Informal STEM learning experiences (ISLEs), such as participating in science, computing, and engineering clubs and camps, have been associated with the development of youth’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics interests and career aspirations. However, research on ISLEs predominantly focuses on institutional settings such as museums and science centers, which are often discursively inaccessible to youth who identify with minoritized demographic groups. Using latent class analysis, we identify five general profiles (i.e., classes) of childhood participation in ISLEs from data
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Remy DouHeidi CianZahra HazariPhilip SadlerGerhard Sonnert
This Research Advanced by Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering (RAISE) project is supported by the Division of Research on Learning in the Education and Human Resources Directorate and by the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. This interdisciplinary project integrates historical insights from geometric design principles used to craft classical stringed instruments during the Renaissance era with modern insights drawn from computer science principles. The project applies abstract mathematical concepts toward the making and designing of furniture, buildings, paintings, and instruments through a specific example: the making and designing of classical stringed instruments. The research can help instrument makers employ customized software to facilitate a comparison of historical designs that draws on both geometrical proofs and evidence from art history. The project's impacts include the potential to shift in fundamental ways not only how makers think about design and the process of making but also how computer scientists use foundational concepts from programming languages to inform the representation of physical objects. Furthermore, this project develops an alternate teaching method to help students understand mathematics in creative ways and offers specific guidance to current luthiers in areas such as designing the physical structure of a stringed instrument to improve acoustical effect.
The project develops a domain-specific functional programming language based on straight-edge and compass constructions and applies it in three complementary directions. The first direction develops software tools (compilers) to inform the construction of classical stringed instruments based on geometric design principles applied during the Renaissance era. The second direction develops an analytical and computational understanding of the art history of these instruments and explores extensions to other maker domains. The third direction uses this domain-specific language to design an educational software tool. The tool uses a calculative and constructive method to teach Euclidean geometry at the pre-college level and complements the traditional algebraic, proof-based teaching method. The representation of instrument forms by high-level programming abstractions also facilitates their manufacture, with particular focus on the arching of the front and back carved plates --- of considerable acoustic significance --- through the use of computer numerically controlled (CNC) methods. The project's novelties include the domain-specific language itself, which is a programmable form of synthetic geometry, largely without numbers; its application within the contemporary process of violin making and in other maker domains; its use as a foundation for a computational art history, providing analytical insights into the evolution of classical stringed instrument design and its related material culture; and as a constructional, computational approach to teaching geometry.
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.
The University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center, Chaminade University of Honolulu (CUH), and the Georgia Institute of Technology will lead this NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot (DDLP) to establish a model for data science preparation of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) students at the high school and undergraduate levels. The project is premised on the promise of NHPI communities gaining access to, and the ability to work with, large data sets to tackle emerging problems in the Pacific. Such agency over "big data" sets that are relevant to Pacific issues, and contemporary skills in data science, analytics and visualization have the potential to be transformative for community improvement efforts. The effort has the potential to advance knowledge, instructional pedagogy and practices to improve NHPI high school and undergraduate students performance in and attraction to STEM education and careers.
The project team will work to: 1) Increase interest and proficiency in data science and visualization among NHPI high school and undergraduate students through a summer immersion experience that bridges computation and culture; 2) Build data science capacity at an NHPI serving undergraduate institution (CUH) through creation of a certificate program; and 3) Develop and expand partnerships with other organizations with related goals working with NHPI populations. The month-long summer training for 20 NHPI college students, and five NHPI high school students, takes place at CUH and focuses on data science, visualization, and virtual reality, including working on problem sets that require data science approaches and incorporate geographically, socially- and culturally-relevant research themes.
The University of New Hampshire (UNH) NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot project is a collaborative effort with the Community College System of New Hampshire, Advanced Manufacturing (AM) businesses, NH Economic Development, and the University of New Hampshire to address workforce development in the Advanced Manufacturing sector in the state. The Advanced Manufacturing Program (AMP) uses a framework built on the Collective Impact collaboration model that enables AMP partners to innovate, plan, and implement strategies that significantly increase NH's community colleges (CC) as a source for future workers and leaders in AM.
Specifically, this proposal addresses the pressing need for increasing numbers of AM workers through strategies designed to increase the retention of low socioeconomic status (LSES) students in CC STEM degree programs. AMP coordinates four key implementation strategies: 1) Co-requisite remediation within mathematics and quantitative reasoning; 2) Guided Pathways mentorship with "high touch" advising and student guidance resources that combines clearly defined academic pathways leading to 4-year college transfer and job placement; 3) paid work-based learning (WBL) experiences in industry and academic research; and 4) mentor inclusiveness training to prepare the workplace and academic settings to receive LSES students into a supportive climate. Successfully coordinating these four components through the process of Collective Impact collaboration will lead to a flexible and integrated AM workforce pipeline that serves CC AM students, AM industry partners, and the state as a whole. Findings will be disseminated to academic, business, and government stakeholders in NH, the region, and nationally to inform and improve broadening participation initiatives.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Palligarnai VasudevanStephen HaleBrad KinseyLeslie BarberMelissa Aikens
The Sustainability Teams Empower and Amplify Membership in STEM (S-TEAMS), an NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot project, will tackle the problem of persistent underrepresentation by low-income, minority, and women students in STEM disciplines and careers through transdisciplinary teamwork. As science is increasingly done in teams, collaborations bring diversity to research. Diverse interactions can support critical thinking, problem-solving, and is a priority among STEM disciplines. By exploring a set of individual contributors that can be effect change through collective impact, this project will explore alternative approaches to broadly enhance diversity in STEM, such as sense of community and perceived program benefit. The S-TEAMS project relies on the use of sustainability as the organizing frame for the deployment of learning communities (teams) that engage deeply with active learning. Studies on the issue of underrepresentation often cite a feeling of isolation and lack of academically supportive networks with other students like themselves as major reasons for a disinclination to pursue education and careers in STEM, even as the numbers of underrepresented groups are increasing in colleges and universities across the country. The growth of sustainability science provides an excellent opportunity to include students from underrepresented groups in supportive teams working together on problems that require expertise in multiple disciplines. Participating students will develop professional skills and strengthen STEM- and sustainability-specific skills through real-world experience in problem solving and team science. Ultimately this project is expected to help increase the number of qualified professionals in the field of sustainability and the number of minorities in the STEM professions.
While there is certainly a clear need to improve engagement and retention of underrepresented groups across the entire spectrum of STEM education - from K-12 through graduate education, and on through career choices - the explicit focus here is on the undergraduate piece of this critical issue. This approach to teamwork makes STEM socialization integral to the active learning process. Five-member transdisciplinary teams, from disciplines such as biology, chemistry, computer and information sciences, geography, geology, mathematics, physics, and sustainability science, will work together for ten weeks in summer 2018 on real-world projects with corporations, government organizations, and nongovernment organizations. Sustainability teams with low participation by underrepresented groups will be compared to those with high representation to gather insights regarding individual and collective engagement, productivity, and ongoing interest in STEM. Such insights will be used to scale up the effort through partnership with New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability (NJHEPS).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Amy TuiningaAshwani VasishthPankaj Lai
The article discusses the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: Information, Technology and Scientific Literacy (STEM-ALL) for ALl Learners project of Emporia State University, Kansas. The project is an interdisciplinary program for teaching information, technology and scientific-literacy that brings STEM content into Master of Library Science curriculum. It aims to create an Information, Technology and Scientific Literacy Certificate for educators to earn across degree programs.
Research shows that participation and interest in science starts to drop as youth enter high school. This is also the point when science becomes more complex and there is increased need for content knowledge, mathematics capability, and computer or computational knowledge. Evidence suggests that youth who participate in original scientific research are more likely to enter and maintain a career in science as compared to students who do not have these experiences. We know young people get excited by space science. This project (STEM-ID) is informed by previous work in which high school students were introduced to scientific research and contributed to the search for pulsars. Students were able to develop the required science and math knowledge and computer skills that enabled them to successfully participate. STEM-ID builds on this previous work with two primary goals: the replication of the local program into a distributed program model and an investigation of the degree to which authentic research experiences build strong science identities and research self-efficacies. More specifically the project will support (a) significant geographic expansion to institutions situated in communities with diverse populations allowing substantial inclusion of under-served groups, (b) an online learning and discovery environment that will support the participation of youth throughout the country via online activities, and (c) opportunities for deeper participation in research and advancement within the research community. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program which seeks to advance new approaches to, and understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. STEM-ID will serve 2000 high school youth and 200 high school teachers in afterschool clubs with support from 30 undergraduate and graduate students and 10 college/university faculty. Exploratory educational research will determine the broad mechanisms by which online activities and in-person and online peer-mentor teacher-scientist interactions influence science identity, self-efficacy, motivation, and career intentions, as well as a focused understanding of the mechanisms that influence patterns of participation. Youth will be monitored longitudinally through the first two years of college to provide an understanding of the long-term effects of out-of-class science enrichment programs on STEM career decisions. These studies will build an understanding of the best practices for enhancing STEM persistence in college through engagement in authentic STEM programs before youth get to college. In addition to the benefits of the education research, this program may lead participants to discover dozens of new pulsars. These pulsars will be used for fundamental advances such as for testing of general relativity, constraining neutron star masses, or detecting gravitational waves. The resulting survey will also be sensitive to transient signals such as sporadic pulsars and extragalactic bursts. This project provides a potential model for youth from geographical disparate places to participate in authentic research experiences. For providers, it will offer a model for program delivery with lower costs. Findings will support greater understanding of the mechanisms for participation in STEM. This work is being led by West Virginia University and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Participating sites include California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, El Paso Community College, Howard University, Montana State University, Penn State University, Texas Tech University, University of Vermont, University of Washington, and Vanderbilt University.