Designing Our World (DOW) was a four-year NSF-funded initiative in which the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) sought to promote girls’ pursuit of engineering careers through community-based programming, exhibition development, and identity research. The overarching aim of DOW was to engage girls ages 9–14 with experiences that illuminate the social, personally relevant, and altruistic nature of engineering. In addition to programming for girls, the project also included workshops for parents/caregivers, professional development for staff from community partners; and an exhibition
EvaluATE is a national resource center dedicated to supporting and improving the evaluation practices of approximately 250 ATE grantees across the country. EvaluATE conducts webinars and workshops, publishes a quarterly newsletter, maintains a website with a digital resource library, develops materials to guide evaluation work, and conducts an annual survey of ATE grantees. EvaluATE's mission is to promote the goals of the ATE program by partnering with projects and centers to strengthen the program's evaluation knowledge base, expand the use of exemplary evaluation practices, and support the continuous improvement of technician education throughout the nation. EvaluATE's goals associated with this proposal are to: (1) Ensure that all ATE Principal Investigators and evaluators know the essential elements of a credible and useful evaluation; (2) Maintain a comprehensive collection of online resources for ATE evaluation; (3) Strengthen and expand the network of ATE evaluation stakeholders; and (4) Gather, synthesize, and disseminate data about the ATE program activities to advance knowledge about ATE/technician education. The Center plans to produce a comprehensive set of evaluation resources to complement other services, engaging several community college-based Principal Investigators and evaluators in that process.
EvaluATE's products are informed by current research on evaluation, the National Science Foundation's priorities for the evaluation of ATE grants, and the needs of ATE PIs and evaluators for sound guidance that is immediately relevant and usable in their contexts. The fundamental nature of EvaluATE's work is geared toward supporting ATE grantees to use evaluation regularly to improve their work and demonstrate their impacts. All of EvaluATE's products are available to the public. EvaluATE's findings from the annual survey of ATE grantees aid in advancing understanding of the status of technician education and illuminate areas for additional research. The new survey investigates ATE grantees' work to serve underrepresented and special populations, including women, people of color, and veterans. Survey data are available upon request for research and evaluation purposes.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Lori WingateArlen GullicksonEmma PerkKelly RobertsonLyssa Becho
Summary
Girlstart’s mission is to increase girls’ interest and engagement in STEM through innovative, nationally-recognized informal STEM education programs. Girlstart examines in this report how STEM education directed toward elementary school girls influences long-term readiness and participation to math and science learning. This report compares Girlstart After School participants’ academic performance to nonparticipant performance. Specifically, it examines how Girlstart After School influences science STAAR performance and course enrollment in subsequent elementary and early middle
This project will make synthetic biology activities accessible to high school students and teachers by providing them with an authentic but safe context to learn. These activities will also broaden their understanding and perspectives about how synthetic biology and bioengineering is used in personal, health, and food production contexts as well as raise their interest in STEM. The design of bioMAKERlab will generate an educational version of an existing professional-grade lab for synthetic biology to promote safe production, accessibility, and affordability for high schools and community colleges interested in integrating such wetlab activities into their curriculum.
Most current efforts to broaden access to maker activities for K-12 students have focused on developing collaborative fabrication workspaces (fablabs) involving 3D printers, laser cutters, and other digital and traditional tools. This project will develop and implement bioMAKERlab, an innovative wetlab starter kit and activities that will enable high school students and teachers to engage in synthetic biology by building genetic circuits that let microorganisms change color, smell, and shape. In synthetic biology, participants make their own DNA--gene by gene--and then grow their designs into real applications by inserting them into microorganisms to develop different traits and characteristics provided by the genes. The project will involve students from a Philadelphia public high school and young people participating in weekend workshops at The Franklin Institute, a Philadelphia-based science museum.
This project is a part of NSF's Maker Dear Colleague Letter portfolio (NSF 15-086), a collaborative investment of Directorates for Computer & Information Science & Engineering, Education and Human Resources, and Engineering.
While the term 'failure' brings to mind negative associations, there is a current focus on failure as a driver of innovation and development in many professional fields. It is also emerging from prior research that for STEM professionals and educators, failure plays an important role in designing and making to increase learning, persistence and other noncognitive skills such as self-efficacy and independence. By investigating how youth and educators attend to moments of failure, how they interpret what this means, and how they respond, we will be better able to understand the dynamics of each part of the experience. The research team will be working with youth from urban, suburban and rural settings, students from Title I schools or who qualify for free/reduced-price lunches, those from racial and ethnic minority groups, as well as students who are learning English as a second language. These youth are from groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM and in making, and research indicates they are more likely to experience negative outcomes when they experience failure.
The intellectual merit of this project centers on establishing a baseline understanding of how failure in making is triggered and experienced by youth, what role educators play in the process, and what can be done to increase persistence and learning, rather than failure being an end-state. The research team will investigate these issues through the use of qualitative and quantitative research methods. In particular, the team will design and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions on increasing the abilities of youth and educators in noticing and responding to failures and increasing positive (e.g., resilience) outcomes. Research sites are selected because they will allow collection of data on youth from a wide range of backgrounds. The research team will also work to test and revise their hypothesized model of the influence of factors on persistence through failures in making. This project is a part of NSF's Maker Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) portfolio (NSF 15-086), a collaborative investment of Directorates for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), Education and Human Resources (EHR) and Engineering (ENG).
This Research in Service to Practice project, a collaboration of Pepperdine University and the New York Hall of Science, will establish a network of STEM-related Media Making Clubs comprised of after-school students aged 12 - 19 and teachers in the U.S. and in three other countries: Kenya, Namibia and Finland. The media produced by the students may include a range of formats such as videos, short subject films, games, computer programs and specialized applications like interactive books. The content of the media produced by the students will focus on the illustration and teaching of STEM topics, where the shared media is intended to help other students become enthused about and learn the science. This proposal builds on the principal investigator's previous work on localized media clubs by now creating an international network in which after-school students and teachers will collaborate at a distance with other clubs. The central research questions for the project pertain to three themes at the intersection of learning, culture and collaboration: the impact of participatory teaching, virtual networks, and intercultural, global competence. The research will combine qualitative, cross-cultural and big data methods. Critical to the innovation of the project, the research team will also develop a network assessment tool, adapting epistemic network analysis methods to the needs of this initiative. This work 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.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Eric HamiltonKatherine McMillanPriya Mohabir
As part of an overall strategy to enhance learning within maker contexts in formal and informal environments, the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) and Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) programs partnered to support innovative models for making in a variety of settings through the Enabling the Future of Making to Catalyze New Approaches in STEM Learning and Innovation Dear Colleague Letter. This Early Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) will test an innovative approach to bringing making from primarily informal out-of-school contexts into formal science classrooms. While the literature base to support the positive outcomes and impacts of design-based making in informal settings at the K-12 level is emerging, to date, minimal studies have investigated the impacts of making design principles within formal contexts. If successful, this project would not only add to this gap in the literature base but would also present a novel model for bridging the successful engineering design practices of making and tinkering primarily found in informal science education into formal science education classrooms. The model would also demonstrate an innovative, highly interactive way to engage high school students and their teachers in engineering based design principles with immediate real-world applications, as the scientific instruments developed in this project could be integrated directly into science classrooms at relatively minimal costs.
Through a multi-phased design and implementation model, high school students and their teachers will engage deeply in making design principles through the design and development of their own scientific instruments using Arduino-compatible hardware and software. The first phase of the project will reflect a more traditional making experience with up to twenty high school students and their teachers participating in an after-school design making club, in this case, focused on the development and testing of scientific instrument prototypes. During the second phase of the project, the first effort to transpose the after school making experience to a more formalized experience will be tested with up to eight students selected to participate in two week summer research internships focused on scientific instrument design and development through making at Northwestern University. A two-day summer teacher workshop will also be held for high school teachers participating in the subsequent pilot study. The collective insights gleaned from the after school program, student internships, and teacher workshop will culminate to inform the full implementation of the formal classroom pilot study. The third and final phase will coalesce months of iterative, formative research, design and development, resulting in a comprehensive pilot investigation in up to seven high school physics classrooms.
Using a multi-phased, mixed methods exploratory design-based research approach, this 18-month EAGER will explore several salient research questions: (a) How and to what extent does the design & making of scientific instrumentation serve as useful tasks for learning important science and engineering knowledge, practices, and epistemologies? (b) How engaging is this making activity to learners of diverse abilities and prior interests? What can be generalized to other types of making activities? (c) How accessible is the Arduino hardware and coding environment to learners? What combination of hardware and software materials and tools best support accessibility and learning in this type of digital making activity? and (d) What types of scaffolding (for students and teachers) are required to support the effective use of maker materials and activities in a classroom setting? Structured interviews, artifacts, video recordings from visor cameras, student design logs, logfiles, and ethnographic field notes will be employed to garner data and address the research questions. Given the early stage of the proposed research, the dissemination of the findings will be limited to a few select journals, teacher forums and workshops, and professional conferences.
This EAGER is well-poised to directly impact up to 125 high school physics students (average= 25 students/class), approximately 7 high school physics teachers, 6-8 high school summer interns, nearly 20 high school students participating in the after-school design making club, and indirectly many more. The results of this EAGER could provide the basis and evidence needed to support a more robust, expanded future investigation to further substantiate the findings and build the case for similar efforts to bring making into formal science education contexts.
This project takes an ethnographic and design-based approach to understanding how and what people learn from participation in makerspaces and explores the features of those environments that can be leveraged to better promote learning. Makerspaces are physical locations where people (often families) get together to make things. Some participants learn substantial amounts of STEM content and practices as they design, build, and iteratively refine working devices. Others, however, simply take a trial and error approach. Research explores the affordances are of these spaces for promoting learning and how to integrate technology into these spaces so that they are transformed from being makerspaces where learning happens, but inconsistently, into environments where learning is a consistent outcome of participation. One aim is to learn how to effectively design such spaces so that participants are encouraged and helped to become intentional, reflective makers rather than simply tinkerers. Research will also advance what is known about effective studio teaching and learning and advance understanding of how to support youth to help them become competent, creative, and reflective producers with technology(s). The project builds on the Studio Thinking Framework and what is known about development of meta-representational competence. The foundations of these frameworks are in Lave and Wengers communities of practice and Rogoff's, Stevens et al.'s, and Jenkins et al.'s further work on participatory cultures for social networks that revolve around production. A sociocultural approach is taken that seeks to understand the relationships between space, participants, and technologies as participants set and work toward achieving goals. Engaging more of our young population in scientific and technological thinking and learning and broadening participation in the STEM workplace are national imperatives. One way to address these imperatives is to engage the passions of young people, helping them recognize the roles STEM content and practices play in achieving their own personal goals. Maker spaces are neighborhood spaces that are arising in many urban areas that allow and promote tinkering, designing, and construction using real materials, sometimes quite sophisticated ones. Participating in designing and successfully building working devices in such spaces can promote STEM learning, confidence and competence in one's ability to solve problems, and positive attitudes towards engineering, science, and math (among other things). The goal in this project is to learn how to design these spaces and integrate learning technologies so that learning happens more consistently (along with tinkering and making) and especially so that they are accessible and inviting to those who might not normally participate in these spaces. The work of this project is happening in an urban setting and with at-risk children, and a special effort is being made to accommodate making and learning with peers. As with Computer Clubhouses, maker spaces hold potential for their participants to identify what is interesting to them at the same time their participation gives them the opportunity to express themselves, learn STEM content, and put it to use.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. The project's goal is to demonstrate an educational model fully commensurate with the demands of the 21st Century workforce, and more specifically, with the emerging “green-tech” economy.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. This project is exploring and identifying successful, cross-institutional approaches to using maker activities to engage members of communities of color (with a focus on family groups) in STEM activities.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Designing Our World (DOW) empowers and promotes girls’ pursuit of engineering careers by cultivating networks of community stakeholders and engaging girls with experiences that illuminate the social, personally relevant and altruistic nature of engineering.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Indianapolis: City as a Living Laboratory (NSF Grant #DRL-1323117) examines how different public art mediums can serve as conduits for informal science learning at a city-wide scale.