The purpose of this national survey was to connect with librarians to determine: (1) What STEM programming is currently in place? How do libraries approach and implement these programs? (2) What obstacles prevent libraries from incorporating more STEM programming? (3) What kind of training and resources would be most helpful to librarians? Additionally, we sought the following information from STEM professionals, for the purpose of establishing and maintaining a Community of Practice: (4) What factors influence and enhance the success of Communities of Practice?
Public libraries are becoming an important place for informal science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education for K-12 students and their families, as well as for adult education activities that support STEM workforce development. This report provides public librarians, administrators and collaborating organizations a brief background on the role that libraries can play in fostering a healthy STEM education ecosystem, as well as promising practices for implementing effective STEM programs in public libraries.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Annette ShtivelbandLauren RiendeauAmanda Wallander-RobertsRobert Jakubowski
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and programming has become a priority in our nation. In the United States, the STEM pipeline is considered "leaky" as many students disengage from STEM at various points during their lives. In particular, women, Latinos, and African Americans are more likely to disengage from the STEM pipeline. American students are less likely to earn STEM postsecondary and graduate degrees compared to other nations. As careers in STEM fields are expected to increase at a faster rate than other occupations, there is growing concern about the
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Annette ShtivelbandAmanda Wallander RobertsRobert Jakubowski
This project seeks to prepare female Hispanic students for leadership in the STEM workforce. The project seeks to determine if a blended set of STEM engagement activities including summer intensive laboratory-based experiential learning and out-of-school STEM activities, peer support, mentoring, and financial assistance can help to take target students through a traditional leaky workforce and educational pipeline resulting in matriculation to and graduation from undergraduate STEM programs. If successful, the work will increase participation and leadership of Hispanic women in the STEM workforce. To accomplish these goals, the PIs will: (1) work with partners to identify, recruit, and screen bright, energetic Hispanic females in their freshman year of high school who show promise and interest in STEM disciplines; (2) engage selected students and their families in formal and informal STEM learning both throughout the school year and during summer residential experiences to enable the students to further develop and clarify their STEM calling; (3)prepare the students to matriculate to undergraduate college; (4) provide program participants with full-tuition scholarships to ensure undergraduate education is attainable; and (5) at our institution and partner colleges, provide dedicated advisors and mentors and cohort activities to ensure undergraduate persistence and success.
Technical Summary
The PIs seek to prepare female Hispanic students for leadership in the STEM workforce. To compete in the global economy, maintain national security, and meet serious environmental challenges, more skilled graduates are needed to fill STEM jobs. An untapped source of talent exists in those populations that continue to be underrepresented in STEM fields, including women and people of color. This work will help to determine if a blended set of STEM engagement activities including summer intensive laboratory-based experiential learning and out-of-school STEM activities, peer support, mentoring, and financial assistance can help to take target students through a traditional leaky pipeline resulting in matriculation to and graduation from undergraduate STEM education. The work builds on research that shows that mentored research opportunities and peer support and interaction improves persistence in female students. It also builds on regional models of collective impact whereby a variety of corporate, nonprofit, and foundation organizations successfully join together for large-impact projects. If successful, the work will increase participation and leadership of Hispanic women in the STEM workforce.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
April MarchettiCharles EnglishRebecca MichelsenRachele DominguezLaurie Massery
This NSF INCLUDES Launch Pilot project, STEPs to STEM, will create a statewide STEM pipeline within an integrated program of community college education throughout the state prisons of New Jersey. The Pilot leverages a long-standing collaboration among education, government, and volunteer sectors including NJ-Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (STEP), all of whom commit to work together to accredit and ensure articulation (transferability) of the required STEM courses. The broadening participation challenge that will be addressed by this Pilot is to extend college-level STEM education to incarcerated persons, who are overwhelmingly minorities from the lowest socioeconomic levels of American society. Education in general and STEM education in particular equips students for high-level workforce readiness, offering improved quality of life for formerly incarcerated persons and their families and contributing to American economic success.
Technical Abstract:
Four major goals of the Pilot are: 1. consolidate and ensure articulation of STEM A.A. courses in NJ state prisons with a seamless path to B.A. study at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; 2. begin teaching new accredited STEM courses and offering REU and internship opportunities to released students; 3. implement tracking of students in STEM courses while incarcerated and beyond, enabling a supplementary research goal to evaluate student and teacher performance in comparison with mainstream educational settings; 4. work with partners in business, government, non-profit, development, and public sectors to build a complete STEM pipeline with a long-term goal of enabling formerly incarcerated students to clear their records through education and workforce participation in STEM. Implementation of the goals will proceed as follows. Senior personnel from each of the cooperating institutions and a jointly-supervised postdoctoral trainee will negotiate the terms of accreditation and articulation across the state system with our partner, the lead accreditation institution, Raritan Valley Community College. Teaching of STEM courses by our established team of volunteers will commence as each course is accredited. Our industry and research partners will begin offering REU and training internships in the first summer. Educational research professional on the team will guide the design, implementation, and analysis of student and teacher performance. New partners will be brought in to the collective from the non-profit, business, and public sectors to extend the reach and impact of this initiative.
The Morgan State University INCLUDES project will build on an existing regional partnership of four Historically Black Colleges and Universities that are working together to improve STEM outcomes for middle school minority male students that are local to Morgan State in Baltimore, North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, Jackson State in Mississippi, and Kentucky State in Frankfort. Additional partners include SRI International, the National CARES Mentoring Network, and the Verizon Foundation. Using the collective impact-style approaches such as planning and implementing a Network Improvement Community (NIC), developing a shared agenda and implementing mutually reinforcing activities, these partners will address two common goals: (1) Broaden the participation of underrepresented minority males in science and engineering through educational experiences that prepare them for careers in STEM fields; and (2) Create a Network Improvement Community focused on STEM achievement in minority males. Program elements include high-quality instruction in STEM content, mentoring, and professional development. The project will expand to include eight additional partners (six HBCUs and two Hispanic-Serving Institutions) and schools and districts in communities local to their campuses. The INCLUDES pilot will help scale innovations that target impacting minorities in STEM.
The project will develop STEM learning pathways for middle school minority males by harnessing the collective impact of 12 university partners, local K-12 schools and districts with which they partner, and surrounding community organizations and businesses with a vested interest in achieving common goals. Products will include a roadmap for addressing the problem through a Network Improvement Community, a website that will contribute to the knowledge base regarding effective strategies for enhancing STEM educational opportunities for minority males, and common metrics, assessments, and shared measurement systems that will be used to measure the collective impact of the Network Improvement Community.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jumoke Ladeji-OsiasCindy ZikerGeneva HaertelKamal AliAyanna GillDerrick GilmoreClay Gloster
This study was a longitudinal summative evaluation of repeat visitors’ experiences in four Math Moves! exhibitions that were developed as part of a large collaborative exhibition development project called Math Core for Museums, and mounted at four museums around the country: Museum of Science (Boston); Museum of Life & Science (Durham, NC); Explora (Albuquerque); and Science Museum of Minnesota (St. Paul). The summative evaluation purposively selected four family groups at each institution and collected naturalistic data as the 16 groups engaged with the exhibits from 4-6 times over a two
The Let’s Talk project examined what we know and don’t know about dialogue-based programs in museums. Through research, a symposium and an experimental graduate course, the project created a set of priorities and resources for moving dialogue work forward, developed new relationships across STEM based and cultural based museums and prepared a pool of pre-professionals to enter the field with knowledge of the value and potential of dialogue. The project ends with a call for further articulation and appropriate measurement of the intended and possible impacts and further development of field
This is a two-year "Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science" (INCLUDES) Design and Development Launch Pilot targeting high school students in the Hudson Valley, including the New York Metropolitan Area. It will support a network of institutional partners that are committed to providing internship and mentoring opportunities to youths interested in authentic research projects. The proposed work will build on a current research immersion program--the Secondary School Field Research Program (SSFRP) at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. SSFRP serves high school students, mainly from underrepresented and underserved communities, who work with college students, science teachers, and researchers around a specific science problem. Over the past decade, the program has had demonstrable impact, including attendance to college, and students' selection of STEM majors. Tracking data indicates that retention rates of its alumni in four-year colleges are well above the norm, and a significant fraction of early participants are now in graduate programs in science or engineering. The program has surpassed all expectations in its effectiveness at engaging underserved populations in science and promoting entry into college, recruitment into STEM majors, and retention through undergraduate and into graduate studies. Hence, the project's overall goal will be to extend and adapt the research-immersive summer internship model through an alliance with peer research institutions, school districts and networks, public land and resource management agencies, private funding agencies, informal educational institutions, and experts in pedagogical modeling, metrics, and evaluation. Focused on earth and environmental sciences, the summer and year-round mentoring model will allow high school students to work in research teams led by college students and teachers under the direction of research scientists. The mentoring model will be multilayered, with peer, near-peer, and researcher-student relationships interweaving throughout the learning process.
The project has formulated a set of testable explanatory hypotheses: (1) Beyond specific subject knowledge, success rests on increased student engagement in a community of practice, with near-peer mentors, teachers, and scientists in the context of scientific research; (2) The intensity of engagement also shifts the students' vision of their future to include higher education, and specifically to imagine and move toward a STEM career; and (3) Early engagement, before students attend college, is critical because high school is where students form patterns of engagement and capacities related to science learning. Thus, the immediate goal of the two-year plan will be to create approximately 11 research internship programs focused on earth and environmental sciences, and to build the networks for growth through engagement with a wider community of educational partners. The main focus of this approach will be removing barriers between high school students and STEM organizations, and adapting the current mentoring model at Columbia University to the specific cultures of other research groups and internship programs throughout the lower Hudson Valley. The team has already assembled a diverse set of partners committed to broadening participation in STEM using a collective impact approach to early engagement in project-based learning. Research partners will provide the mentors, research projects, and laboratory facilities. The educational network partners will provide access for students, particularly those from under-resourced communities to participate, as well as participation opportunities for interested teachers. Informal learning organizations will provide access to field and research sites, along with research dissemination opportunities. In Year 1, the project will conduct a series of development workshops for partners already in place and foster the formation of new partnership clusters according to shared interest, complementary resources and geographic proximity. The workshops will provide a forum for partners to learn about each other's visions, values, challenges, and existing structures, while working through theoretical and practical issues related to STEM engagement for young investigators. In Year 2, the project will target the implementation of the internship programs at various sites according to the agreed-upon goals, program model, research projects, recruitment and retention strategy, staff training, data collection, and evaluation plans. An external evaluator will address both the formative and summative evaluation of the effort directed toward examining the three project's hypotheses concerning the educational impacts of scientific research on student engagement, extent of the immersion, and overall effectiveness of the programs.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Robert NewtonLuo Cassie XuMargie TurrinEinat LevMatthew Palmer
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Physics awards smaller percentages of PhDs to women (19%) and underrepresented ethnic and racial minorities (7%) than any other field in the sciences, and underrepresentation is especially pronounced at selective universities. As global competition for scientific talent heats up and US demographics shift, cultivating a robust domestic workforce is critical to US technological leadership. We seek to build on the successful American Physical Society Bridge Program (apsbridgeprogram.org) by transforming physics graduate education to fully support the inclusion of women and ethnic and racial minorities. Our vision is to create a national network of disciplinary colleagues, expert researchers, and representatives from professional associations who will develop and build evidence-based knowledge of effective practices for recruitment, admissions, and retention of women and underrepresented ethnic and racial minorities. This pilot project will include six large, highly selective physics graduate programs to demonstrate and map out a plan for a discipline-wide effort. The pilot focuses on improving admissions practices, because this strategy promises immediate and measurable impact backed by extant research. The pilot will also take exploratory steps to develop scalable recruitment and retention strategies. To refine interventions, we will conduct research to identify and understand demographically-based loss points of students in graduate physics programs and to understand how network participation facilitates change. The project will also establish connections with other STEM disciplines, beginning with mathematics and chemistry, to explore expanding these efforts.
This project is grounded in research on diversity in graduate education, organizational learning, and the resources of networks to catalyze cultural change. The project team includes expertise in institutional change, graduate admissions, student success, diverse and inclusive environments, and social science research. The pilot advances a novel research agenda on inclusion in STEM by addressing recruitment, admissions, and retention in physics graduate education as interconnected challenges of faculty learning, professional networks, and disciplinary cultural change. Physics graduate programs will report admissions data and common metrics, and will document changes resulting from project activities. Faculty will be trained on holistic admissions and diversity in selection processes, and be guided in the use of inclusive admissions practices. An external evaluator will examine project effectiveness and readiness for scaling to an Alliance phase project.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Monica PlischTheodore HodappJulie PosseltGeraldine CochranCasey Miller
Science and technology are embedded in virtually every aspect of modern life. As a result, people face an increasing need to integrate information from science with their personal values and other considerations as they make important life decisions about medical care, the safety of foods, what to do about climate change, and many other issues. Communicating science effectively, however, is a complex task and an acquired skill. Moreover, the approaches to communicating science that will be most effective for specific audiences and circumstances are not obvious. Fortunately, there is an
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TEAM MEMBERS:
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
While interest in citizen science as an avenue for increasing scientific engagement and literacy has been increasing, understanding how to effectively engage underrepresented minorities (URMs) in these projects remains a challenge. Based on the research literature on strategies for engaging URMs in STEM activities and the project team’s extensive experience working with URMs, the project team developed a citizen science model tailored to URMs that included the following elements: 1) science that is relevant to participants’ daily lives, 2) removal of barriers to participation, such as