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' motivation and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM). It is essential that STEM professionals effectively and efficiently communicate and justify processes, and find and fix mistakes.

Researchers at Boston College will engage high school aged youth in a three-year pathway framework that will engage the youth in conducting authentic scientific research. The project will involve emerging agricultural technologies like transparent soil (a recent discovery which is a hydrogel that behaves like soil), a near-peer and college-focused mentoring model, and interaction with scientists. The youth will learn to build and code Raspberry Pis (small and affordable computers that students can use to learn programming) to share their data with agronomists and plant scientists.

This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase student motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM). Voices to Hear (V2H) will use the oral tradition of storytelling to empower Native American students (middle school, high school and college) to engage in environmental decision-making and scientific communication, while building a stronger sense of their ethnic identity.

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 preparing and interesting high achieving middle school students for advanced math courses in high school and eventually in engineering careers.

This is a collaborative project submitted to the Successful Project Expansion and Dissemination (SPrEaD) strand of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program (Program Solicitation NSF 17-565) to advance efforts to better understand and promote practices that increase student motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM).

This project is supported by the STEM+Computing (STEM+C) program, which advances applied research integrating computational thinking and computing activities within disciplinary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics teaching and learning in early childhood education through high school (PreK-12). Because of its fundamental focus on collaborative, iterative, process-based learning--key 21st century skills--maker education's learning outcomes cannot be adequately tracked by tests, the traditional means of assessment in classrooms.

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 developing, broadly implementing, and systematically investigating two 10-day computer programming instructional sequences.

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 producing empirical findings and/or research tools that contribute to knowledge about which models and interventions with K-12 students and teachers are most likely to increase capacity in the STEM and STEM-cognate intensive workforce of the future.

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 producing empirical findings and/or research tools that contribute to knowledge about which models and interventions with K-12 students and teachers are most likely to increase capacity in the STEM and STEM-cognate intensive workforce of the future.