Interdisciplinary | STELAR - STEM Learning and Research Center

It Takes a Network: How to Scale Up an Afterschool STEM Program

Publications

Quickly disseminating an innovative, timely afterschool program raises challenges, from recruitment and professional development to assessment, program fidelity, and quality. In this paper, we describe our experience as project developers, trainers, and researchers working with an afterschool network, Imagine Science, to disseminate a middle school club program about epidemic diseases and data. What we learned from working with this network may be useful to others who have created an afterschool science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) program they hope to spread widely

Take Flight

Poster

Take Flight is a free adaptable school curriculum program developed by Learning Scientists at CAST, the organization that founded Universal Design for Learning (UDL), funded by the National Science Foundation.

Through Take Flight, teachers middle school teacher have access to the curriculum, tools and resources they need to integrate drones into their STEM curriculum to help their students develop STEM skills and increase their motivation to pursue STEM careers.

Scaling professional development: Integrity of implementation as a measurement approach.

Publications

Professional learning about an innovative teaching method is a demonstrated way to improve teacher practices, and ultimately impact student learning. One way to scale up professional learning is a facilitator development model, in which professional learning and development (PLD) designers prepare facilitators to understand the innovation and they in turn, teach teachers. To understand the effectiveness of this model, identifying how facilitators implement the model with teachers is critical. As such, the Power of Data (POD) team scaled-up effective PLD by providing Facilitation Academies to

Teacher enactment of the Geospatial Inquiry cycle in classrooms Teacher enactment of the Geospatial Inquiry cycle in classrooms following scaled up professional learning and development following scaled up professional learning and development

Publications

The current study examined the effects of a nationally scaled up Professional Learning and Development (PLD) model on teachers’ classroom implementation of the Geospatial Inquiry instructional framework. Geospatial Inquiry is defined as: asking and answering a research question through the analysis and communication of data that is linked to a geographic location on, above, or near Earth. These data are often represented visually via maps and explored with geospatial technologies. It also examined the relationships between Geospatial Inquiry Teacher Workshop (GITW) implementation and teacher

The impact of Geospatial Inquiry lessons on student interest in science and technology careers

Publications

Advances in online geospatial technologies (GST) have expanded access to K-12 classrooms which has implications for the support teachers require to effectively integrate GSTs to promote learning. Previous studies have shown the impact of GST-integrated lessons on student engagement, spatial thinking skills, and/or content knowledge; however, most of these studies have been small in scope and scale and frequently focus on the affordances of the technology, without addressing the context of the implementation and student characteristics for whom GST is most impactful. We attempt to address some

Collaborative Research: Expanding Socio-Environmental Science Investigations with Geospatial Technologies in High Schools

Poster

This project expands from a single site into a multi-university, multi-school teacher professional development and curriculum development initiative for geospatial integration into science, social studies, and STEM courses. Student outcomes addressed include spatial thinking and reasoning and STEM college and career interests.

Robot-Mediated Learning: Exploring School-Deployed Collaborative Robots

Poster

Project Overview: Advance robot-mediated learning in schools and investigate how collaborative tele-robots can facilitate optimal learning experiences.

SYNTHESIS: A quantitative meta-analysis and qualitative synthesis on the impacts of informal STEM and ICT programs on cognitive and social-emotional outcomes of youth participants

Poster

This project is a synthesis study to investigate the effectiveness of informal STEM and ICT programs to maximize impact and broaden participation of youth participants in STEM pathways. We focus on two research questions: (1) How and to what extent do informal, out-of-school time (OST) STEM and ICT learning experiences impact K-12 participants’ awareness, interest, and engagement in STEM majors and STEM careers?

Engaging Young Black and Latino Students in Data Science Through Water Security

Poster

Communities of color across the nation face increasing challenges with affordable access to safe drinking water. Using data science to explore why, where and how this is happening, and what is being done about it, provides a powerful vehicle for the engagement of students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and to help develop a digital work force with appropriate representation from the affected communities.

CS Frontiers: Beyond CS Principles: Engaging Female High School Students in New Frontiers of Computing

Poster

Building on the foundations set by the AP Computer Science (CS) Principles course, this project seeks to dramatically expand access, especially for high school girls, to the most exciting and emerging frontiers of computing, such as distributed computation, the internet of things (IoT), cybersecurity, and machine learning, as well as other 21st century skills required to productively leverage computational methods and tools in virtually every profession.

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