ITEST Projects

Education Connection's Center for 21st Century Skills, in collaboration with a consortium of education and industry partners, will develop an online open source platform with an integrated incubator curriculum that engages high school students, teachers, and mentors in synergistic collaborations to advance students' competencies and skills via the design and launching of STEM-related products and services.

This project will use real-world exemplars as the foundation for integrating entomology and engineering design to investigate the development of 21st skills (creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and computational thinking) in STEM for teachers and students in rural Indiana.

This project will employ mobile technology to help up to 530 teachers and more than 9,000 students use proven retrieval experiences to improve STEM learning.

This project will design and test a model for student engagement using paleontology as the disciplinary focus. Paleontology, or the scientific study of fossils, is a broad, interdisciplinary field that spans biology and geology. Current paleontological research harnesses the resources provided by

Middle and high schools students from groups underrepresented in science, including visually impaired students, will digitally design and fabricate 3D-printed tactile storybooks for young children with visual impairments.

This project will develop opportunities for students to learn creatively in science through inquiry. The project will prepare 72 middle school teachers to work with approximately 1800 students from economically disadvantaged schools who have had few opportunities to participate in technology-rich, inquiry-based learning environments.

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 investigating ways to make science assessment and science instruction more culturally relevant to Native Hawaiians.

The Detroit Public Schools will collaborate with the Belle Island Aquarium to develop a field-trip program that will enrich learning in biology, with cross-curricular impacts on chemistry, physics, business, literacy and the arts.

This project will engage students, educators, elders, informal educators, natural resource professionals, and parents in community dialogues and relationship building, informal-formal professional development collaborations, and indigenized STEM learning experiences and mentoring for students in grades 8-12.

This project will produce 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.