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.
The Hollister Herbarium at Tennessee Tech University will implement “Rooting Students in their Botanical History” — an educational module targeted for 11th and 12th grade biology students. The module will address “plant blindness,” a phenomenon defined as the failure to notice or appreciate plants. The herbarium will collaborate with three Tennessee high school biology teachers, a videographer, and a graduate research assistant to increase knowledge, awareness, and appreciation of plants over the three-year project. Students also will get to know herbarium specimens as an essential resource for information about the natural world.
The Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden will conduct the Million Orchid Project Authentic STEM Initiative to provide inclusive and accessible STEM learning opportunities for approximately 1,800 students annually from the most diverse and under-resourced middle and K-8 schools in Miami–Dade County. The initiative will use the Fairchild's STEMLab — a mobile plant propagation lab designed especially for schoolchildren — to bring the museum’s specialized scientific research to young learners in South Florida neighborhoods. Students and teachers will collect and analyze scientific data, devise research questions, and test hypotheses that will advance local conservation and contribute to the propagation of endangered orchids. Students will have the opportunity to explore STEM careers through interactions with Fairchild botanists.
The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum will partner with the Flowing Wells Unified School District on “We Bee Scientists,” a program to engage students in grades K–6 in real-world science by learning about bees—the most important group of pollinators. They plan to create a curriculum and related activities aligned with the Arizona science standards. The program is an expansion of the Tucson Bee Collaborative, which empowers community scientists from “K to grey” to contribute to ecosystem health and understanding through the study of native bees. The museum also will partner with Pima Community College and the University of Arizona on the program, which will involve volunteers and high school, college, and university students in documenting the abundance and diversity of native bees.
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
The Dunes Center will provide in-class instruction and field trip activities focused on coastal restoration and community education on water quality for over 300 5th-graders at Guadalupe’s Kermit McKenzie Intermediate School. Through science experiments and hands-on experiences, students will learn how ecosystems function and explore watershed characteristics. Intended to supplement current local science education and reach underserved, rural, Latinx students, the “Explore the Coast” program will help students understand how human actions can affect the environment, promote pollution prevention in the community, and aspire to higher education in the field of science.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that over 41 million people connect to nature through birding. Learning about birds in their natural environments offers opportunities for informal engagement in STEM by a broad range of individuals and groups. Birders often engage in scientific data gathering and analyses, geolocation and remote sensing, and phenology. They also become aware of ecological changes in bird habitats and migratory patterns due to rising temperatures and climate-related events like sea level rise, droughts, fires, and extreme weather. As such, the birding community is an ideal network to better understand and communicate the impacts of climatological changes on bird populations to the public. With this Innovations in Development project, the National Audubon Society will develop a new avian-focused, conservation and climate science community science curriculum for its Nature Centers, and test the effectiveness of the curriculum in educating the public about avian-focused conservation and climatological changes through guided nature experiences. Birding can serve as a pivotal entrée for young people into STEM fields and careers. Through its programs and partnerships, Audubon will leverage its national network to ensure that through this project a more diverse group of voices, particularly young adults and young adults of color, become involved in asking critical questions and developing solutions to address important environmental issues of the future. If successful, the broader impacts of this project on capacity building and public engagement could be far-reaching and long-lasting.
Over the three-year project duration, Audubon will bring educators from its nationwide network of thirty-four Nature Centers (including urban, suburban, and rural sites), together with over 510 young adults (ages 18-25) from its network of college campus chapters. An evidence-based curriculum and community science activities will be created and tested, relying heavily on a team of experts in ornithology, climate science research, STEM curriculum design, diversity, and informal science education. College students will advise on the design of content and activities to effectively interest and engage young adults. These students will be recruited from the new Audubon Campus Chapters Program, which includes 111 college and university campuses, among them, 19 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). The target population will be surveyed to also understand their current and likely participation in guided nature experiences and knowledge base in climate science. Current best practices in guided nature experiences will be gathered from across the Audubon network. The implementation efforts will result in a national STEM model, with train-the-trainer guides and workshops for informal science educators and public engagement opportunities focused on improving the state and condition of avian habitats and communities through climate science research. An external evaluation will be conducted and will include data collection methods such as retrospective pre and post surveys, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and an embedded assessment to determine impact. The findings will be used to iteratively refine the evidence-based curriculum and measure STEM learning outcomes for the guided nature experience participants. The evaluation will address four areas: (1) fidelity of program implementation to promote accountability; (2) formative evaluation to understand needs and interests of young adults (ages 18-25), and subsequently inform program design; (3) outcomes for Center educators, to inform iterative improvement; and (4) outcomes for program participants, to contribute to the growing knowledge base on effective practices for STEM learning in informal settings.
This Innovations in Development 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:
Loren SmithMark ScallionHeather Starck
The RASOR project is designed to increase engagement of students from rural Alaska communities in biomedical/STEM careers. Rural Alaskan communities are home to students of intersecting identities underrepresented in biomedical science, including Alaska Native, low-income, first generation college, and rural. Geographic isolation defines these communities and can limit the exposure of students to scientifically-minded peers, professional role models, and science career pathways. However these students also have a particularly strong environmental connection through subsistence and recreational activities, which makes the one-health approach to bio-medicine an intuitive and effective route for introducing scientific research and STEM content. In RASOR, we will implement place-based mentored research projects with students in rural Alaskan communities at the high school level, when most students are beginning to seriously consider career paths. The biomedical one-health approach will build connections between student experiences of village life in rural Alaska and biomedical research. Engaging undergraduate students in research has proved one of the most successful means of increasing the persistence of minority students in science (Kuh 2008). Furthermore, RASOR will integrate high school students into community-based participatory research (Israel et al. 2005). This approach is designed to demonstrate the practicality of scientific research, that science has the ability to support community and cultural priorities and to provide career pathways for individual community members. The one-health approach will provide continuity with BLaST, an NIH-funded BUILD program that provides undergraduate biomedical students with guidance and support. RASOR will work closely with BLaST, implementing among younger (pre-BLaST) students approaches that have been successful for retaining rural Alaska students along STEM pathways and tracking of post-RASOR students. Alaska Native and rural Alaska students are a unique and diverse population underrepresented in biomedical science and STEM fields.
The concept of One Health emphasizes the connection between human health, the health of animals and the health of the environment – with the goal of improving all health. The One Health approach supports collaborations between physicians, veterinarians, dentists, nurses, ecologists, and other science, health and environmentally-related disciplines. The One Health approach is increasingly important as our population rises, agriculture intensifies, and habitat destruction increases.
The goal of our “One Health” project is to increase adolescents’ understanding of One Health concepts and the importance of One Health collaborations. We will accomplish this by developing and disseminating: (1) Classroom lessons for high school students that are case-based, incorporate hands-on activities, and align with the Next Generation Science Standards, and; (2) Activities for middle and high school students that are suitable for use in a variety of informal (non-school) education settings. During this five-year project we will:
• Collaborate with scientists and life science teachers to develop case-based, hands-on One Health lessons for high school students.
• Develop and use a reliable and valid pre/post assessment to determine the impact of the One Health lessons on student learning.
• Implement a dissemination plan in which we will recruit, train and support a national network of “teacher-presenters” to lead professional development workshops for their peers throughout the US.
• Develop activities that will be used for middle school and high school One Health field trip programs at the University of Rochester’s Life Sciences Learning Center.
• Collaborate with informal educators to create One Health activities to be used in their outreach programs.
This project is significant because it will improve students’ understanding of the One Health approach to promoting the health of people, animals, and the environment. This project will also significantly impact teachers’ awareness of One Health, and how One Health concepts are aligned with NGSS and can be incorporated into their existing curriculums. This project is innovative because it will develop One Health lessons and activities for use in a variety of settings, through partnerships with scientists, science teachers, and informal science educators. This project will also feature an innovative model for disseminating the One Health lessons to teachers nationwide using peer-to-peer professional development.
This project will examine the characteristics and outcomes of a large sample of environmental education field trip programs for youth to elucidate program characteristics that most powerfully influence 21st century learning outcomes. Environmental education programs for youth, particularly day-long school trip programs, are popular and reside at the intersection of formal and informal STEM education. Such field trips provide opportunities for diverse audiences to participate in shared learning experiences, but current understanding of what leads to success in these programs is limited. This large-scale study will address this gap in knowledge by investigating the linkages between program characteristics and participant outcomes for at least 800 single-day environmental education field trip programs for youth in grades 5-8, particularly programs for diverse and underserved audiences. This study will result in the identification of evidence-based practices that will inform future program design for a wide variety of settings, including nature centers, national parks, zoos, museums, aquaria, and other locations providing informal environmental education programs.
This Research in Service to Practice study is guided by two research questions: 1) What program characteristics (context, design, and delivery) most powerfully influence learner self-determination and learner outcomes? And 2) Do the most influential program characteristics differ across diverse and underserved audiences (e.g. African American, Hispanic/Latino, economically disadvantaged) and contexts (e.g. rural versus urban)? This project will examine a wide range of program-related factors, including pedagogical approaches and contextual characteristics. A valid and reliable protocol for observing 78 program characteristics hypothesized to influence learner outcomes developed by a previous project will be used to systematically sample and observe 500 single-day environmental education field trip programs for youth in grades 5-8 distributed across at least 40 U.S. states and territories. Programs for diverse and underserved youth will be emphasized, and a diverse set of programs in terms of program type and context will be sought. Data from this sample will be combined with those of an existing sample of 334 programs provided by over 90 providers. The final combined sample of over 800 programs will provide sufficient statistical power to confidently identify which program components are most consistently linked with learning outcomes. This sample size will also enable stratification of the sample for examination of these relationships within relevant subpopulations. Principal component analyses will be used to reduce data in theoretically meaningful and statistically valid ways, and multilevel structural equation modeling will be employed to examine the influences of both participants' individual characteristics and program and context characteristics on participant outcomes. Since one research question focuses on whether program outcomes are the same across different audiences, the project will include at least 200 programs for each of three specific audiences to ensure sufficient statistical power for confidence in the results: primarily African American, primarily Hispanic/Latino, and primarily White.
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:
Robert PowellMarc SternBrandon Frensley