ITEST Resources

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

Our project introduced students in grades 7 through 12 to spatial thinking and geospatial technologies in the context of challenges in their community. We used a mix of levels of inquiry to advance learning from teacher- to student-guided through a citizen mapping group activity. Student-suggested problem-based topics included parks and community gardens, crime, housing, and youth employment opportunities. Qualitative methods were used to evaluate students’ knowledge of spatial thinking and geospatial technologies, including map interpretation, a case study, daily exit slips, and interviews

As part of the design and development of an informal learning environment meant to increase urban middle school students’ interest in technology-focused STEM careers, and to support their twenty-first century skill development, researchers developed and administered the ICT/Twenty-First Century Skills Questionnaire. Both STEM-ICT professionals and middle school students completed the survey. STEM-ICT professionals indicated that problem solving, critical thinking and communication were the most valued and the most frequently used skills in their environments. Students underestimated the amount

Assessing computational thinking in making has proven a challenge, in part because student creations are innately diverse and unique. In this paper we consider portfolios as a way to document and assess students’ learning processes in the context of designing electronic textile (e-textile) projects. We describe students’ use of portfolios at the end of an introductory computing course, Exploring Computer Science, during which 33 students created a series of electronic textile (e-textile) projects as part of a new curricular unit. Our analysis not only illuminates the capability of portfolios