The New England Aquarium will create Conservation STEM — an online curriculum that features engaging videos and hands-on activities aligned with state and national standards that are easily accessible for teachers to use in the classroom. The project responds to a need that the aquarium’s Teacher Advisory Council — composed of Pre-K through 12 teachers from the greater Boston area — identified, which was to help students develop critical and systems thinking skills. It also will provide a means for teachers to engage students with authentic experiences to address real-world problems and build an understanding of the need for a balanced use of the ocean.
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 Key West Tropical Forest and Botanical Garden will strengthen and expand its “Living Laboratory,” a hands-on outdoor youth environmental education program. New curricula will target students in preschool through 6th grade to expand the reach of the program. Additional programming will serve students in middle school and high school, including facilitating guided research projects for students in the district STEM Fair. Partnerships with local organizations will help to expand inclusive programming for at-risk and economically disadvantaged students and make the program free. They will use student-created videos of their experiments and activities to create multimedia online tutorial resources for educators.
The Massachusetts Audubon Society will develop, pilot, and implement an evaluation framework for nature-based STEM programming that serves K-12 students visiting its network of nature centers and museums. Working with an external consultant, the society will develop the framework comprised of a logic model and theory of change for fieldtrips, and develop a toolkit of evaluation data collection methodology suitable to various child development stages. The project team will design and conduct three professional development training seminars to help Massachusetts Audubon school educators develop a working understanding of the new evaluation framework for school programs and gain the skills necessary to support protocol implementation. This project will result in the development and adoption of a universal protocol to guide the collection, management, and reporting of education program evaluation data across the 19 nature centers and museums in the Massachusetts Audubon system.
In response to a community-identified need to prevent conflicts between humans and carnivores, the Woodland Park Zoo will develop new strategies to facilitate community-driven learning and problem-solving. The zoo will establish a community-based science education and conservation model in partnership with the city and school district of Issaquah. The project will include a middle school inquiry-based science program for 6th grade students that will begin with teacher orientations, followed by introducing program elements to students, and culminating in a community event at each school featuring student presentations. A three-phase community engagement program will begin with a resident survey on carnivores in the community and an open house launch event. A series of community events and formation of learning teams for further dialogue and for problem solving will result in the implementation of strategies developed by the teams. The framework produced by the project will be applicable to other communities attempting to balance urban expansion with wildlife conservation.
Implementation of a permanent exhibit and supporting programs exploring themes of labor, immigration, and the changing nature of work and community in New Bedford’s commercial fishing industry.
To produce "More Than a Job: Work and Community in New Bedford’s Commercial Fishing Industry," a permanent exhibit, digital exhibits, K-12 curriculum materials, and significant public programming exploring themes of labor and immigration, and the changing nature of work and community in New Bedford's commercial fishing industry.
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.
DATE:
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Robert PowellMarc SternBrandon Frensley
The Growing Beyond Earth Project (GBE) is a STEM education program designed to have middle and high school students conduct botany experiments, designed in partnership with NASA researchers at Kennedy Space Center, that support NASA research on growing plants in space. GBE was initiated by Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in collaboration with NASA's Exploration Research and Technology Programs and Miami-Dade County Public School District. Project goals are to: (1) improve STEM instruction in schools by providing authentic research experiments that have real world implications through curricular activities that meet STEM education needs, comprehensive teacher training, summer-long internships and the development of replicable training modules; (2) increase and sustain youth and public engagement in STEM related fields; (3) better serve groups historically underrepresented in STEM fields; and (4) support current and future NASA research by identifying and testing new plant varieties for future growth in space. During the 2016-17 academic year, 131 school classrooms participated in the program. To date, students have tested 91 varieties of edible plants and produced more than 100,000 data points that have been shared with the researchers at KSC.