In 2018, the Croucher Foundation conducted its third annual mapping exercise for the out-of-school STEM learning ecosystem in Hong Kong.
The study reveals a rich and vibrant ecosystem for out-of-school STEM in Hong Kong with over 3,000 discrete activities covering a very wide range of science disciplines. This third report indicates extremely rapid growth in available out-of-school STEM activities compared to 2016 and an even larger increase in the number of organisations offering out-of-school STEM activities in Hong Kong.
STEM educators are eager to foster long term collaboration with each other, and with schools. At the same time, good working practice by schools, teachers, STEM educators and institutions that involves and engages local communities was discovered, showing the diversified modes of connection which could enhance the sustainability of STEM ecosystem.
We trust that this three-year study with its associated digital maps, provides a useful resource for schools, teachers, students, parents, STEM educators and education policy makers in Hong Kong.
This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by engaging in hands-on field experience, laboratory/project-based entrepreneurship tasks and mentorship experiences.
Twin Cities Public Television project on Gender Equitable Teaching Practices in Career and Technical Education Pathways for High School Girls is designed to help career and technical education educators and guidance counselors recruit and retain more high school girls from diverse backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) pathways, specifically in technology and engineering. The project's goals are: 1) To increase the number of high school girls, including ethnic minorities, recruited and retained in traditionally male -STEM pathways; 2) To enhance the teaching and coaching practices of Career and Technical Education educators, counselors and role models with gender equitable and culturally responsive strategies; 3) To research the impacts of strategies and role model experiences on girls' interest in STEM careers; 4) To evaluate the effectiveness of training in these strategies for educators, counselors and role models; and 5) To develop training that can easily be scaled up to reach a much larger audience. The research hypothesis is that girls will develop more positive STEM identities and interests when their educators employ research-based, gender-equitable and culturally responsive teaching practices enhanced with female STEM role models. Instructional modules and media-based online resources for Minnesota high school Career and Technical Education programs will be developed in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and piloted in districts with strong community college and industry partnerships. Twin Cities Public Television will partner with STEM and gender equity researchers from St. Catherine University in St. Paul, the National Girls Collaborative, the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-Boulder), the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System.
The project will examine girls' personal experiences with equitable strategies embedded into classroom STEM content and complementary mentoring experiences, both live and video-based. It will explore how these experiences contribute to girls' STEM-related identity construction against gender-based stereotypes. It will also determine the extent girls' exposure to female STEM role models impact their Career and Technical Education studies and STEM career aspirations. The study will employ and examine short-form autobiographical videos created and shared by participating girls to gain insight into their STEM classroom and role model experiences. Empowering girls to respond to the ways their Career and Technical Education educators and guidance counselors guide them toward technology and engineering careers will provide a valuable perspective on educational practice and advance the STEM education field.
The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and the Association for Science-Technology Centers (ASTC), with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), has launched an initiative to develop and distribute two pilot issues of a new resource for STEM education practitioners in both formal and informal (out-of-school) settings. An aim of the new resource is to better connect practitioners across education settings and the research and knowledge base about STEM learning. David Heil & Associates, Inc. (DHA) is serving in a co-PI role on the grant to provide NSTA and ASTC with
This project supports environmental education and outreach activities that promote the ocean and coastal stewardship and climate literacy goals of NOAA and the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. Specifically, the partnership supports: (1) development of education and outreach materials; (2) professional development to educators and science communicators, (3) competitions that promote the goals of the partnership; (4)the activities of the Science on a Sphere Users' Collaborative Network; and (4) evaluation of partners' programs.
It’s important to communicate the excitement and value of NSF-funded research. This tool (formatted as a Prezi presentation) helps you do that with assistance from NSF public affairs experts, exploring options for communicating your research and broader impacts.
Many people believe that both public policy and personal action would improve with better access to “reliable knowledge about the natural world” (that thing that we often call science). Many of those people participate in science education and science communication. And yet, both as areas of practice and as objects of academic inquiry, science education and science communication have until recently remained remarkably distinct. Why, and what resources do the articles in this special issue of JRST give us for bringing together both the fields of practice and the fields of inquiry?
The fields of science education and science communication share the overarching goal of helping non-experts and non-members of the professional science community develop knowledge of the content and processes of scientific research. However, the specific audiences, methods, and aims employed in the two fields have evolved quite differently and as a result, the two fields rarely share findings and theory. Despite this lack of crosstalk, one theoretical construct—framing—has shown substantial analytic power for researchers in both fields. Specifically, both fields have productively made use of
Since its completion in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge has become one of the world’s most recognized landmarks as both an iconic public works accomplishment and a popular tourist destination. In 2008, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $3 million grant to the Golden Gate Bridge Highway & Transportation District to leverage this status in developing informal education resources to interpret the science, engineering and history of the bridge. Through this initiative the Golden Gate Bridge would become a model for other public works venues for providing informal science education and
People of color who live in low income, urban communities experience lower levels of educational attainment than whites and continue to be underrepresented in science at all educational and professional levels. It is widely accepted that this underrepresentation in science is related, not only to processes of historical exclusion and racism, but to how science is commonly taught and that investigating authentic, relevant science questions can improve engagement and learning of underrepresented students. Approaching science in these ways, however, requires new teaching practices, including ways of relating cross-culturally. In addition to inequity in science and broader educational outcomes, people of color from low income, urban communities experience high rates of certain health problems that can be directly or indirectly linked to mosquitoes. Recognizing that undertaking public health research and preventative outreach efforts in these communities is challenging, there is a critical need for an innovative approach that leverages local youth resources for epidemiological inquiry and education. Such an approach would motivate the pursuit of science among historically-excluded youth while, additionally, involving pre-service, in-service, and informal educators in joint participatory inquiry structured around opportunities to learn and practice authentic, ambitious science teaching and learning.
Our long-term goal is to interrupt the reproduction of educational and health disparities in a low-income, urban context and to support historically-excluded youth in their trajectories toward science. This will be accomplished through the overall objective of this project to promote authentic science, ambitious teaching, and an orientation to science pursuits among elementary students participating in a university-school-community partnership promise program, through inquiry focused on mosquitoes and human health. The following specific aims will be pursued in support of the objective:
1. Historically-excluded youth will develop authentic science knowledge, skills, and dispositions, as well as curiosity, interest, and positive identification with science, and motivation for continued science study by participating in a scientific community and engaging in the activities and discourses of the discipline. Teams of students and educators will engage in community-based participatory research aimed at assessing and responding to health and well-being issues that are linked to mosquitoes in urban, low-income communities. In addition, the study of mosquitoes will engage student curiosity and interest, enhance their positive identification with science, and motivate their continued study.
2. Informal and formal science educators will demonstrate competence in authentic and ambitious science teaching and model an affirming orientation toward cultural diversity in science. Pre-service, in-service, and informal educators will participate in courses and summer institutes where they will be exposed to ambitious teaching practices and gain proficiency, through reflective processes such as video study, in adapting traditional science curricula to authentic science goals that meet the needs of historically excluded youth.
3. Residents in the community will display more accurate understandings and transformed practices with respect to mosquitoes in the urban ecosystem in service of enhanced health and well-being. Residents will learn from an array of youth-produced, culturally responsive educational materials that will be part of an ongoing outreach and prevention campaign to raise community awareness of the interplay between humans and mosquitoes.
These outcomes are expected to have an important positive impact because they have potential for improving both immediate and long-term educational and health outcomes of youth and other residents in a low-income, urban community.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Katherine Richardson BrunaLyric Colleen Bartholomay
Recruiting more research scientists from rural Appalachia is essential for reducing the critical public health disparities found in this region. As a designated medically underserved area, the people of Appalachia endure limited access to healthcare and accompanying public health education, and exhibit higher disease incidences and shorter lifespans than the conventional U.S. population (Pollard & Jacobsen, 2013). These health concerns, coupled with the fact that rural Appalachian adults are less likely to trust people from outside their communities, highlights the need for rural Appalachian youth to enter the biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research workforce. However, doing so requires not only the specific desire to pursue a science, technology, engineering, math, or medical science (STEMM) related degree, it also requires the more general desire to pursue post-secondary education at all. This is clearly not occurring in Tennessee’s rural Appalachian regions where nearly 75% of adults realize educational achievements only up to the high school level. Although a great deal of research and intervention has been done to increase students’ interest in STEMM disciplines, very little research has considered the unique barriers to higher education experienced by rural Appalachian youth. A critical gap in past interventions research is the failure to address these key pieces of the puzzle: combatting real and perceived barriers to higher education and STEMM pursuits in order to increase self-efficacy for, belief in the value of, and interest in pursuing an undergraduate degree. Such barriers are especially salient for rural Appalachian youth.
Our long-range goal is to increase the diversity of biomedical, clinical and behavioral research scientists by developing interventions that both reduce barriers to higher education and increase interest in pipeline STEMM majors among rural Appalachian high school students. Our objective in this application is to determine the extent to which a multifaceted intervention strategy combining interventions to address the barriers to and supports for higher education with interventions to increase interest in STEMM fields leads to increased intentions to pursue an undergraduate STEMM degree. Our hypothesis is that students who experience such interventions will show increases in important intrapersonal social-cognitive factors and in their intentions to pursue a postsecondary degree than students not exposed to such interventions. Based on the low numbers of students from this region who pursue post-secondary education and the research demonstrating the unique barriers faced by this and similar populations (Gibbons & Borders, 2010), we believe it is necessary to reduce perceived barriers to college-going in addition to helping students explore STEMM career options. In other words, it is not enough to simply offer immersive and hands-on research and exploratory career experiences to rural Appalachian youth; they need targeted interventions to help them understand college life, navigate financial planning for college, strategize ways to succeed in college, and interact with college-educated role models. Only this combination of general college-going and specific STEMM-field information can overcome the barriers faced by this population. Therefore, our specific aims are:
Specific Aim 1: Understand the role of barriers to and support for higher education in Appalachian high school students’ interest in pursuing STEMM-related undergraduate degrees. We will compare outcomes for students who participate in our interventions, designed to proactively reduce general college-going barriers while increasing support systems, to outcomes for students from closely matched schools who do not participate in these interventions to determine the extent to which such low-cost interventions, which can reach large numbers of students, are effective in increasing rural Appalachian youth’s intent to pursue STEMM-related undergraduate degrees.
Specific Aim 2: Develop sustainable interventions that decrease barriers to and increase support for higher education and that increase STEMM-related self-efficacy and interest. Throughout our project, we will integrate training for teachers and school counselors, nurture lasting community partnerships, and develop a website with comprehensive training modules to allow the schools to continue implementing the major features of the interventions long after funding ends.
This research is innovative because it is among the first to recognize the unique needs of this region by directly addressing barriers to and supports for higher education and integrating such barriers-focused interventions with more typical STEMM-focused interventions. Our model provides opportunities to assess college-going and STEMM-specific self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and barriers/supports, giving us a true understanding of how to best serve this group. Ultimately, this project will allow future researchers to understand the complex balance of services needed to increase the number of rural Appalachians entering the biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research science workforce.
Taking the International Science in Popular Culture conference as a starting point, this editorial considers audiences for cultural products, considering the size of audiences (from blockbuster films, to intimate science slams), their pre-existing (or lack of pre-existing) interest in the subject and what this might offer the field of science communication.
The ever-changing nature of academic science communication discourse can make it challenging for those not intimately associated with the field ― scientists and science-communication practitioners or new-comers to the field such as graduate students ― to keep up with the research. This collection of articles provides a comprehensive overview of the subject and serves as a thorough reference book for students and practitioners of science communication.