In this chapter from the book, "Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement: The Art of Creating APE Exhibits," we describe the methods and results from an array of studies designed to assess active, prolonged engagement in science museum visitors.
This INCLUDES award to the Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network will focus on building STEM research and teaching capacity of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). HBCUs and TCUs share the impact of disparities that affect their communities and are constantly seeking STEM research and education solutions to engage students and prepare them to be fully involved in developing innovative and effective remedies that will address these disparities. The QEM Design & Development Launch Pilot (DDLP) Project is a collaboration that will provide an underpinning for broadening the participation of institutions involved in improving the enrollment and retention of minority students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). To be competitive in a future global economy, the Nation must make a larger investment in the STEM education of its underrepresented groups, including, males and persons with disabilities. Failure to make such an investment can weaken our STEM infrastructure and inhibit the continuity of the Nation as a world leader in STEM.
The project's initial partners consist of five HBCUs (Morehouse College, Morgan State University, Spelman College, Tuskegee University, and University of Maryland Eastern Shore) and two TCUs (Aaniiih Nakoda College and United Tribes Technical College) with the aim of expanding to 12 institutions as well as adding business/industry partners and STEM-focused professional societies. The goals of the DDLP project are to: (1) build and sustain an alliance to increase the participation of African Americans and Native Americans in STEM education, research, and the workforce; (2) strengthen the STEM research, instructional, and mentoring capacities of partner HBCUs and TCUs; and (3) develop and promote broadening participation (BP) practices to address academic and professional career needs of African American and Native American males to significantly increase their representation in STEM. The QEM DDLP will implement evidence-based and data-driven approaches to developing research, education, and mentoring activities that can be tailored to institutional needs and context. The resulting outcome will be an increase in the capacities of HBCUs and TCUs in STEM that will position these institutions for sustained contributions to national broadening participation initiatives.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Shirley McBayLeander McDonaldLaura-Lee DavidsonEugene DeLoatchJuliette Bell
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This collaboration between two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) will form a networked improvement community located within the Piedmont Region of North Carolina. In close partnership with community colleges and civic organizations, the project will reach families and students that lead to broader participation of underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. The overall goal is to build and sustain a scalable, inquiry-based network with the purpose of increasing the academic success of underrepresented ethnic minorities and women in the STEM continuum. By engaging in culturally relevant socio-environmental frameworks, project outcomes will positively impact student retention, knowledge, and quantitative skills in STEM across socio-economic divides and STEM disciplines.
The Launch Pilot phase will focus on evidence-based teaching and learning approaches for middle school students. The core structure of the network will serve as a platform to launch and guide other age- and level-specific educational instruction, research, and assessment initiatives. Student understanding of the nature of science will be enhanced by adapting structure, behavior, and function (SBF) theory and system thinking hierarchical (STH) models. Ultimately, the network will represent a driver for social innovation that positively impacts broadening participation in STEM.
The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) will lead this Design and Development Launch Pilot to conduct activities aimed to increase the number of STEM faculty at APLU member universities from underrepresented and traditionally underserved groups: Women, historically underrepresented minorities (URM), persons with disabilities (PWD), and people from low socioeconomic backgrounds. This project was created in response to the Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (NSF INCLUDES) program solicitation (NSF 16-544). The INCLUDES program is a comprehensive national initiative designed to enhance U.S. leadership in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) discoveries and innovations focused on NSF's commitment to diversity, inclusion, and broadening participation in these fields. The INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilots represent bold, innovative ways for solving a broadening participation challenge in STEM.
The full participation of all of America's STEM talent is critical to the advancement of science and engineering for national security, health and prosperity. Our nation is advancing knowledge and practices to address a STEM achievement and the graduation gap between postsecondary STEM students who are women, URM, PWD, and persons from low socioeconomic backgrounds and males, non-URM, non-PWD, and persons from middle and upper socioeconomic backgrounds. At the same time U.S. universities and colleges struggle to recruit, retain and promote a diverse STEM faculty as role models and academic leaders for historically underrepresented and traditionally underserved students to learn from, to work with and to emulate. Recent NSF reports indicate that URM STEM associate and full professors occupy 8% of the senior faculty positions at all 4-year colleges and universities and about 6% of these positions at the nation's most research-intensive institutions. The APLU INCLUDES: A Collective Impact Approach to Broadening Participation in the STEM Professoriate has the potential to advance a national network of organizations to improve the representation of women, URMs, PWDs and persons from low socioeconomic backgrounds in STEM faculty positions, eventually providing URM STEM role models to STEM undergraduate and graduate students at postsecondary academic institutions across the Nation.
APLU will work closely with multiple organizations to address key objectives, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning, the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (recently renamed the Big Ten Academic Alliance), the Council of Graduate Schools, the Florida Education Fund's McKnight Doctoral Fellowship Program, Southern Regional Education Board State Doctoral Scholars Program and the University of California's Office of the President. Together this network plans to connect APLU member institutions and experts to (1) develop and test a set of diagnostic tools and practices for recruiting, hiring, retaining and supporting faculty, to (2) identify a set of institutional activities to increase participation along STEM pathways toward the professoriate, to engage a group of institutions to collectively implement one or more of the activities, and to (3) evaluate the adequacy and coverage current data sources and metrics available to track students from entry into postsecondary education through the professoriate.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Howard GobsteinAlan MabeTravis YorkChristine KellerKimberly Griffin
The Yellowstone Altai-Sayan Project (YASP) brings together student and professional researchers with Indigenous communities in domestic (intermountain western U.S.) and international (northwest Mongolian) settings. Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, MSU and tribal college student participants performed research projects in their home communities (including Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Fort Peck Assiniboine & Sioux, and Fort Berthold Mandan, Hidatsa and Sahnish) during spring semester 2016. In the spirit of reciprocity, these projects were then offered in comparative research contexts during summer 2016, working with Indigenous researchers and herder (semi-nomadic) communities in the Darhad Valley of northwestern Mongolia, where our partner organization, BioRegions International, has worked since 1998. In both places, Indigenous Research Methodologies and a complementary approach called Holistic Management guided how and what research was performed, and were in turn enriched by Mongolian research methodologies. Ongoing conversations with community members inspire the research questions, methods of data collection, as well as how and what is disseminated, and to whom. The Project represents an ongoing relationship with and between Indigenous communities in two comparable bioregions*: the Big Sky of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and the Eternal Blue Sky of Northern Mongolia.
*A ‘bioregion’ encompasses landscapes, natural processes and human elements as equal parts of the whole (see http://bioregions.org/).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kristin RuppelClifford MontagneLisa Lone Fight
Libraries across the country have been reimagining their community role and leveraging their resources and public trust to strengthen community-based learning and foster critical thinking, problem solving, and engagement in STEM. What started some years ago as independent experiments has become a national movement. The Space Science Institute's National Center for Interactive Learning (NCIL), in partnership with the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), received funding from the National Science Foundation for the first-ever Public Libraries & STEM conference, at the Sheraton Denver Downtown
Public libraries are becoming an important place for informal science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education for K-12 students and their families, as well as for adult education activities that support STEM workforce development. This report provides public librarians, administrators and collaborating organizations a brief background on the role that libraries can play in fostering a healthy STEM education ecosystem, as well as promising practices for implementing effective STEM programs in public libraries.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Annette ShtivelbandLauren RiendeauAmanda Wallander-RobertsRobert Jakubowski
National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded an Informal Science Education (ISE) grant, since renamed Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) to a group of institutions led by two of the University of California, Davis’s centers: the Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) and the W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES). Additional partner institutions were the ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center (ECHO), Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) at the University of California, Berkeley, and Audience Viewpoints Consulting (AVC). The summative evaluation study was
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative resources for use in a variety of settings. This conference proposal represents the first phase of a larger three-phase participatory research project that will use communities of interest as a vehicle for solving problems of common concern about designing youth-based STEM programs. It will set the stage for research over the next 10-25 years about the long-term impact of a variety of youth programs on STEM learning and career aspirations. Through a virtual format, the Association of Science-Technology Centers will bring together two representatives from ten long-standing youth programs, experts in the field of out-of-school time youth programming, and researchers to collaboratively develop a program profile template for measuring the impact of youth programming. The program profile template will help identify specific characteristics that will capture the influence of youth programs on their participation in out-of-school STEM activities.
The program profile template will be the main outcome from the conference. It will serve as the foundation for designing long-term impact studies that support the needs of program staff interested in improving youth programming in informal environments. It will also allow program staff and researchers to document and share intellectual capital, compare goals and features across programs, and support network efforts among informal agencies worldwide. The program profile template will be shared online through informalscience.org, the Association of Science-Technology Centers' communities of practice networks, and through other out-of-school-time national organizations.
Mathematics is a notoriously disliked subject; there is so little stigma associated with being "bad at math", that educated adults openly describe themselves in this way. There are many reasons for math's unpopularity; chief among them is that school mathematics seldom offers opportunities to engage with the richness of this potentially fascinating subject. As a result, the mathematics education pipeline in the United States is more often a filter than a pump, siphoning students out rather than bringing them along. Children have libraries to help them fall in love with literature: where do they get a chance to fall in love with math? This project presents a unique opportunity to study children engaged with mathematics in an informal setting, the Minnesota State Fair, facilitated by mathematically knowledgeable volunteers. The Math On-a-Stick mathematical playground provides a place for children to engage with mathematics by exploring patters, asking quantitative questions, and investigating shape and space to mathematize their play. The project will observe and videotape this engagement to inform the design of mathematical learning environments in a variety of outside of school time settings, such as after school programs and summer camps, that are accessible to a wider range of the population. This project is co-funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) and Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) programs. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in three thematic areas: STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation, and STEM workforce development. The AISL program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments.
The project will investigate three research questions: (1) How does the design of various parts of the exhibit differently support rich mathematical interactions between children and mathematicians? (2) How do children engage different parts of the exhibit? How do differences in engagement relate to (a) exhibit design and (b) prior mathematical experience? (3) How do exhibit volunteers, mathematicians, and caregivers interact to support (or undermine) students' mathematical play? The project will use participant observation and videography to capture visitors' activities through the exhibit, analyzing them as qualitative case studies.
This project was submitted in response to EHR Core Research (ECR) program announcement NSF 15-509. The ECR program of fundamental research in STEM education provides funding in critical research areas that are essential, broad and enduring. EHR seeks proposals that will help synthesize, build and/or expand research foundations in the following focal areas: STEM learning, STEM learning environments, STEM workforce development, and broadening participation in STEM. The ECR program is distinguished by its emphasis on the accumulation of robust evidence to inform efforts to (a) understand, (b) build theory to explain, and (c) suggest interventions (and innovations) to address persistent challenges in STEM interest, education, learning, and participation.
In 2015, average mathematics scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) declined in fourth and eighth grades, the first declines in mathematics at these grade levels since 1990. Declines in U.S. mathematics performance has important implications for overall STEM education as well as STEM workforce and international competitiveness. Researchers at Rutgers University will conduct an analysis to isolate the cause of the mathematics decline by investigating the dimensionality of the NAEP assessment, state-level outcomes, and demographic trends.
The team will use multilevel item response theory modeling techniques to investigate the declines by examining the factor structures to determine dimensionality across years. Researchers will examine subscores corresponding to each dimension of the factor structure at the state and national levels. In addition, subscores will be examined for trends in individual states and jurisdictions. Potentially, the analyses will allow for examination of factors related to state standards adoptions, demographic shifts, and participation rates.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Gregory Camilli
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The Museum of Science (MOS) will conduct a conference and associated activities to consider ways to foster the STEM workforce via both science research and science communications experiences for students at the high school level. The work will draw on and expand the scope in the USA of the NSF-funded National Living Laboratory Network which currently involves more than 350 institutions across 48 states and 21 countries. The National Living Laboratory initiative involves university researchers and museum professionals in co-implementing research and science communications activities in museum settings with the public, primarily families with young children. The research and communications focus is on cognitive science pertaining to the development of young children. While many scientists and museum professionals are interested in integrating high school research experiences into their practices, particularly for under-represented youth, existing infrastructure at museums and universities limits the quality of experiences and quantity of students that institutions can support. Current academic and museum members of the National Living Laboratory community have identified an opportunity to advance shared interests and knowledge in engaging youth in STEM by leveraging the Living Laboratory framework.
This project involves pre- and post- conference activities and will convene a group of science research and museum professionals at a workshop in Boston, MA to: 1) document current opportunities and challenges in engaging high-school aged youth in cognitive science research activities; 2) outline strategies to engage youth in research and science communication through Living Laboratory, with particular emphasis on cognitive sciences; and 3) create and disseminate a report on workshop outcomes through existing communication channels in both fields. The project includes pre-conference surveys of professionals about the topic and an evaluation of the project activities and outcomes. It 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.