| NSF Org: |
SES Division of Social and Economic Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 12, 2016 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 12, 2016 |
| Award Number: | 1649298 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Kurt Thoroughman
SES Division of Social and Economic Sciences SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | October 1, 2016 |
| End Date: | September 30, 2019 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $299,972.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $299,972.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
809 S MARSHFIELD AVE M/C 551 CHICAGO IL US 60612-4305 (312)996-2862 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
1040 West Harrison Street Chicago IL US 60607-4212 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
General Summary
Because of the siloed nature of formal educational curricula, students who opt out of STEM coursework, for whatever reason, lose the opportunity to engage with the domain of science almost entirely, thereby closing the door to the STEM workforce pipeline. This disproportionately impacts students of color and women. This project advances an alliance that consists of a consortium of community-engaged partners, including university and k-12 educational agencies, community colleges, community organizations, cultural institutions and local businesses. The project built around this alliance will leverage interdisciplinary spaces in the curriculum, particularly the humanities and social sciences, across academic levels, as a forum for integrating and applying STEM to bear on the practical, social, economic and political issues of modern life. The PIs establish a physical Community STEM Center as an anchoring institution for STEM engagement. This Center will be situated within the community that the alliance serves, bringing STEM opportunities and engagement to students instead of asking them to come where STEM education is currently provided. The activities enacted through the Community STEM Center will focus on enduring problems experienced by the communities, where students, community residents, teachers, and experts from higher education, industry and other community-based entities can come together to work on understanding them and developing evidenced centered advocacy as a means for addressing them. To facilitate the work at the Community STEM Center, the project creates a Community Ambassadors Program (CAP), leveraging participation across alliance members in partnership with the community. This Design and Development Launch Pilot will cultivate the necessary knowledgebase to develop a scalable model for implementation across diverse urban communities.
Technical Summary
This Design and Development Launch Pilot focuses on shifting the narrative of STEM education away from a solitary focus on formalized educational experiences and targets STEM content. This project develops and facilitates a parallel set of activities designed to engage under-represented students in learning how and why STEM is relevant to their lives, and approached through new and non-traditional educational dimensions. The five main objectives of this proposed pilot are to: (1) Develop a pilot alliance of community-engaged partners, including university and k-12 educational agencies, community colleges, community organizations, cultural institutions and industry;(2)Establish a physical Community STEM Advocacy Center as an anchoring institution for change embedded within the community that the pilot alliance serves; (3) Leverage interdisciplinary spaces in curricula, across academic levels, particularly the humanities and social sciences, as a forum for integrating and applying STEM to bear on the practical, social, economic and political issues of modern life; (4) Create a Community Ambassadors Program (CAP), leveraging participation across higher education pilot alliance members in partnership with the community; and (5)Conduct an evaluation of project initiatives and research regarding the usability and feasibility of a systemic approach to developing community-based, interdisciplinary pathways to broaden STEM participation pathways. Efforts to examine the impact of this community-based, interdisciplinary approach concentrates on the proximal outcomes related to STEM interest, self-efficacy and identity. Data will be collected in pre/post format across our three constituent samples: 1) Community STEM Advocacy Center participants; 2) k-12 students; and, 3) postsecondary students. Analysis of data will be conducted through MANCOVAs to account for potential co-variation among construct scores. Qualitative data will also be collected to contextualize findings and enable the development of a rich case study. At least two observations will be conducted in the Community STEM Advocacy Center and the two classroom implementations to document engagement, participant interactions and level of STEM content.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This project proceeded through five specific objectives designed to investigate new methods to engaged different communities in STEM learning. This included Objective 1, centered on the development of an Alliance based at a university but engaging with specific community organizations and their educational and advocacy needs. This resulted in building and sustaining several relationships between the university and its community partners and also within the university between STEM and non-STEM departments.
Our work for Objective 2 supported work within the new Alliance around two major areas. Ongoing work with the education network in the community supported their development (along with other major partners) of a Quality of Life plan, including follow on work to sustain that work in the development of an educational ecosystem model for the community. Advocacy within the community was also carried out through participation with a community-based organization as it worked to education the community on issues associated with lead in the water and the risk of pollution in the neighborhod, resulting in ongoing, sustained participation to support their work with STEM expertise.
Objective 3 invovled developing interdisciplinary curricula for middle school and for humanities and social science classrooms at the university, incorporating STEM within those areas. This specifically engaged students in understanding the science associated with the sociology and the built history of an urban area through testing for air pollution data.
The work of the project was enabaled and evaluated through two additional objectives. Objective 4 centered on recruiting and training Community Ambassadors, who were central to the work we did, especially in community STEM advocacy. Finally, we engaged in a research and evaluation program (Objective 5) that provided insight into the issues of importance in the community and the impact of our work, especially in the area of curricula, for the partcipants. This research work both supported some of the Alliances? STEM advocacy, for example by providing empirical information on areas of concern for the community, and also allowed us to understand the impact of STEM activities on student participants.
Together, the work towards this objectives supported both the intellectual merit and broader impacts of the project. In the area of intellectual merit, specific outcomes included the development of specific methods for building an Alliance partnership over time, including documenting the consultative and participatory work that is needed. In addition, the project goals of understanding how disengaged members of the community can be brought to understand the role of STEM knowledge was supported by research and evaluation work on classroom impacts of new curricula. The broader impacts goals of the project were also to support new ways for community groups to be able to incorporate STEM data and expertise in their work, both in the forms of specific collaborative data work (e.g., on testing for lead in the water or for nitrogen oxides in the air) and in terms of understanding better how to characterize STEM learning opportunities in their K-12 school ecosystem.
Last Modified: 05/07/2020
Modified by: Donald J Wink
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