Event

Over the past year, STELAR staff have been meeting with ITEST community members to learn more about the work projects are engaged in, and uncover challenges that projects have faced. In our review of these discussions, we identified three topic areas where examples of best-practices would benefit the community; Engaging schools as research partners (held May 16), Sustaining your ITEST Project (held July 18), and Developing STEM career competencies from K-12.  

Join STELAR on November 5, 2-3 pm ET for 
Developing STEM career competencies from K-12

All ITEST projects engage students in technology-rich experiences that: (1) increase awareness and interest of STEM and ICT occupations; (2) motivate students to pursue appropriate education pathways to those occupations; and (3) develop STEM-specific disciplinary content knowledge and practices that promote critical thinking, reasoning, and communication skills needed for entering the STEM and ICT workforce of the future (NSF 19-583). 

Our next meetup will focus on this third area, specifically how ITEST projects support the development of the skills and dispositions that will prepare youth for this future workforce. STELAR explored these concepts previously in our white paper: Building the Foundational Skills Needed for Success in Work at the Human-Technology Frontier (Malyn-Smith 2017). STELAR would now like to hear from ITEST projects to learn:

• What do K-12 STEM career competencies look like in the context of your ITEST project?
• What experiences have been most beneficial for project participants?
• What skills are being built through participation in your project?
• What methods are being employed to document and measure skill development?

Our goal for this call is to capture perspectives from several ITEST projects, with the intention of co-developing an Idea Brief for dissemination to the broader ITEST community. 

Unable to join us on November 5? Share your contribution with us offline and we will present it for you during the session, and include you in our followup activities. Email us at stelar@edc.org to coordinate. 

Please note: This meetup is appropriate for ITEST Projects with information to contribute for the benefit of the broader ITEST community. Projects seeking assistance on this topic should set up a separate time to meet with STELAR technical assistance staff. 

Register now for this ITEST-Project only event! Projects must log in order to register, for password assistance please visit: http://stelar.edc.org/user/password

Malyn-Smith, J., Blustein, D., Pillai, S., Parker, C. E., Gutowski, E., & Diamonti, A. J. (2017). Building the foundational skills needed for success in work at the human-technology frontier. Waltham, MA: EDC. (Link)