approach to conduct three research activities: (1) Describe the organizational context through interviews, participant observations, and artifact analysis to map and describe the overall support system as a context for understanding organizational culture change; (2) Describe change over time in organizational culture, CQI processes, and STEM program offerings and quality through surveys/interviews of afterschool youth, staff, directors, and grantee representatives; and (3) Generate explanations about the relationships between organizational culture, CQI, and STEM quality in different contexts through in depth case studies. Bringing organizational culture, CQI, and STEM offerings and quality into shared focus is the most important intellectual contribution of this work. Organizational theory's sensemaking concept will guide analyses to describe, exemplify, and generate theoretical explanations for patterns in organizational culture, CQI, and STEM program changes, with attention to relevant contextual factors.
Continuous quality improvement provides tools for afterschool STEM staff to identify needs and ways to improve. The EPISTEMIC study will contribute recommendations on the systemic, organizational, and cultural aspects of improvement strategies relevant to policymakers, funders, support providers, and afterschool organizations in California, as well as other state or nongovernmental support systems around the country. The study will also produce CQI guidelines for reflecting on and incorporating changes to organizational culture as part of CQI for afterschool staff and site directors. These will be helpful for practitioners around the country. The study's focus on three organizational contexts -- school district, national afterschool, and local afterschool -- will extend the relevance of the findings and recommendations, which will be disseminated through forums, workshops, and articles in practice and policy-oriented publications. The study will also benefit the research community by providing a framework and methods for studying organizational culture and CQI. The findings on the relationships between organizational culture, CQI, and STEM offerings and outcomes will provide a foundation for further research on how these relate to STEM learning outcomes for youth. EPISTEMIC 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 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:
Patrik LundhAndrea BeesleyTimothy PodkulCarrie Allen
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
This project responds to the Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) solicitation (NSF 17-537) and is sponsored by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning program at the National Science Foundation. CAREER: Talking Science: Early STEM Identity Formation Through Everyday Science Talk (Talking Science) addresses the critical issue of the development of children's identification with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields and the limited knowledge about the development of STEM identity through conversations, particularly among very young children from underserved and underrepresented populations. Talking Science is based on the premise that individuals who develop STEM interests and identify with STEM at a young age tend to participate in STEM fields more so than individuals who develop these later in life. This study investigates how STEM-related conversations outside of school with friends and family during formative years (i.e., 7 - 12 years old) shape youths’ STEM identity later in life and their engagement in STEM. The goals of Talking Science are (1) To develop an understanding of the features and context of conversations held between children and their caregivers/teachers that support STEM identity development in both majority and Hispanic/Latine populations; and (2) To translate the research outcomes into informal STEM learning practices that positively contribute to young people's perceptions of STEM fields in their future.
To achieve its goals, this work addresses the following research questions: (1) What is the content, context, and structure of STEM-related conversations with friends and family that youth ages 7 - 12 participate in?; (2) How do the features of conversation (i.e., content, context, structure) relate to the development of youth's STEM interests, sense of recognition as STEM people, and self-identification with STEM?; (3) How do the cultural values and science talk experiences of Hispanic/Latine youth shape conversation features related to youth's STEM interests, sense of recognition as STEM people, and self-identification with STEM?; and (4) Does professional development for practitioners that focuses on encouraging youth to engage in STEM-related conversations with friends and family positively contribute to youth's STEM interest, sense of recognition, and self-identification with STEM? To address these questions, the study adopts a qualitative research approach that applies phenomenological strategies in research design, data collection, and analysis to allow for exploration of the meaning of lived experiences in social and cultural contexts. Participants include elementary-age youths (ages 7 - 12) and caregivers from socially, culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse backgrounds. To inform the development of interview protocols in terms of the kinds of childhood talk that leave a long-term impact on students, including the kinds of talk experiences remembered by students who choose or persist towards a STEM career in college, the project also recruits college students pursuing STEM degrees as participants. Data gathering and interpretation strategies include surveys and interviews. The outcomes of this research will constitute a theoretical framework and models that guide the development of both professionals and programmatic activities at informal learning institutions, particularly around scaffolding participation in STEM through family science talk.
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.
BioEYES is a K-12 science outreach program that develops self-sustaining teachers as a replication strategy to address high demand for the program while promoting long-term school partnerships. This paper explores the practices of “model teachers” from multiple grades, who are empowered over a three-year period to deliver BioEYES’ hands-on science content autonomously, as compared to the program’s standard co-teaching model (BioEYES educator + classroom teacher). The authors found that BioEYES’ professional development (PD) workshop, classroom co-teaching experience, and refresher trainings
Robots and robotics excite and challenge youths and adults. Unfortunately, the cost of purchasing robots or building useful robots is prohibitive for many low resource individuals and groups. This project will relieve this expense and provide an opportunity for resource limited individuals to experience the thrilling aspects of robotics by building a computer game that simulates robotic action. This project uses co-robotics wherein the participating player programs an avatar to assist in a symbiotic manner to achieve the goals of the game and participant. The game will provide access to the ideas and concepts such as programing, computational thinking and role assumption. The overarching goals are (1) to engage low-resource learners in STEM education through robotics in out-of-school spaces, and (2) to update the field of robotics-base STEM education to integrate the co-robotics paradigm.
This project is designed to gain knowledge on how co-robotics can be used in the informal education sector to facilitate the integration of computational science with STEM topics and to expand the educational use of co-robotics. Because the concept of co-robotics is new, a designed-based research approach will be used to build theoretical knowledge and knowledge of effective interventions for helping participants learn programing and computational thinking. Data will be collected from several sources including surveys, self-reports, in game surveys, pre and post-tests. These data collection efforts will address the following areas: Technology reliability, Resolution of cognitive tension around co-play, Accelerate discovery and initial engagement, Foster role-taking and interdependence with co-robots, Investigate social learning, and Validate measures using item response theory analysis. The DBR study questions are:
1.What design principles support the development of P3Gs that can effectively attract initial engagement in a free-choice OST space that offers large numbers of competing options? 2.What design principles support a P3G gameplay loop that enables learning of complex skills, computational thinking and co-robotics norms, and building of individual and career interest over the course of repeated engagement?
3.What design principles support P3Gs in attaining a high rate of re-engagement within low-resource OST settings? 4.What kinds of positive impact can P3Gs have on their proximal and distal environment? In addition, the project will research these questions about design: 1.What technical and game design features are needed to accommodate technological interruption? 2.What design elements or principles mitigate competition for cognitive resources between real-time play and understanding the co-robotic's behavior in relation to the code the player wrote for it? 3.What design elements are effective at getting learners in OST settings to notice and start playing the game? 4.What designs are effective at encouraging learners to engage with challenging content, particularly the transition from manual play to co-play? 5.What design elements help players develop a stake in the role the game offers? 6.What social behaviors emerge organically around a P3G prototype that is not designed to evoke specific social interactions?
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.
This project responds to calls to increase children's exposure and engagement in STEM at an early age. With the rise of the maker-movement, the informal and formal education sectors have witnessed a dramatic expansion of maker and tinkering spaces, programs, and curricula. This has happened in part because of the potential benefits of tinkering experiences to promote access and equity in engineering education. To realize these benefits, it is necessary to continue to make and iterate design and facilitation approaches that can deepen early engagement in disciplinary practices of engineering and other STEM-relevant skills. This project will investigate how stories can be integrated into informal STEM learning experiences for young children and their families. Stories can be especially effective because they bridge the knowledge and experiences young children and their caregivers bring to tinkering as well as the conversations and hands-on activities that can extend that knowledge. In addition, a unique contribution of the project is to test the hypothesis that stories can also facilitate spatial reasoning, by encouraging children to think about the spatial properties of their emerging structures.
This project uses design-based research methods to advance knowledge and the evidence base for practices that engender story-based tinkering. Using conjecture mapping, the team will specify their initial ideas and how it will be evident that design/practices impact caregivers-child behaviors and learning outcomes. The team will consider the demographic characteristics, linguistic practices, and funds of knowledge of the participants to understand the design practices (resources, activities) being implemented and how they potentially facilitate learning. The outcome of each study/DBR cycle serves as inputs for questions and hypotheses in the next. A culturally diverse group of 300+ children ages 5 to 8 years old and their parents at Chicago Children's Museum's Tinkering Lab will participate in the study to examine the following key questions: (1) What design and facilitation approaches engage young children and their caregivers in creating their own engineering-rich tinkering stories? (2) How can museum exhibit design (e.g., models, interactive displays) and tinkering stories together engender spatial thinking, to further enrich early STEM learning opportunities? and (3) Do the tinkering stories children and their families tell support lasting STEM learning? As part of the overall iterative, design-based approach, the team will also field test the story-based tinkering approaches identified in the first cycles of DBR to be most promising.
This project will result in activities, exhibit components, and training resources that invite visitors' stories into open-ended problem-solving activities. It will advance understanding of mechanisms for encouraging engineering learning and spatial thinking through direct experience interacting with objects, and playful, scaffolded (guided) problem-solving activities.
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.
An in-depth case study of one of America’s first STEM Learning Ecosystems in Tulsa, Oklahoma, conducted by researchers at The PEAR Institute: Partnerships in Education and Resilience, finds that strong leadership, deep partnerships, and data-informed methods have led to the creation of diverse, high-quality, STEM-rich learning opportunities for Tulsa’s youth. Additionally, these efforts improved the capacity of STEM educators through high-quality professional development and supported youth pathways to STEM careers by increasing mentoring opportunities for STEM professionals.
These findings
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kristin Lewis-WarnerPatricia AllenGil Noam
Research shows that science centers and museums play an important role in giving youth STEM learning opportunities (Hamilton, Nussbaum, Kupermintz, Kerkhoven, & Snow, 1995; Salmi, 2001, 2002). These informal learning spaces use interactive exhibits and programming to spur excitement, generate interest in the sciences, shape STEM identities, and support science skills (National Research Council, 2009). A previous Knowledge Base article on engaging diverse youth further details the potential of informal learning to activate STEM interest.
However, despite these encouraging findings, informal
In April 2018, FHI 360, under the leadership of Maryann Stimmer and Merle Froschl, convened a meeting of thought leaders in Washington, D.C. to capture a “snapshot” of STEM education. They subsequently conducted additional interviews with more than 50 local and national policy leaders; public and private funders; researchers; PreK-12 and post-secondary educators; parents, and leaders of afterschool programs, science centers and youth-serving organizations. The purpose of this summary report is to identify current trends and gaps to inform research, policy, and practice in order to reinforce
Ruff Family Science is a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that aims to foster joint media engagement and hands-on science exploration among diverse, low-income parents and their 4- to 8-year-old children. Building on the success of the PBS series FETCH! with Ruff Ruffman, the project leverages FETCH’s funny and charismatic animated host, along with its proven approach to teaching science, to inspire educationally disadvantaged families to explore science together. The project is utilizing a research and design process to create resources that meet the needs of families
This Conference Paper was presented at the International Soceity for the Learning Sciences Confernece in June 2018. We summarize interviews with youth ages 9-15 about their failure mindsets, and if those midsets cross boundaries between learning environments.
Previous research on youth’s perceptions and reactions to failure established a view of failure as a negative, debilitating experience for youth, yet STEM and in particular making programs increasingly promote a pedagogy of failures as productive learning experiences. Looking to unpack perceptions of failure across contexts and