Employing Peer Mentoring to Empower Youth to Become 21st Century Energy Leaders

Poster

This poster describes a project to foster energy/climate-related STEM career knowledge and interest in diverse high school students in Minnesota through an engaging year-long experiential learning project that tests the effectiveness of near-peer mentors as STEM/energy education and career role models that enhance the STEM-relevant cognitive and social-emotional impacts of simulation- and project-based learning.

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WeatherX: Understanding Weather Extremes with Big Data

Poster

WeatherX has provided data-rich science learning experiences for 12 teachers and over 470 middle school students in low-income rural districts in northern New Hampshire and Maine. In collaboration with students and teachers, we are learning how to make data science promote students’ understanding of and interests in important data practices.  This project is built on a strong foundation of partnerships including EDC, Mount Washington Observatory, Concord Consortium, University of Maine, and University of Washington.

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Integrating AI Learning into Middle School Science through Natural Language Processing

2022 - 2025

This project responds to the growing recognition that learners of all ages should have the opportunity to engage with and learn about artificial intelligence (AI). Of AI's many subfields, natural language processing (NLP) is one of the fastest growing. NLP focuses on how to automatically understand spoken or textual data, and billions of these textual or spoken exchanges are recorded online every day.

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STEM Tales: Investigating the effect of media read-alouds on young children's STEM and literacy learning and interest in STEM careers

2022 - 2024

Exciting young children's interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is an essential way to attract more students to STEM course work and STEM careers. This project will use a variety of tools to engage four- to eight-year-old children and their families. First, the project will create a five-episode STEM media series for the Public Broadcasting System. The series will include diverse STEM professionals, including astronauts and engineers, reading STEM picture books from space, Earth, and sea.

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A Model Program to Engage Students in Authentic, Technology-Infused Coastal Research and Monitoring: Building Student Data Literacy and Career Competency through Partnership

2022 - 2026

The project will introduce and investigate an innovative model for using authentic community-relevant research to deepen students' STEM knowledge and skills, while building strong community connections between Maine's coastal school districts and their communities. The project will involve teachers and administrators, STEM and STEM education faculty, and business leaders and other community members in a research practice partnership.

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A Workshop to Synthesize Findings from Education Research Conducted During the Pandemic: Emerging Lessons From COVID-19

2021 - 2022

This project will host a workshop in order to identify and synthesize research findings from NSF awards that addressed the unanticipated effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on STEM teaching and learning. The interruptions from the pandemic had dramatic, widespread effects in education. Across the nation, teachers, students, parents, staff, and school administrators experienced extended school closures and a rapid and unexpected shift to virtual instruction.

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Innovative Science, Technology Engineering, and Mathematics Work Force Development Project

2020 - 2023

The Morehouse College's Innovative Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Work Force Development Project will engage minority male students in an active, inclusive learning community to enhance their interest in science and mathematics education and careers. The objective of the project is to shift from passive learning to active learning within the context of real-life problem-solving scenarios in order to promote academic success in middle school and high school and prepare students academically to attend a college or university.

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Developing underserved elementary students’ systems thinking and economic literacy through investigations of local ecological-economic systems

2021 - 2022

This project will advance efforts to better understand and promote practices that broaden access to and interest in regionally relevant science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) occupations for underrepresented youth in the state of Maine. This project will engage students in investigations of local marine ecosystems through the construction and revision of computational models of those systems.

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