We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in the United States, focusing on the role of inventive ability (“nature”) vs. environment (“nurture”). Using deidentified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records, we first show that children’s chances of becoming inventors vary sharply with characteristics at birth, such as their race, gender, and parents’ socioeconomic class. For example, children from high-income (top 1%) families are ten times as likely to become inventors as those from below-median income families. These gaps persist even
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alex BellRaj ChettyXavier JaravelNeviana PetkovaJohn Van Reenen
This is a story about learning STEM content and practices while making objects. It is also a story about how that learning is contextualized in one young man’s disruption of racism simply by trying to learn how gears work. Our project, Investigating STEM Literacies in MakerSpaces (STEMLiMS), focuses on how adults and youth use representations to accomplish tasks in STEM disciplines in formal and informal making spaces (Tucker-Raymond, Gravel, Kohberger, & Browne, 2017). Making is an interdisciplinary endeavor that may involve mechanical and electrical engineering, digital literacies and
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 Montana Girls STEM Collaborative brings together organizations and individuals throughout Montana who are committed to informing and motivating girls to pursue careers in STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. The Collaborative offers professional development, networking and collaboration opportunities to adults who offer and/or support STEM programs for girls and other youth typically under-represented in STEM. The vision of Montana Girls STEM is that every young person in Montana has the opportunity to learn about STEM careers and feels welcome pursuing any dream they
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Suzi TaylorRay CallawayCathy Witlock
As the world is increasingly dependent upon computing and computational processes associated with data analysis, it is essential to gain a better understanding of the visualization technologies that are used to make meaning of massive scientific data. It is also essential that the infrastructure, the very means by which technologies are developed for improving the public's engagement in science itself, be better understood. Thus, this AISL Innovations in Development project will address the critical need for the public to learn how to interpret and understand highly complex and visualized scientific data. The project will design, develop and study a new technology platform, xMacroscope, as a learning tool that will allow visitors at the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Center of Science and Industry, to create, view, understand, and interact with different data sets using diverse visualization types. The xMacroscope will support rapid research prototyping of public experiences at selected exhibits, such as collecting data on a runner's speed and height and the visualized representation of such data. The xMacroscope will provide research opportunities for exhibit designers, education researchers, and learning scientists to study diverse audiences at science centers in order to understand how learning about data through the xMacroscope tool may inform definitions of data literacy. The research will advance the state of the art in visualization technology, which will have broad implications for teaching and learning of scientific data in both informal and formal learning environments. The project will lead to better understanding by science centers on how to present data to the public more effectively through visualizations that are based upon massive amounts of data. Technology results and research findings will be disseminated broadly through professional publications and presentations at science, education, and technology conferences. The 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. 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 project is driven by the assumption that in the digital information age, being able to create and interpret data visualizations is an important literacy for the public. The research will seek to define, measure, and advance data visualization literacy. The project will engage the public in using the xMacrocope at the Science Museum of Minnesota and at the Center of Science and Industry's (COSI) science museum and research center in Columbus, Ohio. In both museum settings the public will interact with different datasets and diverse types of visualizations. Using the xMacroscope platform, personal attributes and capabilities will be measured and personalized data visualizations will be constructed. Existing theories of learning (constructivist and constructionist) will be extended to capture the learning and use of data visualization literacy. In addition, the project team will conduct a meta-review related to different types of literacy and will produce a definition with performance measures to assess data visualization literacy - currently broadly defined in the project as the ability to read, understand, and create data visualizations. The research has potential for significant impact in the field of science and technology education and education research on visual learning. It will further our understanding of the nature of data visualization literacy learning and define opportunities for visualizing data in ways that are both personally and culturally meaningful. The project expects to advance the understanding of the role of personalization in the learning process using iterative design-based research methodologies to advance both theory and practice in informal learning settings. An iterative design process will be applied for addressing the research questions by correlating visualizations to individual actions and contributions, exploring meaning-making studies of visualization construction, and testing the xMacroscope under various conditions of crowdedness and busyness in a museum context. The evaluation plan is based upon a logic model and the evaluation will iteratively inform the direction, process, and productivity of the project.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program 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 goal of this project is to make 21st century quantum science comprehensible and engaging to non-expert informal adult learners. This project has strong potential to add new knowledge about the public's perception and understanding of quantum physics. This scientific content is often difficult for informal audiences to grasp, and there are relatively few accessible learning resources for a non- professional audience. The development of this online, interactive resource with short animations, graphics, and simulations has strong potential to fill this gap. It will develop a visually driven online resource to engage non-expert audiences in understanding the basics of quantum physics. The web design will be modular, incorporating many multimedia elements and the structure will be flexible allowing for future expansion. All content would be freely available for educational use. There is potential for extensive reach and use of the resources by informal adult learners online as well as learners in museums, science centers, and schools. Project partners are the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, College Park. An independent evaluation of the project will add new knowledge about informal learners' perceptions and/or knowledge about quantum science and technology. An initial needs assessment via focus groups with the general public will be designed to find out more about what they already know about quantum physics topics and terminology, as well as what they want to know and what formats they prefer (games, simulations, podcasts, etc.). In person user testing will be used with early versions of the project online resource using a structured think-aloud protocol. Later in year 1 and 2, online focus groups with the general public will be conducted to learn what they find engaging and what they learned from the content. Iterative feedback from participants during the formative stage will guide the development of the content and format of the online resources. The Summative Evaluation will gather data using a retrospective post-survey embedded with a pop-up link on the Atlas followed by interviews with a subset of online users. Google Analytics will be used to determine the breadth and depth of their online navigation, what resources they download, and what websites they visit afterward. A post-only survey of undergraduate and graduate students who participated in resource development will focus on changes in students' confidence around their science communication skills and level of quantum physics understanding.
This project will capitalize on the power of story to teach foundational computational thinking (CT) concepts through the creation of animated and live-action videos, paired with joint media engagement activities, for preschool children and their parents. Exposure at a young age to CT is critical for preparing all students to engage with the technologies that have become central to nearly every occupation. But despite this recognized need, there are few, if any, resources that (1) introduce CT to young children; (2) define the scope of what should be taught; and (3) provide evidence-based research on effective strategies for bringing CT to a preschool audience. To meet these needs, WGBH and Education Development Center/Center for Children and Technology (EDC/CCT) will utilize an iterative research and design process to create animated and live-action videos paired with joint media engagement activities for parents and preschool children, titled "Monkeying Around". Animated videos will model for children how to direct their curiosity into a focused exploration of the problem-solving process. Live-action videos will feature real kids and their parents and will further illustrate how helpful CT can be for problem solving. With their distinctive visual humor and captivating storytelling, the videos will be designed to entice parents to watch alongside their children. This is important since parents will play an important role in guiding them in explorations that support their CT learning. To further promote joint media engagement, hands-on activities will accompany the videos. Following the creation of these resources, an experimental impact study will be conducted to capture evidence as to if and how these resources encourage the development of young children's computational thinking, and to assess parents' comfort and interest in the subject. Concurrent with this design-based research process, the project will build on the infrastructure of state systems of early education and care (which have been awarded Race to the Top grants) and local public television stations to design and develop an outreach initiative to reach parents. Additional partners--National Center for Women & Information Technology, Code in Schools, and code.org (all of whom are all dedicated to promoting CT)--will further help bring this work to a national audience.
Can parent/child engagement with digital media and hands-on activities improve children's early learning of computational thinking? To answer this question, WGBH and EDC/CCT are collaborating on a design-based research process with children and their parents to create Monkeying Around successive interactions. The overarching goal of this mixed-methods research effort is to generate evidence that supports the development of recommendations around the curricular, instructional, and contextual factors that support or impede children's acquisition of CT as a result of digital media viewing and hands-on engagement. Moving through cycles of implementation, observation, analysis, and revision over the course of three years, EDC/CCT researchers will work closely with families and WGBH's development team to determine how children learn the fundamentals of CT, how certain learning tasks can demonstrate what children understand, how to stimulate interest in hands-on activities, and the necessary scaffolds to support parental involvement in the development of children's CT. Each phase of the research will provide rich feedback to inform the next cycle of content development and will include: Phase 1: the formulation of three learning blueprints (for algorithmic thinking, sequencing, and patterns); Phase 2: the development of a cohesive set of learning tasks to provide evidence of student learning, as well as the production of a prototype of the digital media and parent/child engagement resources (algorithmic thinking); Phase 3-Part A: pilot research on the prototype, revisions, production of two additional prototypes (sequencing and patterns); Phase 3-Part B: pilot research on the three prototypes and revisions; and Phase 4: production of 27 animated and live-action videos and 18 parent/child engagement activities and a study of their impact. Through this process, the project team will build broader knowledge about how to design developmentally appropriate resources promoting CT for preschool children and will generate data on how to stimulate interest in hands-on activities and the necessary scaffolds to support parental involvement in the development of children's CT. The entire project represents an enormous opportunity for WGBH and for the informal STEM media field to learn more about how media can facilitate informal CT learning in the preschool years and ways to broaden participation by building parents' capacity to support STEM learning. This 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. 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.
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 proposed effort embraces broad participation by the three Ute tribes, History Colorado, and scientists in the field of archaeology to investigate and integrate traditional ecological knowledge and contemporary Western science. The project will preserve knowledge from the Ute peoples of Colorado and Utah, including traditional technology, ethnobotany, engineering and math. Results from this project will inform educational efforts in similar communities.
This project will build on the long-standing collaborations between History Colorado (HC), the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and Ute Indian Tribe, Uintah & Ouray Reservation, and the Dominguez Archaeological Research Group DARG). HC will implement and evaluate a regional informal learning collaboration focused on Ute traditional and contemporary STEM knowledge serving over 128,000 learners through tribal programs, local history museums and educational networks. This project will advance the understanding of integrated knowledge and the role of Ute people as STEM learners and practitioners. This Informal Science Learning project will increase lifelong STEM learning in rural communities and create a replicable model for collaboration among tribes, history museums, and scientists.
Portal to the Public: Expanding the National Network (PoP: ENN) is implementing around the county the successful NSF-funded Portal to the Public model in which researchers are trained to communicate and interact with the general public at informal science education (ISE) institutions about the research that they are conducting. The project, which follows on a thorough evaluation of the model at eight sites and current implementation at an additional fifteen sites, will incorporate twenty new ISE sites into the growing network, provide training and mentorship to ISE professionals on the use and adaptation of the PoP implementation manual and toolkits, and develop an enhanced network website that will serve as a communication and innovation hub. The work is responsive to the needs and activities of ISE organizations which continue to expand their missions beyond presenting to the public established science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and are working to become places where visitors can also experience the process and promise of current research via face-to-face interactions with researchers. The project is expanding both the kind and number of institutions involved around the country and is facilitating their capacity to develop a knowledge base, share experiences and best practices.
This CAREER proposal focuses on the development of teachers' identities, which are operationalized as beliefs and practices, behaviors, and pedagogical knowledge. The PI uses a qualitative approach, occurring over two phases, to investigate the impact of formal-informal collaborations on identity development over time. The study is grounded in an ecological theoretical approach that incorporates a view of informal learning settings as learner-driven and unique in providing opportunities for interaction with objects during meaning-making experiences among groups of learners. The longitudinal research design includes collection of an array of data, including observations of teaching and learning activities, interviews, survey responses, and archival documents such as student work and videos of classroom experiences. The PI uses a narrative analysis and a grounded theoretical approach to generate themes about beliefs and practices around behaviors and pedagogical knowledge informed by informal science education experiences. Research findings and related educational activities inform the field's understanding of best practices of integrating informal science activities into science teacher education, including determining appropriate kinds of support for STEM teachers who learn to teach in informal learning environments (ILE). The PI is integrating research findings in the revision of existing courses and the development of new courses and experiences for both new and experienced teachers. The project addresses the need for empirical evidence of impacts of ILE experiences on professional development, and will build capacity of informal science institution and university professionals to provide effective teacher education experiences and new teacher support.