RISES (Re-energize and Invigorate Student Engagement through Science) is a coordinated suite of resources including 42 interactive English and Spanish STEM videos produced by Children's Museum Houston in coordination with the science curriculum department at Houston ISD. The videos are aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, and each come with a bilingual Activity Guide and Parent Prompt sheet, which includes guiding questions and other extension activities.
This Innovations in Development project explores radical healing as an approach to create after-school STEM programming that welcomes, values and supports African American youth to form positive STEM identities. Radical healing is a strength-based, asset centered approach that incorporates culture, identity, civic action, and collective healing to build the capacity of young people to apply academic knowledge for the good of their communities. The project uses a newly developed graphic novel as a model of what it looks like to engage in the radical healing process and use STEM technology for social justice. This graphic novel, When Spiderwebs Unite, tells the true story of an African American community who used STEM technology to advocate for clean air and water for their community. Youth are supported to consider their own experiences and emotions in their sociopolitical contexts, realize they are not alone, and collaborate with their community members to take critical action towards social change through STEM. The STEM Club activities include mentoring by African American undergraduate students, story writing, conducting justice-oriented environmental sciences investigations, and applying the results of their investigations to propose and implement community action plans. These activities aim to build youth’s capacity to resist oppression and leverage the power of STEM technology for their benefit and that of their communities.
Clemson University, in partnership with the Urban League of the Upstate, engages 100 predominantly African American middle school students and 32 African American undergraduate students in healing justice work, across two youth-serving, community-based organizations at three sites. These young people assume a leadership role in developing this project’s graphic novel and curriculum for a yearlong, after-school STEM Club, both constructed upon the essential components of radical healing. This project uses a qual→quant parallel research design to investigate how the development and use of a graphic novel could be used as a healing justice tool, and how various components of radical healing (critical consciousness, cultural authenticity, self knowledge, radical hope, emotional and social support, and strength and resilience) affect African American youths’ STEM identity development. Researchers scrutinize interviews, field observations, and project documents to address their investigation and utilize statistical analyses of survey data to inform and triangulate the qualitative data findings. Thus, qualitative and quantitative data are used to challenge dominant narratives regarding African American youth’s STEM achievements and trajectories. The project advances discovery and understanding of radical healing as an approach to explicitly value African Americans’ cultures, identities, histories, and voices within informal STEM programming.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Renee LyonsRhondda ThomasCorliss Outley
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. This project will research core methods of science documentary film production and impact on audience engagement and understanding. The findings from this study will be used to later produce a film on how the CRISPR genome editing technology will shape agriculture, ecology, and the natural world. The research study and film to be produced will be a collaboration of science communication practitioners and researchers. The intended outcomes are to improve effective science filmmaking and increase impact on audiences. Many people rely on documentary film and videos for science information outside of formal learning environments. Research has shown that video programming can reduce knowledge gaps between those of higher and lower levels of education. But there is little research with findings about what makes a particular style of storytelling effective for engagement and learning outcomes. A recent report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine identified a significant shortage of social science research with directly applicable lessons for filmmakers. This project addresses this need by providing new frameworks for research and methods to produce science documentaries. Project partners are iBiology, a producer of video resources for learning, and science communication researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This project will examine two key questions: 1) In a science documentary film, how does the diversity of the scientists profiled and the use of a narrator shape audiences? perception of content and scientists? and 2) What are effective methods in science filmmaking to visualize the invisible (i.e. explain scientific phenomena that are not easily visualized)? The project begins by testing a recently produced film, Human Nature, that tells the story of the discovery of CRISPR (genome editing), told by the scientists who led the effort. Phase 1 testing will include screenings, focus groups, and experiments run through Amazon Mechanical Turk to test what features of the film (editorial voice and visualization styles) are most effective for communicating scientific content. In Phase 2 video test clips will be produced using a combination of narration and visualization strategies. An experimental design run through Amazon Turk will randomly assign participants to watch a clip using different combinations. Researchers will use this data to parse out what effect seems to be related to particular narration and visualization choices. This quantitative experimental data will be supplemented by qualitative data from focus groups with participants with a diverse range of science experience and demographic backgrounds. Researchers will design a survey-embedded experiment with a U.S. nationally representative sample to see how well the findings translate and change in a broader population.
This Innovations in Development 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:
Dietram ScheufeleSarah GoodwinElliot Kirschner