This NSF INCLUDES pilot addresses the challenge of broadening participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) among minoritized youth in grades 5-8 and their access to computer science (CS), which is recognized as integral to all STEM disciplines. This project will specifically focus on developing and understanding computing experiences intentionally designed to strengthen mathematical skills utilizing culturally responsive pedagogy. Culturally responsive pedagogy integrates knowledge relevant to students' identities and communities with computational learning activities, and maximizes the potential for increasing engagement, competence, and belonging of underrepresented youth in computing. This pilot will be situated in community-based organizations, including Boys and Girls Clubs and Public Libraries, with the support of industry partners and the local Department of Education. Given the role of community-based organizations and libraries across the nation for community engagement and educational enrichment, this work represents an exciting opportunity for spreading into thousands of libraries and community centers across the nation, thereby having collective impact that materializes CS for All.
This project will engage minoritized youth in grades 5-8. The overarching vision is to establish a scalable model for providing these students with recurrent opportunities to create computational artifacts that are culturally-responsive to their community contexts. In addition, there will be an explicit and simultaneous focus on strengthening students' mathematical skills. The project has four goals: (1) facilitate culturally-responsive learning of key CS concepts and practices; (2) build youth and community knowledge around positive impacts of computing on local communities; (3) increase participants' knowledge, confidence and interest in becoming creators of computing innovations; and (4) strengthen mathematical skills through intentional computing experiences. The project will adapt and implement CS modules from the NSF-funded Exploring Computer Science curriculum, and will intentionally reinforce mathematics skills and community engagement. It will design and implement a culturally-responsive training model for establishing community instructors who can support CS project learning. Finally, it will create instruments for monitoring project goals and participant outcomes. Due to the collaboration with community-based organizations present in cities across the nation, the model has strong potential to scale up regionally and nationally.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Lori PollockChrystalla MouzaJohn PeleskoRosalie Rolon-Dow
The Bay Area Regional Collaboration to Expand and Strengthen STEM (RECESS) is a regional, unified STEM continuum effort from preschool through graduate school and career. RECESS is based on successful collective impact efforts in other fields and employs a participatory action research (PAR) approach to broaden participation in STEM. In the PAR framework, youth and their families will help to define the issues and develop expertise about community needs through a shared research process.
RECESS introduces participatory action research as an innovative element to the collective impact social agency framework. The intent is to determine the extent to which the engagement and involvement of the students and communities targeted can effectively shape the function of the collective impact network of organizations.
During the two year planning phase, RECESS (a) conducts a comprehensive needs assessment and gap analysis; (b) establishes a functioning organization of stakeholders with a common agenda and governance model; and (c) develops a detailed action plan. It is a significant contribution to the body of knowledge on effective and innovative collective impact structures designed to promote STEM education and participation.
The Yellowstone Altai-Sayan Project (YASP) brings together student and professional researchers with Indigenous communities in domestic (intermountain western U.S.) and international (northwest Mongolian) settings. Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, MSU and tribal college student participants performed research projects in their home communities (including Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Fort Peck Assiniboine & Sioux, and Fort Berthold Mandan, Hidatsa and Sahnish) during spring semester 2016. In the spirit of reciprocity, these projects were then offered in comparative research contexts during summer 2016, working with Indigenous researchers and herder (semi-nomadic) communities in the Darhad Valley of northwestern Mongolia, where our partner organization, BioRegions International, has worked since 1998. In both places, Indigenous Research Methodologies and a complementary approach called Holistic Management guided how and what research was performed, and were in turn enriched by Mongolian research methodologies. Ongoing conversations with community members inspire the research questions, methods of data collection, as well as how and what is disseminated, and to whom. The Project represents an ongoing relationship with and between Indigenous communities in two comparable bioregions*: the Big Sky of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and the Eternal Blue Sky of Northern Mongolia.
*A ‘bioregion’ encompasses landscapes, natural processes and human elements as equal parts of the whole (see http://bioregions.org/).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kristin RuppelClifford MontagneLisa Lone Fight
Finding inclusive approaches to broaden the participation of underrepresented communities in the sciences is the focus of this project. The team will create pathways for Native American students from the development of new partnerships between tribal communities and STEM institutions that promote the participation and inclusion of Native American scientists in the geosciences. Each partner brings a successful program, based on good practices from the research literature in improving outcomes for underrepresented students and scientists. Together, the researchers will create scientific collaborations that support a pipeline for Native American students from middle school through to graduate school and beyond. In addition, the project will work on building welcoming workplace climates for indigenous researchers within ?traditional Western? organizations. The approach will integrate indigenous and Western knowledge in research collaborations to create more creative, innovative, and culturally relevant science research programs.
This project, Integrating Indigenous and Western Knowledge to Transform Learning and Discovery in the Geosciences, uses the principles of collective impact to create new partnerships between tribal communities and STEM institutions that promote the participation and inclusion of Native American scientists in the geosciences. The project collaborators will more strongly integrate indigenous and Western knowledge into collectively-developed research projects. The project partners the Rising Voices: Collaborative Science for Climate Solutions (Rising Voices) and member tribal colleges and communities with Haskell Indian Nations University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the University of Arizona?s Biosphere 2, and National Center for Atmospheric Research?s Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) internship and Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) citizen science programs. Together, they will build research partnerships between Native American and traditional Western scientists, provide professional development for NCAR and Biosphere 2 scientists on how to engage appropriately with tribal communities, and provide pathways for NA students from middle school through college, to grad school and beyond. The project will connect community-based citizen science programs for middle- and high school youth with undergraduate programs at Haskell Indian Nations University and University of Arizona, and with summer research internship experiences for undergraduates and graduate students that address topics of interest across tribal communities, tribal college faculty, traditional science institutions, and community-based citizen science. This project also enhances the research capacity of all partners, and brings together diverse perspectives, which have been shown to lead to greater innovation, creativity, and higher impact research. The project has the potential to provide a tried and tested model for building similar partnerships at other institutions, including content and methods for professional development for mainstream scientists, ways to create more welcoming spaces for Native American students and scientists, promising practices for improving how research in the geosciences carried out, and an increase in the representation of Native American students and scientists in that vital research enterprise.
The Colleges of Science & Engineering and Graduate Education, and the Metro Academies College Success Program (Metro) at San Francisco State University in partnership with San Francisco Unified School District and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce develop an integrated approach for computing education that overcomes obstacles hampering broader participation in the U.S. science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce. The partnership fosters a more diverse and computing-proficient STEM workforce by establishing an inclusive education approach in computer science (CS), information technology, and computer engineering that keeps students at all levels engaged and successful in computing and graduates them STEM career-ready.
Utilizing the collective impact framework maximizes the efficacy of existing regional organizations to broaden participation of groups under-educated in computing. The collective impact model establishes a rich context for organizational engagement in inclusive teaching and learning of CS. The combination of the collective impact model of social agency and direct engagements with communities yields unique insights into the views and experiences of the target population of students and serves as a platform for national scalable networks.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Keith BowmanIlmi YoonLarry HorvathEric HsuJames Ryan
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 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
As part of an overall strategy to enhance learning within informal environments, the Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems (INFEWS) and Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) programs partnered to support innovative models poised to catalyze well-integrated interdisciplinary research and development efforts within informal contexts that transform scientific understanding of the food, energy, and water systems (FEWS) nexus in order to improve system function and management, address system stress, increase resilience, and ensure sustainability. This project addresses this aim by using systems thinking and interdisciplinary integration approaches to develop a novel immersive educational simulation game and associated materials designed to highlight the role and importance of corn-water-ethanol-beef (CWEB) systems in supporting the ever increasing demands for food, energy, and water in the United States. The focus on FEWS and sustainable energy aligns well with both the INFEWS program and the sizable sustainability-related projects in the AISL program portfolio. The development and broad dissemination of a multiuser game specific to CWEB systems are particularly innovative contributions and advance for both program portfolios and their requisite fields of study. An additional unique feature of the game is the embedding of varying degrees of economic principles and decision-making along with the nuisances of cultural context as salient variables that influence systems thinking. Of note, a team of computer science, management and engineering undergraduate students at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln will be responsible for the engineering, development, and deployment of the game as their university capstone projects. If successful, this game will have a significant reach and impact on youth in informal programs (i.e., 4-H clubs), high school teachers and students in agriculture vocational education courses, college students, and the public. The impact could extend well beyond Nebraska and the targeted Midwestern region. In conjunction with the game development, mixed-methods formative and summative evaluations will be conducted by an external evaluator. The formative evaluation of the game will focus on usability testing, interest and engagement with a select sample of youth at local 4-H clubs and youth day camps. Data will be collected from embedded in-game survey questionnaires, rating scales, observations and focus groups conducted with evaluation sample. These data and feedback will be used to inform the design and refinement of the game. The summative evaluation will focus on the overall impacts of the game. Changes in agricultural systems knowledge, attitudes toward agricultural systems, interest in pursuing careers in agricultural systems, and decision making will be aligned with the Nebraska State Science Standards and tracked using the National Agricultural Literacy Outcomes (NALOs) assessment, game analytics and pre/post-test measures administered to the evaluation study sample pre/post exposure to the game.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jeyamkondan SubbiahEric ThompsonDeepak KeshwaniRichard KoelschDavid Rosenbaum
Changes in household-level actions in the U.S. have the potential to reduce rates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and climate change by reducing consumption of food, energy and water (FEW). This project will identify potential interventions for reducing household FEW consumption, test options in participating households in two communities, and collect data to develop new environmental impact models. It will also identify household consumption behavior and cost-effective interventions to reduce FEW resource use. Research insights can be applied to increase the well-being of individuals at the household level, improve FEW resource security, reduce climate-related risks, and increase economic competitiveness of the U.S. The project will recruit, train, and graduate more than 20 students and early-career scientists from underrepresented groups. Students will be eligible to participate in exchanges to conduct interdisciplinary research with collaborators in the Netherlands, a highly industrialized nation that uses 20% less energy and water per person than the U.S.
This study uses an interdisciplinary approach to investigate methods for reducing household FEW consumption and associated direct and indirect environmental impacts, including GHG emissions and water resources depletion. The approach includes: 1) interactive role-playing activities and qualitative interviews with homeowners; 2) a survey of households to examine existing attitudes and behaviors related to FEW consumption, as well as possible approaches and barriers to reduce consumption; and 3) experimental research in residential households in two case-study communities, selected to be representative of U.S. suburban households and appropriate for comparative experiments. These studies will iteratively examine approaches for reducing household FEW consumption, test possible intervention strategies, and provide data for developing systems models to quantify impacts of household FEW resource flows and emissions. A FEW consumption-based life cycle assessment (LCA) model will be developed to provide accurate information for household decision making and design of intervention strategies. The LCA model will include the first known farm-to-fork representation of household food consumption impacts, spatially explicit inventories of food waste and water withdrawals, and a model of multi-level price responsiveness in the electricity sector. By translating FEW consumption impacts, results will identify "hot spots" and cost-effective household interventions for reducing ecological footprints. Applying a set of climate and technology scenarios in the LCA model will provide additional insights on potential benefits of technology adoption for informing policymaking. The environmental impact models, household consumption tracking tool, and role-playing software developed in this research will be general purpose and publicly available at the end of the project to inform future education, research and outreach activities.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
David WatkinsBuyung AgusdinataChelsea SchellyRachael ShwomJenni-Louise Evans