RISES (Re-energize and Invigorate Student Engagement through Science) is a coordinated suite of resources including 42 interactive English and Spanish STEM videos produced by Children's Museum Houston in coordination with the science curriculum department at Houston ISD. The videos are aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, and each come with a bilingual Activity Guide and Parent Prompt sheet, which includes guiding questions and other extension activities.
The Detroit Zoo will partner with community-based organizations serving youth in metropolitan Detroit to implement a program to develop and present remote STEM programming for students in this area, targeting low- to moderate-income students of color. Staff from the zoo and three afterschool programs (American Institutional Management Services, Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, and Boys and Girls Clubs of Southeast Michigan) will participate in professional development workshops on virtual, inquiry-based, humane STEM education. They will then utilize skills developed in the workshops to develop and lead virtual education programming for a total of 24 groups of 20 middle school youth.
Despite decades of policies and programs meant to increase the representation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), girls and women of color still represent a much smaller percent of the STEM workforce than they do in the US population. This lack of representation is preventing the US STEM workforce from reaching its true potential. Intersecting inequalities of gender, race, ethnicity, and class, along with stereotypes associated with who is successful in STEM (i.e., White men), lead to perceptions that they do not belong and may not succeed in STEM. Ultimately, these issues hinder girls’ STEM identity development (i.e., sense of belonging and future success), lead to a crisis of representation for women of color and have compounding impacts on the STEM workforce. Research suggests there are positive impacts of in-person STEM learning after-school and out-of-school time programs on girls’ sense of belonging. The increasing need for online learning initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic means it is vital to investigate girls’ STEM identity development within an online community. Thus, the project will refine and test approaches in online learning communities to make a valuable impact on the STEM identity development of girls of color by 1) training educators and role models on exemplary approaches for STEM identity development; 2) implementing a collaborative, girl-focused Brite Online Learning Community that brings together 400 girls ages 13-16 from a minimum of 10 sites across the United States; and 3) researching the impact of the three core approaches -- community building, authentic and competence-demonstrating hands-on activities, and interactive learning with women role models -- on participating girls’ STEM identities in online settings.
The mixed methods study is guided by guided by Carlone & Johnson’s model of STEM identity involving four constructs: competence, performance, recognition, and sense of belonging. Data collection sources for the quantitative portion of the project include pre- and post-surveys, while qualitative data sources will be collected from six case study sites and will include observations, focus group interviews with girls, artifacts created by girls and educators, educator interviews, and open-ended survey responses. This approach will enable the research team to determine how and the extent to which the Brite Online Learning Community influences STEM identity constructs, interpreting which practices lead to meaningful outcomes that can be linked to the development of STEM identity for participating girls in an online environment. The products of this work will include research-based, tested Brite Practices and a toolkit for fostering girls’ interest, identification, and long-term participation in STEM. The resulting products will increase the reach of informal STEM education programming to girls of color across the nation as online spaces can reach more girls, potentially increasing the representation of women of color in the STEM workforce.
This project will scale up fully virtual or face-to-face STEM professional development to afterschool educators in both urban and rural settings. Given that many afterschool educators have little or no background in STEM education, there is demand for professional development that is effective, inexpensive, and accessible. This project will build national capacity in STEM education by developing the STEM skills of over 1,500 educators across multiple states and will ultimately impact over 31,000 under-represented youth in these areas. The project will also deliver robust materials through a free open-source mechanism, for use by educators anywhere and anytime. The project will broaden participation in STEM by engaging community educators in the rural parts of the nation, a critically under-represented group in STEM. It will also reach educators from low-income urban communities across three states and seven cities, targeted through strategic networks and partnerships, including organizations such as the YMCA, 4-H, and the National Afterschool Association.
This collaborative project is scaling the ACRES model (Afterschool Coaching for Reflective Educators in STEM). The model humanizes the virtual experience, making it social and engaging, and allows educators to learn, share, and practice essential STEM facilitation skills with a focus on making STEM relevant and introducing STEM careers to youth. In addition to enhancing the professional STEM skills of rural and urban educators, the project will create a national cohort of coaches with deep expertise in (i) converting in-person activities for youth into a highly engaging, choice-rich online format, (ii) engaging isolated informal educators in supportive professional learning communities, and (iii) coaching foundational research-based STEM facilitation skills that ensure these activities are pedagogically sound. A key part of this broad implementation project involves studying how to integrate an effective professional development program into afterschool organizations, including the ways afterschool programs adapt the materials to be culturally responsive to their local communities. The researchers will also study factors contributing to the longer-term sustainability of the program. The research will use surveys, interviews, direct observations, and case studies of participants to provide the field with valuable insights into scaling a program in the afterschool world.
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 extending 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.
Refugee youth are particularly vulnerable to STEM disenfranchisement due to factors including limited or interrupted schooling following displacement; restricted exposure to STEM education; and linguistic, cultural, ethnic, socioeconomic, and racial minority status. Refugee youth may experience a gap in STEM skills and knowledge, and a conflict between the identities necessary for participation in their families and communities, and those expected for success in STEM settings. To conduct research to better understand these challenges, an interrelated set of activities will be developed. First, youth will learn principles of physics and computing by participating in cosmic ray research with physicists using an instructional approach that builds from their home languages and cultures. Then youth periodically share what they are learning in the cosmic ray research with their parents, siblings, and science teachers at family and community science events. Finally, youth conduct reflective research on their own STEM identity development over the course of the project. Research on learning will be conducted within and across these three strands to better understand how refugee youth develop STEM-positive identities. This project will benefit society by improving equity and diversity in STEM through (1) creating opportunities for refugee youth to participate in physics research and to develop computing skills and (2) producing knowledge on STEM identity development that may be applied more broadly to improve STEM education. Deliverables from this project include: (a) research publications on STEM identity and learning; (b) curriculum resources for teaching physics and computing to multilingual youth; (c) an online digital storytelling exhibit offering narratives about belonging in STEM research which can be shared with STEM stakeholders (policy makers, scientists, educators, etc.); and (d) an online database of cosmic ray data which will be available to physicists worldwide for research purposes. This Innovations in Development proposal 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.
This program is designed to provide multiple contexts, relationships, and modes across and within which the identity work of individual students can be studied to look for convergence or divergence. To achieve this goal, the research applies a linguistic anthropological framework embedding discourse analysis in a larger ethnography. Data collected in this study include field notes, audio and video recordings of naturalistic interactions in the cosmic ray research and other program activities, multimodal artifacts (e.g., students' digital stories), student work products, interviews, and surveys. Critically, this methodology combines the analysis of identity formation as it unfolds in moment-to-moment conversations (during STEM learning, and in conversations about STEM and STEM learning) with reflective tasks and the production of personal narratives (e.g., in digital stories and interviews). Documenting convergence and divergence of STEM identities across these sources of data offers both methodological and theoretical contributions to the field. The research will offer thick description of the discursive practices of refugee youth to reveal how they construct identities related to STEM and STEM disciplines across settings (e.g., during cosmic ray research, while creating digital stories), relationships (e.g., peer, parent, teacher), and the languages they speak (e.g., English, Swahili). The findings will be of potential value to instructional designers of informal learning experiences including those working with afterschool, museums, science centers and the like, educators, and scholars of learning and identity.
This Innovations in Development 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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Tino NyaweloJohn MatthewsJordan GertonSarah Braden