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Simulations for Learning Collaboration Skills and Developing Asset-based STEM Career Identities
The CASCADE collaborative research project is working with strategic partners and career partners to create interactive, narrative simulations for use in informal learning environments (ILEs) serving youth in grades 6-12, primarily African American and Latinx who would be first generation college students in their families. CASCADE modules promote learning of collaborative skills for addressing math tasks arising in STEM career fields, and developing STEM career identity. Each module focuses on STEM career fields that use math and includes a simulated environment and storyline to practice challenges in productive collaboration. CASCADE's three specific aims are to: 1) develop and refine modules that support math collaborative skills and STEM career identity, 2) develop program materials for the enactment of modules in ILEs, and 3) enact and study modules in ILEs to document evidence of impacts on youth’s math collaborative skills and STEM career identity.
Pillar 1: Innovative Use of Technologies in Learning and Teaching
Students work in virtual environments of STEM career fields with a narrative built around a math task arising in these careers. They collaborate with virtual partners in first-person perspective engaging with targeted challenges of collaboration. For each challenge, they choose among options reflecting varying levels of collaborative functioning, receiving feedback related to their choices that is both implicit (consequences in the story) and explicit (explanations about their choices and alternatives).
Pillar 2: Partnerships for Career and Workforce Preparation.
CASCADE involves simulations set in STEM careers for students to practice, with virtual partners, aspects of tasks, discourse, and social dynamics important to collaboration. To enhance student engagement and equity, the simulations provide feedback from STEM professionals about using math and collaboration in their careers, and guidance for navigating math-related careers. We partnered with 3 Black and 3 Latinx STEM professionals who shared feedback on collaboration when using math and guidance for career navigation.
Pillar 3: Strategies for Equity in STEM Education
CASCADE's career-relevant feedback and guidance is grounded in the premise that communities possess diverse cultural wealth that offer assets to their members’ adjustment and empower resistance to structural racism and oppression. As students progress through the CASCADE simulation modules, they hear personal narratives of Black and Latinx career mentors on themes of community cultural wealth to help them feel unity with others and reveal possibilities for STEM careers and strategies for career navigation.
Discipline(s)
Data Science
Interdisciplinary
Target Gradespan(s)
Middle school (6-8)
High school (9-12)
Target Participant(s)
Youth / students
Black/African American participants
Hispanic/Latino participants
Project Setting(s)
Informal Education
Category
Developing and Testing Innovations (DTI)
Research Study