ITEST Resources

The initiative called Integrating Science Into Afterschool: A Three-Dimensional Approach to Engaging Underserved Populations in Science set out to promote science learning in three out-ofschool settings (afterschool programs, home, and community), to promote rich and varied science experiences to underserved Philadelphia communities, and to assess the value of this model for the broader field of out-of-school time and informal learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The project was funded through the National Science Foundation’s Innovative Technology Experiences

In 2013 The Franklin Institute, a leading science museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, received a grant from the National Science Foundation (#1138911) to reach under-resourced urban communities by strengthening the capacity of afterschool centers to offer STEM programming. Integrating Science Into Afterschool: A Three-Dimensional Approach to Engaging Underserved Populations In Science, or “STEM 3D,” was a five-year project that aspired to integrate STEM learning across afterschool, home, and community as a strategy for building positive science identities and creating viable STEM pathways

Mobile geospatial technologies enable high school students to engage in authentic scientific data collection and analysis that promote spatial-thinking and reasoning skills, as well as problem-solving in a school’s local environment. We developed and implemented an Ecological Services investigation aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards in an urban high school with a large population of economically disadvantaged students. The investigation includes local field data collection with mobile devices and classroom data analysis using a freely available Web Geographic Information System

The public has an incomplete understanding of engineers and engineering as a profession. In discussions about the public’s understanding of engineers, many have referenced the “conventional” stereotype of engineers as train operators. Though this stereotype may exist among students as well as the public, few investigations to date have focused on students’ ideas about engineers and engineering. The recent introduction ofengineering into the K-12 curriculum in Massachusetts has increased interest among educators in assessing students’ knowledge of engineering as a result of intervention and

Digital East St. Louis, a project supported by a National Science Foundation ITEST grant, is a collaboration between Southern Illinois University’s STEM Center and the IRIS Center for the Digital Humanities to design programming that encourages newfound interest in technology via a place-based approach to the digital humanities. I serve as the project’s curriculum director, alongside STEM’s Instructional Designer Matthew Johnson and English Professor Howard Rambsy. The informal educational program provides participants in grades six - nine in real life (IRL) experiences as they tell the

New York Harbor is a large, iconic and complex body of water that has been extensively modified to support the development of a megacity. These modifications have affected the shorelines, water flow, water quality, habitats and living resources of the harbor. Changes in topography and bathymetry have altered the landscapes and seascapes of the region, largely to support an active shipping port and intense human settlement. New York Harbor has been transformed from a region dominated by marshy shorelines, extensive submersed oyster beds and obstructed entrances to the present-day harbor with

The CCERS partnership includes collaborators from universities, foundations, education departments, community organizations, and cultural institutions to build a new curriculum. As reported in a study conducted by the Rand Corporation (2011), partnerships among districts, community-based organizations, government agencies, local funders, and others can strengthen learning programs. The curriculum merged project-based learning and Bybee’s 5E model (Note 1) to teach core STEM-C concepts to urban middle school students through restoration science. CCERS has five interrelated and complementary

Preparing students to become active, participatory citizens is more than promoting personal responsibility. It requires actively engaging with others in order to improve one’s community. Using a critical geography approach, this article describes research with students living in urban areas that engaged them in fieldwork and citizen mapping of the neighborhood around their high school. We were interested in how they interacted with this environment and their perceptions of social justice issues in the community. Student groups worked together to identify and investigate topics of their