The goal of this engineering education project entitled EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN ENGINEERS (EWE) is to encourage more academically prepared high school girls to consider engineering as an attractive option for post-secondary education and subsequent careers in order to increase the number of women who make up the engineering workforce. Specific project objectives are to: 1) mobilize America's more than one million engineers to reach out to educators, school counselors, and high school girls with tested messages tailored to encourage participation in engineering education and careers; 2) help high school counselors and science, math, and technology teachers to better understand the nature of engineering, the academic background needed to pursue engineering, and the career paths available in engineering; 3) equip high school counselors and teachers to share this information with students, especially girls; and 4) reach out to girls directly with messages that accurately reflect the field of engineering and will inspire girls to choose engineering. The WGBH Educational Foundation has partnered with the American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES), American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and a coalition of more than 50 of the country's engineering associations, colleges, and universities to fundamentally shift the way the engineering and educational communities portray engineering. Based on a needs assessment performed in 2004, the EWE coalition embraces a communication strategy that focuses on the societal value and rewards of being an engineer, as opposed to the traditional emphasis on the process and challenges of becoming an engineer. This project represents a nationwide outreach effort that includes training opportunities for engineers; targeted Web-based and print resources for students, school counselors and teachers, and engineers; and a range of outreach and marketing activities.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Julie BenyoPatrick NataleF. Suzanne Jenniches
This collaborative project aims to establish a national computational resource to move the research community much closer to the realization of the goal of the Tree of Life initiative, namely, to reconstruct the evolutionary history of all organisms. This goal is the computational Grand Challenge of evolutionary biology. Current methods are limited to problems several orders of magnitude smaller, and they fail to provide sufficient accuracy at the high end of their range. The planned resource will be designed as an incubator to promote the development of new ideas for this enormously challenging computational task; it will create a forum for experimentalists, computational biologists, and computer scientists to share data, compare methods, and analyze results, thereby speeding up tool development while also sustaining current biological research projects. The resource will be composed of a large computational platform, a collection of interoperable high-performance software for phylogenetic analysis, and a large database of datasets, both real and simulated, and their analyses; it will be accessible through any Web browser by developers, researchers, and educators. The software, freely available in source form, will be usable on scales varying from laptops to high-performance, Grid-enabled, compute engines such as this project's platform, and will be packaged to be compatible with current popular tools. In order to build this resource, this collaborative project will support research programs in phyloinformatics (databases to store multilevel data with detailed annotations and to support complex, tree-oriented queries), in optimization algorithms, Bayesian inference, and symbolic manipulation for phylogeny reconstruction, and in simulation of branching evolution at the genomic level, all within the context of a virtual collaborative center. Biology, and phylogeny in particular, have been almost completely redefined by modern information technology, both in terms of data acquisition and in terms of analysis. Phylogeneticists have formulated specific models and questions that can now be addressed using recent advances in database technology and optimization algorithms. The time is thus exactly right for a close collaboration of biologists and computer scientists to address the IT issues in phylogenetics, many of which call for novel approaches, due to a combination of combinatorial difficulty and overall scale. The project research team includes computer scientists working in databases, algorithm design, algorithm engineering, and high-performance computing, evolutionary biologists and systematists, bioinformaticians, and biostatisticians, with a history of successful collaboration and a record of fundamental contributions, to provide the required breadth and depth. This project will bring together researchers from many areas and foster new types of collaborations and new styles of research in computational biology; moreover, the interaction of algorithms, databases, modeling, and biology will give new impetus and new directions in each area. It will help create the computational infrastructure that the research community will use over the next decades, as more whole genomes are sequenced and enough data are collected to attempt the inference of the Tree of Life. The project will help evolutionary biologists understand the mechanisms of evolution, the relationships among evolution, structure, and function of biomolecules, and a host of other research problems in biology, eventually leading to major progress in ecology, pharmaceutics, forensics, and security. The project will publicize evolution, genomics, and bioinformatics through informal education programs at museum partners of the collaborating institutions. It also will motivate high-school students and college undergraduates to pursue careers in bioinformatics. The project provides an extraordinary opportunity to train students, both undergraduate and graduate, as well as postdoctoral researchers, in one of the most exciting interdisciplinary areas in science. The collaborating institutions serve a large number of underrepresented groups and are committed to increasing their participation in research.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Tandy WarnowDavid HillisLauren MeyersDaniel MirankerWarren Hunt, Jr.
The institution is The Ohio State University at Lima, the university partners are the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Fayetteville State University. It's About Discovery is a unique partnership to engage students and teachers in critical thinking skills in STEM content areas. The Ford Partnership for Advanced Studies (PAS) new science curriculum is the foundation for the project which will include over 700 students and 20-25 teachers. While the primary focus is on students, throughout the life of the project all teachers will participate in professional development focusing on the PAS units to ensure the quality teaching and understanding of the content. Technology will be integrated throughout the program to enable students to create inquiry based projects across state lines and for teachers to continue their professional development opportunities. Community partners will serve as mentors, host field trips, and engage in on-line conversations with students. An interactive website will be created for both teachers and students. The focus is on 8th grade science as it relates to STEM careers, 9th grade physical science and 10th science and mathematics. We are implementing a new Ford PAS curriculum module, Working Towards Sustainability, which comprises of four modules: We All Run on Energy, Energy from the Sun, Is Hydrogen a Solution? and The Nuclear Revolution. Teachers across states will engage in a new professional development model. Students will create projects through on-line conversations. A website will be created for project participants and the ITEST community. These hands-on, inquiry-based learning experiences engage students and prepare and encourage them to pursue science, engineering, and technology in high school and beyond. All PAS curricula use real world experiences, open-ended problems and result in real world applications. Assessments are on-going and inquiry driven. Teamwork and on-line resources and research are built into the curriculum design. The evaluation consists of a multi-method pre-post design. Teachers complete a Pre Survey at the beginning of the program and then again at the end of the school year. Students complete a Pre Survey at the beginning of the school year and a post survey at the end of the school year. In addition, teachers share students' scores on curriculum assessments completed throughout the year, including student scores on the Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System's (CASAS) Assessment of Critical Thinking in Science writing tasks.
The University of Massachusetts Lowell conducted 1.5-day conference in the fall of 2011, titled "Learning on the Go: Using Out-of-Home Media to Communicate Climate Science." The conference, held at the Lowell Inn and Conference Center, brought together approximately 125 professionals and students in climate science, communications, out-of-home media, social science, informal and formal science education, and educational psychology with the goal of exploring opportunities for applying out-of-home media to communicating science to the public, with a particular emphasis on climate change science. "Out-of-home media" is defined as any type of communication that reaches individuals while they are out of the home, including mobile media, billboards, mass transit placards, posters, etc. The intent was to consider how informal science education and its impacts on learning can be expanded via the adaptation of such media to the goals of ISE. Conference proceedings and podcasts of keynote sessions will be made available on a conference Web site. Conference evaluation will be conducted by Arbor Consulting Partners.
Historically, most of the focus of science education has been on pre-college and college level schooling. Although some of the public's interest and knowledge about science is unquestionably shaped by compulsory schooling, given that the average adult spends only a fraction of their life participating in some kind of formal schooling, we argue that the contribution of school-based science learning to the long-term public understanding of science is limited, particularly for the majority of Americans who do not go on to post-secondary schooling. This article shows that the majority of the
In October 2012, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a new version of the Grant Proposal Guide (GPG) that included significant changes to the review elements and considerations underlying the Merit Review Criteria. This was the first major revision of the Criteria in 15 years. Of particular note were significant changes to the criteria used by panelists, reviewers, and program officers to evaluate a proposal’s broader impacts. To help inform Florida ocean scientists of these changes in anticipation of proposal submission deadlines in early 2013, the Center for Ocean Sciences
This volume explores the integration of recent research on everyday, classroom, and professional scientific thinking. It brings together an international group of researchers to present core findings from each context; discuss connections between contexts, and explore structures; technologies, and environments to facilitate the development and practice of scientific thinking. The chapters focus on: * situations from young children visiting museums, * middle-school students collaborating in classrooms, * undergraduates learning about research methods, and * professional scientists engaged in
The aim of the work reported here has been to give an overview of the support that the informal sector provides for learning and engagement with science. In addressing this goal, we have taken the view that engagement with science and the learning of science occur both within and without schools. What is of interest is not who provides the experience or where it is provided but the nature and diversity of opportunities for science learning and engagement that are offered in contemporary UK society. Thus in approaching the work we have taken a systems perspective and looked at informal
In the spring of 1999, the Board of the National Association of Research in Science Teaching (NARST) established an Informal Science Education Ad Hoc committee, co-chaired by Lynn Dierking and John Falk. The Committee's task was to focus on the organization's positioning in regard to out-of-school science education. After 2 years of work, the committee composed a policy statement, included below, that was presented to, and accepted by, the NARST board. The policy statement defines this arena of research, describes a variety of out-of-school environments in which science learning occurs
There is no single right way to learn things, and no single place or even moment in which we learn. All learning happens continuously, from many different sources, and in many different ways. There are three main educational sectors, the formal education sector of schools and universities, the workplace, and the free-choice learning sector. Of the three, the most frequently over-looked is the free-choice learning sector. The free-choice learning sector includes museums, television, radio, the Internet, magazines, newspapers, books, parks, community organizations of all types: youth, adult
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Institute for Learning InnovationJohn H Falk
In this paper we contrast the possibilities of the World Wide Web to transform communities of educational researchers with actual patterns of use of The Museum Learning Collaborative Web site. We highlight patterns of user interaction that have emerged and discuss the problems and opportunities of creating shared research resources in emerging fields such as museum learning research. Our findings have direct implications for three stakeholders: program funders, ourselves as project researchers, and the larger museum research community.
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Kevin CrowleyGaea LeinhardtChien-fu Chang
Lessons Without Limit is not just another book about school reform but a highly readable guide to transforming the entire experience of learning across a lifetime. Free-choice learning is all about what you choose to do in your learning time. We learn every day at home, at school, at work, and out in the world, from books, in museums, watching television, hearing a symphony, building a model rocket. Our motivations and expectations change over our lifetime but learning never stops. This book will give you a new understanding of the learning process and guide you in maximizing your lifelong