This RAPID award is made by the AISL program in the Division of Research on Learning in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, using funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. COVID-19 presents a national threat to the health of children and families, presenting serious implications for the mental and physical health of children. This project addresses two critical aspects of the impact on COVID-19 on families: (a) the large-scale shift to at-home learning based on nationwide school closures and (b) the critical need for families to understand the basic science of virus transmission and prevention. To address these needs, the project team will develop a series of STEM activities for families with children in grades K-6 that make use of items readily available in most households. The activities help children and their families learn about viruses, virus transmission, and virus prevention while also developing other STEM-skills, particularly related to engineering design. Importantly, the project team also considers the emotional well-being of children and families during the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Led by researchers from Indiana University and Binghamton University, and experts in educational resource development from Science Friday (a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the public's access to science and scientific information through podcasts, digital videos, original web articles, and educational resources for teachers and informal educators) the project is further supported by partnerships with the New York Hall of Science, Amazeum (AR), the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (ME), The Tech Museum of Innovation (CA), the Indiana State Museum, and Kopernik Observatory Science Center (NY). The activities will be shared with families through live-streamed web sessions that introduce the activity, give tips to adults for facilitation, share a bit on related STEM careers and engage the audience in dialog about the activity and their current experiences. Versions of the sessions that are recorded will be edited and include closed-captioning and subtitles in multiple languages before being posted on platforms such as YouTube.
This project uses a design-based research approach to investigate strategies for enabling families to actively engage with STEM while home and away from their traditional institutions during a period of crisis. The research components focus on:
Engagement: How do families engage in the activity tasks, in terms of processes, practices, and use of resources? Who participated, why did they choose to participate and how did they engage (including modification of activities)? What barriers prevented interested families from completing activities?
Impact: How did the activities change participants? feelings of: a) efficacy around STEM and b) connectedness/ isolation, during extended school closures?
The Activities: Which activities had the greatest uptake? How many activity ideas were submitted by those outside of the team? What was the age/content focus of each of these activities?
The researchers will analyze social media data (including data on resource downloads and use of tracked links, YouTube and Facebook views, comment threads during livestreams and Likes/Shares/Follows across social media sites) to refine and improve the activities and programming as well as learn about the ways families are engaging in the activities. The researchers will solicit survey responses from website visitors to gather more information on participants, why they participated, how they engaged and how the activities impacted participants? efficacy around STEM and their feelings of connectedness or isolation. The researchers will also ask participants to submit images, videos and text that describes what they are making and their process along the way. Analysis of this data would lead to insights on how children and families use STEM language and practices; how children and families ask questions and use COVID-19-related and other information as part of their design work; and how ideas are formed, shaped and refined as families engage in design and making. While the project focuses on a unique opportunity to collect data on family STEM engagement as families respond to disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, this project and its findings will provide a knowledge base that can be utilized to inform future responses to national emergencies, other work aimed at promoting family learning at home, and approaches to supporting children in open-ended problem solving.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
Underrepresented minorities (URMs) are less than 10% of engineering faculty, despite comprising nearly a third of the nation's population. A common explanation for their disproportionate representation, at the engineering faculty level, is related to a lack of access to effective mentorship from other faculty. This NSF INCLUDES Design and Development Launch Pilot project will expand a new mentoring and advocacy-networking paradigm to bring together two stakeholder groups: (1) underrepresented minorities (URMs) who are engineering faculty and (2) well-regarded (primarily non-URM) emeriti/retired engineering faculty. A previously-funded NSF project found that this mentor-mentee pairing was viewed favorable by both parties and beneficial, particularly by the URM engineering faculty. Because of these results, the investigators proposed to scale, test, and evaluate the approach on a broader scale by creating national infrastructural network partners to help increase capacity to serve a greater number of URM engineering faculty and to introduce tele-mentoring and training models to serve URM faculty who work in remote geographical locations with very little access to mentors.
The project will use a multi-phased phenomenological, mixed method research design to gain greater understanding of the ways in which the URM faculty and emeriti faculty experience the opportunities afforded by the project. Further, the investigators plan to collect data to examine how project participants perceive and experience conventional, direct communications (e.g., telephone calls, e-mail, and in-person meetings)through the mentoring process versus the use of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), anthropomorphic interface agents that engage a user in real-time dialogue by using verbal-nonverbal channels to emulate the in-person experience. This project has the potential to broaden participation in the engineering professoriate and opens up new possibilities for supporting URM engineering faculty.
DATE:
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Comas HaynesValerie ConleySylvia MendezKinnis GoshaRosario Gerhardt
Quest, produced by KQED, is a multimedia initiative designed to raise the profile of STEM issues throughout the Northern California region and activate citizens to discuss and investigate them. Led by KQED, Quest is created and maintained by an active consortium of 16 participating informal science education organizations. Based on the successful Quest model, KQED will build on its prior collaborative work to develop regional partnerships with other public broadcasting stations and community-based organizations around the country, making possible a new and innovative partnership in science media production and informal science education. This grant will support a) a growing collaborative of science centers, museums, research institutes, and community-based organizations for editorial development, education outreach, and content creation; b) the production of at least 10 hours of television, weekly radio science news reports, and a dynamic online website that supports and extends the broadcast material; and c) educational resources and professional development workshops. STEM content will encompass research drawn from the physical sciences, life sciences, and earth sciences. Most of the stories will also incorporate content about the technology and engineering used to support scientific endeavors. The KQED Educational Network (EdNet) will administer the community and educational outreach initiatives, including creating viewer/listener guides, developing and delivering workshops, and providing information built around Quest media. Project collaborators include the Bay Institute, California Academy of Sciences, Chabot Space and Science Center, East Bay Regional Park District, Exploratorium, Girl Scouts, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Hall of Science, Museum of Paleontology, Oakland Zoo, and The Tech Museum of Innovation. In expanding the model to regional hubs, Quest will also involve the Coalition for Public Understanding of Science (COPUS), the Encyclopedia of Life, and an array of peer public broadcasting organizations. This project offers a useful and exciting model for public television and radio stations nationally in building community collaborations that advance informal science education. The detailed and informed ways in which the team works with its community partners via multiple platforms are innovative. This proposal builds on prior work in Northern California to explore additional regional partnerships with other public broadcasting stations and community-based organizations, making possible a unique partnership in science media production and informal science education. This project extends reach by developing up to ten regional "hubs" across the country. Evaluation will be conducted by Rockman et al.
The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework for initiatives focused on supporting learning across settings in the domains of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The conceptual framework emerges from ecological perspectives on learning that suggest a need to consider how learning develops across settings, through a range of supportive interactions and relationships (Barron, 2006; Bronfenbrenner, 1979). The framework presents initial design principles for organizing learning opportunities that connect people to practices in multiple settings. It also