This is the solicitation for proposals to the NSF 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 for public and professional audiences; provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and develop understandings of deeper learning by participants.
Nationally, there is tremendous interest in enhancing participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Providing rich opportunities for engagement in science and engineering practices may be key to developing a much larger cadre of young people who grow up interested in and pursue future STEM education and career options. One particularly powerful way to engage children in such exploration and playful experimentation may be through learning experiences that call for tinkering with real objects and tools to make and remake things. Tinkering is an important target for research and educational practice for at least two reasons: (1) tinkering experiences are frequently social, involving children interacting with educators and family members who can support STEM-relevant tinkering in various ways and (2) tinkering is more open-ended than many other kinds of building experiences (e.g., puzzles, making a model airplane), because it is the participants' own unique questions and objectives that guide the activity. Thus, tinkering provides a highly accessible point of entry into early STEM learning for children and families who do not all share the same backgrounds, circumstances, interests, and expertise. This Research-in-Service to Practice 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. The project will take place in the Tinkering Lab exhibit at Chicago Children's Museum. The research will investigate how reflective interactions between parents and children (ages 6-8) during tinkering activities ultimately impact child engagement in STEM. Design-based research (DBR) is well-suited to the iterative and contextually-rich process of tinkering. Using a DBR approach, researchers and museum facilitators will be trained to prompt variations of simple reflection strategies at different time points between family members as a way to strengthen children's engagement with, and memory of these shared tinkering events. Through progressive refinement, each cycle of testing will lead to new hypotheses that can be tested in the subsequent round of observations. The operationalization of study constructs and their measurement will come organically from families' activities in the Tinkering Lab and will be developed in consultation with members of the advisory board. Data collection strategies will include observation and interviews; a series of coding schemes will be used to make sense of the data. The research will result in theoretical and practical understanding of ways to enhance STEM engagement and learning by young children and their families through tinkering. A diverse group of at least 350 children and their families will be involved. The project will provide much needed empirical results on how to promote STEM engagement and learning in informal science education settings. It will yield useful information and resources for informal science learning practitioners, parents, and other educators who look to advance STEM learning opportunities for children. This research is being conducted through a partnership between researchers at Loyola University of Chicago and Northwestern University and museum staff and educators at the Chicago Children's Museum.
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 project will develop and research an integrated children's media and early childhood educator professional development strategy to prepare preschoolers with social-emotional skills that provide a foundation for later math learning success. The social-emotional skills include persistence, risk-taking, regulating anxieties, and collaborating to solve problems. Media components include Peg+Cat television episodes, videos, games and apps distributed through PBS broadcast and online. The integrated professional development model is designed to impact these educators' understanding of math and develop their skills for fostering in children a positive math mindset. Additional resources include a new Peg+Cat summer day camp at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. The project partners include a media company, The Fred Rogers Company; researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and St. Vincent College; and the evaluator, Rockman et al. This project is unique in its focus on integrating social-emotional skills with early math learning and educator skill development. It will fill an important niche in the research literature and has the potential to impact media practice which is undergoing significant change as new digital tools and technologies become available for learning. Both standardized and researcher-developed measures will be used to assess learning outcomes, including early childhood educators' attitudes and quality of instruction, as well as children's interest and engagement in math. The research design includes iterative data collection to inform the development and refinement of the professional learning for teachers. The mixed methods approach will include classroom observations, interviews and focus groups with educators, and parent questionnaires. Key questions include: does exposure to Peg+Cat positively relate to children's use of social-emotional skills during math learning activities? Does educators' exposure to the professional development training improve their attitudes and abilities to infuse math instruction with social-emotional skills? Does having an educator who received Peg+Cat training impact children's engagement and interest in math?
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 research project leverages ongoing longitudinal research to investigate whether, and if so how, youth from ages 10 to 15 in a diverse, under-resourced urban community become interested and engaged in STEM. The project addresses a global issue; fewer youth choose to major in scientific fields or take science coursework at high school or university levels. These declining numbers result in fewer STEM professionals and fewer scientifically literate citizens who are able to function successfully in an increasingly scientific and technological society. These declines are observed for youth as a whole, but are most pronounced for girls and particular non-white ethnic minorities. Data collected from youth in this community of study, including non-white ethnic minorities, mirrors this decline. NSF funding will support a five-year systematic and systemic process in which project researchers work collaboratively with existing informal and formal educational partners (e.g., museums, libraries, afterschool providers, schools) to develop sets of customized, connected, and coordinated learning interventions, in and out of school, for youth with different backgrounds, needs, and interests, all with the goal of averting or dampening this decline of STEM interest and participation during early adolescence. In addition to new research and community STEM networks, this project will result in a Community Toolkit that includes research instruments and documentation of network-building strategies for use by other researchers and practitioners nationally and internationally. This mixed methods exploratory study has two distinct but interrelated populations - youth and educators from across informal and formal institutions. To develop a clearer understanding of the factors that influence youths' STEM interest development over time, particularly among three youth STEM Interest Profiles identified in a secondary analysis (1-Dislike Math, 2-Like all STEM, 3-Dislike all STEM), the design combines surveys with in-depth interviews and observations. To study educators and institutions, researchers will combine interviews, focus groups, and observations to better understand factors that influence community-wide, data-driven approaches to supporting youth interest development. Research will be conducted in three phases with the goal of community-level change in youth STEM interest and participation. In Phase 1 (Years 1 & 2) four educational partners will develop interventions for a 6th and 7th grade youth cohort that will be iteratively refined through a design-based approach. Educational partners and researchers will meet to review and discuss interest and participation data and use these data to select content, as well as plan activities and strategies within their programs (using a simplified form of conjecture mapping). By Phase 2 (Years 3 & 4) four additional partners will be included, more closely modeling the complex system of the community. With support from researchers support and existing partners, new educational partners will similarly review and discuss data, using these to select content, as well as plan activities consistent with program goals and strategies. Additional interventions will be implemented by the new partners and further assessed and refined with a new 6th and 7th grade cohort, along with the existing interventions of the first four partners. In Phase 3 (Year 5) data will be collected on pre-post community-level changes in STEM interest and participation and the perceived effectiveness of this approach for youth. These data will inform future studies.
The goal of "Communicating STEM -- Applying the Science of Science Communication to Natural History Media Products in Development/Production" is to bring standard methodology for media product development/production into better alignment with evidence-based best practices for science communication. Presentations in the professional development science strand at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival (JHWFF) conference will be curated to demonstrate how adhering to research-based communication strategies has been proven to increase knowledge retention in a lay audience and decrease instances of audience bias. The strand will present emerging methods for assessing media impact beyond simply the number of viewers, as well as in depth case studies examining evidence for measurable benefits to adopting science communication strategies. By establishing an international cohort of interdisciplinary professionals, and by recruiting ongoing engagement through dissemination of project deliverables through partner organizations and university programs, JHWFF will increase opportunities for cross-industry collaboration and provide media producers, STEM professionals and science communication experts with the resources and network necessary for informed, effective public outreach through natural history and science media products. This conference strand is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning 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. Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival (JHWFF) is a premier international industry conference for natural history media professionals. This project will establish a cross-industry, interdisciplinary professional development science strand in the upcoming 2015 JHWFF conference. The goal is to advance interdisciplinary collaborations between STEM professionals, science communication experts, media producers, and students/early career professionals. The strand will explore examples of successful science/media collaborations, and increase discourse on best practices for public engagement at the intersection of STEM research, empirically-proven communication methods, and media content for diverse audiences. The project is divided into two phases: Phase I involves the work at the conference; Phase II will provide free online access to edited videos of program sessions made broadly available through partner organizations and institutions, and promoted via social networking, cohort groups, and online blogs. The collaborating organizations (American Association for the Advancement of Science, LifeOnTERRA, and Participant Media), complemented by a broad group of expert advisors, will extend the capacity of the project, facilitate access to stakeholders, and recruit broader participation in both phases of the project. Dr. Louis Nadelson, Director of the Center for the School of the Future at Utah State University, will conduct external evaluation.
Disparities in engineering participation and achievement by women and individuals from traditionally underserved racial and ethnic groups have been persistent. Approaches outside the context of university and school reform, including approaches to supporting interest development in early childhood, have not been fully considered by educators and policymakers. This AISL Pathways project will focus on engineering, which has emerged as a critical topic in the STEM education field and a prominent aspect of educational standards and policies. Building on a strong empirical and theoretical base, it will lay the foundation for future research efforts to advance the field's limited understanding of early childhood engineering-related interest development, especially through parent-child interactions; create research tools for studying engineering-related interest in young children; and identify effective strategies for supporting long-term engineering interest pathways. "Head Start on Engineering" 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. Through an asset-based approach and authentic engagement with families and community organizations, Head Start on Engineering will pilot research and program activities that are sensitive to the constraints of low-income families and build on the resources and funds of knowledge within these communities. It will test and refine an innovative, theoretical model of early childhood interest development. The overall design of the pilot study will be mixed-method and short-term longitudinal, with data collected before, during, and after program implementation from participating families. Quantitative measures will allow for consistent comparisons across groups and within families, while qualitative data will help explore complex factors and processes hypothesized in the theoretical framework and related to program implementation. This work will allow the team time to address unanswered questions and issues around how to feasibly operationalize key aspects of the revised theoretical model in preparation for more extensive, longitudinal and experimental investigations as part of the next phase of the project. Understanding and honoring parents' beliefs, knowledge, and experiences is central to this project. In developing and implementing both the programs and research activities, the team will adopt culturally responsive and asset-based perspectives. The Pathways project is a collaboration between the Institute for Learning Innovation (ILI), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of lifelong, free-choice learning for all communities through research, practice, and policy initiatives; Mt. Hood Community College Head Start program; the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), a nationally renowned science museum; and the Center for STEM Education at the University of Notre Dame. The project involves families with four-year-old children who attend the Head Start program. The collaboration between educators, community organizations, and researchers and the integrated approach to research and program development will ensure that study findings translate to practical and effective education strategies and that future research efforts are well-grounded in the realities of practitioners and learners.
Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), will hold three two-day workshops (in New Jersey, Kansas, and California) for regional and state-level leaders in afterschool science education in more than 20 states who have been associated with the National Partnerships for After School Science (NPASS), Design It! and Explore It! afterschool science initiatives. The workshops will be designed to strengthen ties among current and prospective members of the NPASS network and to identify issues for future research for the after school field at large aimed at increasing understanding of how afterschool science programs succeed or fail. Despite the current absence of centralized support to maintain or expand this network, many of its members continue to offer NPASS and NPASS-like programming in their states. The workshops will bring together some of the most experienced leaders in the NPASS network as well as experienced advocates and leaders of afterschool science from beyond the network. The project builds on 15 years of prior work conducted by EDC that developed afterschool science and engineering curricula that was nationally disseminated via the NPASS network and train-the-trainer workshops. The project will support the overall strategy of the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program to enhance learning in informal environments through the funding of innovative resources through a variety of settings. 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. The regional workshops will be designed to: (1) enable leaders of the NPASS network to re-establish ties and renew their understanding of and commitment to best practices and critical elements of afterschool science; (2) gather information about common obstacles to implementation of these practices and about when, where, and why adaptations to these best practices occur, and what they (the practitioners) believe to be the impact on program quality; and (3) identify questions for further research. The findings from these workshops will be broadly disseminated to the field via a report summarizing the proceedings and findings from the workshop, including a revised NPASS statement of critical structural and pedagogical elements on practices critical to successful afterschool science programming.
The goal of the project is to research ways in which the teaching of basic computing skills can be integrated into after-school choral programs. The team will study how to adapt the interdisciplinary, computing + music activities developed to date in their NSF-funded Performamatics project with college-aged students to now introduce middle school-aged students to computing in an informal, after-school choral program. They will investigate how to leverage the universal appeal of music to help students who typically shy away from technical studies to gain a foothold in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) by programming choral music. 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. 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. The team will use a qualitative and quantitative, mixed-methods approach to study four research questions: (1) Can middle school-aged children follow the connections from singing to digitized sound to MIDI and back to music and learn to program using the songs they like to sing? To encourage students to become involved with manipulating sounds and programming music on their own computers, the approach will employ Audacity and Scratch, two free music recording, editing, and generation platforms. The team will study how well programming of music helps them acquire STEM skills by assessing the complexity and efficacy of the programs they can learn to code. (2) Can programming their individual parts help students learn to sing in three- and four-part harmony? The main focus is on learning of STEM, but research on this question will evaluate whether programming skills can help students learn about music too. (3) What resources, models, and tools (RMTs) are necessary to integrate STEM education into a middle school after-school choral program? The team will work with local middle schools to research techniques for integrating computing into after-school choral programs without disrupting their musical focus. They will identify what choral teachers need in order to do this integration, and they will devise and evaluate techniques for adding STEM skills to the students' choral experience. (4) Can the involvement of adults who match the students' racial and/or cultural backgrounds have a positive effect on the "people like me don't (or can't) do that?" belief that so often stifles efforts to attract underrepresented groups to STEM? They will actively seek to involve students of underrepresented groups in the program by recruiting adult role models from these groups who are involved with both music and computing. They will use attitudinal surveys to assess whether these adults have any effect on the students' self-efficacy and the "people like me" syndrome that hinders some from engaging in STEM.
The University of Pittsburgh's Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University are building an open access cyberlearning infrastructure that employs super high-resolution gigapixel images as a tool to support public understanding, participation, and engagement with science. Networked, gigapixel image technology is an information and communication technology that creates zoomable images that viewers can explore, share, and discuss. The technology presents visual information of scientifically important content in such detail that it can be used to promote both scientific discovery and education. The purpose of the project is to make gigapixel technology accessible and usable for informal science educators and scientists by developing a robotic imaging device and online services for the creation, storage, and sharing of billion-pixel images of scientifically important content that can be analyzed visually. Project personnel are conducting design activities, user studies, and formative evaluation studies to support the development of a gigapan technology platform for demonstration and further prototyping. The project builds on and leverages existing technologies to provide informal science education organizations use of gigapixel technology for the purpose of facilitating three types of activities that promote participatory learning by the public--Public Understanding of Science activities; Public Participation in Scientific Research activities; and Public Engagement in Science activities. The long-terms goals of the work are to (1) create an accessible database of gigapixel images that informal science educators can use to facilitate public-scientist interactions and promote participatory science learning, (2) characterize and demonstrate the affordances of networked gigapixel technologies to support socially-mediated, science-focused cyberlearning experiences, (3) generate knowledge about how gigapixel technology can enable three types of learning interactions between scientists and the public around visual data, and (4) disseminate findings that describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of the gigapixel platform to support participatory science learning. The project's long-term strategic impacts include guiding the design of high-resolution images for promoting STEM learning in both informal and formal settings, developing an open educational resource and science communication platform, and informing informal science educators about the use and effectiveness of gigapixel images in promoting participatory science learning by the public.
The Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies Program funds efforts that support envisioning the future of learning technologies and advance what we know about how people learn in technology-rich environments. Development and Implementation (DIP) Projects build on proof-of-concept work that shows the possibilities of the proposed new type of learning technology, and PI teams build and refine a minimally-viable example of their proposed innovation that allows them to understand how such technology should be designed and used in the future and that allows them to answer questions about how people learn, how to foster or assess learning, and/or how to design for learning. This project is building and studying a new type of online learning community. The WeatherBlur community allows kids, teachers, scientists, fishermen/fisherwomen, and community members to learn and do science together related to the local impacts of weather and climate on their coastal communities. Members of the community propose investigations, collect and share data, and learn together. WeatherBlur is designed to be a new form of knowledge-building community, the Non-Hierarchical Online Learning Community. Unlike other citizen science efforts, there is an emphasis on having all members of the community able to propose and carry out investigations (and not just help collect data for investigations designed by expert scientists or teachers). Prior research has demonstrated important structural differences in WeatherBlur from other citizen science learning communities. The project will use social network analysis and discourse analysis to measure learning processes, and Personal Meaning Mapping and embedded assessments of science epistemology and graph interpretation skills to examine outcomes. The measures will be used to explore knowledge-building processes and the scaffolds required to support them, the negotiation of explanations and investigations across roles, and the epistemic features that drive this negotiation process. The work will be conducted using an iterative design-based research process in which the prior functioning WeatherBlur site will be enhanced with new automated prompt and notification systems that support the non-hierarchical nature of the community, as well as tools to embed assessment prompts that will gauge participants' data interpretation skills and epistemic beliefs. Exponential random graph modeling will be used to analyze the social network analysis data and test hypotheses about the relationship between social structures and outcomes.
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) identify an ambitious progression for learning energy, beginning in elementary school. To help the nation's teachers address this challenge, this project will develop and investigate the opportunities and limitations of Focus on Energy, a professional development (PD) system for elementary teachers (grades 3-5). The PD will contain: resources that will help teachers to interpret, evaluate and cultivate students' ideas about energy; classroom activities to help them to identify, track and represent energy forms and flows; and supports to help them in engaging students in these activities. Teachers will receive the science and pedagogical content knowledge they need to teach about energy in a crosscutting way across all their science curricula; students will be intellectually engaged in the practice of developing, testing, and revising a model of energy they can use to describe phenomena both in school and in their everyday lives; and formative assessment will guide the moment-by-moment advancement of students' ideas about energy. This project will develop and test a scalable model of PD that will enhance the ability of in-service early elementary teachers to help students learn energy concepts by coordinating formative assessment, face-to-face and web-based PD activities. Researchers will develop and iteratively refine tools to assess both teacher and student energy reasoning strategies. The goals of the project include (1) teachers' increased facility with, and disciplined application of, representations and energy reasoning to make sense of everyday phenomena in terms of energy; (2) teachers' increased ability to interpret student representations and ideas about energy to make instructional decisions; and (3) students' improved use of representations and energy reasoning to develop and refine models that describe energy forms and flows associated with everyday phenomena. The web-based product will contain: a set of formative assessments to help teachers to interpret student ideas about energy based on the Facets model; a series of classroom tested activities to introduce the Energy Tracking Lens (method to explore energy concept using multiple representations); and videos of classroom exemplars as well as scientists thinking out loud while using the Energy Tracking Lens. The project will refine the existing PD and build a system that supports online implementation by constructing a facilitator's guide so that the online community can run with one facilitator.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Sara LacyRoger TobinNathaniel BrownStamatis VokosRachel ScherrKara GrayLane SeeleyAmy Robertson
This is the final report of the Open University’s RCUK-funded Public Engagement with Research Catalyst, ‘An open research university’, a project designed to create the conditions in which engaged research can flourish. The report describes an evidence-based strategy designed to embed engaged research within the University’s strategic planning for research and the operational practices of researchers. This programme of organisational change was informed by action research, working collaboratively with researchers at all levels across the institution to identify and implement strategies that
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Richard HollimanAnne AdamsTim BlackmanTrevor CollinsGareth DaviesSally DibbAnn GrandRichard HoltiFiona McKerlieNick MahonyNick Mahony