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STUDY CONTEXT: The overarching goal of this project is to address the disconnect between science, design, and technology (Perignat & Katz-Buonincontro, 2019). We examine how urban and rural high school students benefit from innovative learning experiences in plant science that integrate these disciplines while gaining interest in and skills for future STEM careers. This project tests a STEAM (Art in STEM) teaching model in which students create scientific products to incorporate in Augmented and Virtual Reality (AVR) platforms. This experience inspires creative learning, provides critical thinking and problem-solving benefits, supports concepts of innovation, and allows students to connect to real-life situations impacting their career paths. RESEARCH DESIGN: Objectives: 1. Inspire interest in STEM careers among students and provide them with skills for a future STEM career, 2. Foster knowledge and appreciation of plant science among students, 3. Integrate art/design into STEM plant science education, and 4. Apply AVR technology to advance in plant science education through the use of novel tools and methodologies. Teams of self-identified science, technophile, and art students receive training in 3D modeling. With support from scientists, they create models of plants under research at our institution, write worksheets, and give presentations in public/scientific events. Teams’ products will be shared globally through the education community of our AVR partner institution. To assess the project objectives, we are using a mixed-methods approach using pre/post open-ended self-reflections and surveys (STEM Semantics Survey with additional questions for A (Art/Design); Plant Awareness Disparity Index (PAD-I)). ANALYSES AND INTERPRETATION: Data collection is in its initial stages. We will present preliminary results from surveys and reflections from 28 students. The students worked in seven teams that created models of corn, alfalfa, volvox, and milkweed. CONTRIBUTION: This project contributes to STEAM, an emerging discipline with scant information on theory, best practices, and practical applications, by testing a teaching model in which students design and create scientific products. The project contributes to the body of knowledge on AVR teaching tools from a different approach by allowing the students to create their own AVR products. The project also contributes to interesting and challenging ways to learn about plant science and promote plant awareness.
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Metal Matters—Towards the Omnipresence of Metal in Education
ABSTRACT For many years, comprehensive data demonstrate a persistent lack of interest in the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) among students in European and North American countries. This lack of interest is regarded as one reason causing underrepresentation of diversity, especially that of female students within the field of STEM. Obviously, students—although possibly highly talented—refrain from choosing STEM careers only because their attention is not sufficiently attracted to STEM at the right time at the right place. In particular, this fact significantly affects the field of material research and, therefore, identifying opportunities for sparking students’ interest in materials is a crucial challenge in the framework of a modern STEM education. Here, we present the outline of the novel project “Metal Matters”, which aims at establishing an interdisciplinary approach to foster the field of materials in education. In essence, our research focusses on the omnipresence of metal as material. By exploring the K-16 continuum, we aim to identify windows of opportunities for raising awareness of the relevance of materials. Our approach is to stimulate interest in the relevance of materials by explicitly promoting metal as a topic across the curriculum. Our project is deliberately not restricted to STEM, but also covers history, society, economy, health, sports, literature, and language. Here, we present one part of the project contrasting the scientific relevance of metal with the students’ ideas about metal. For the present exploration and data collection, we employed a mixed-method design consisting of linguistic frequency analysis of scientific publications as well as the qualitative analysis of students’ written responses and drawings.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1748262
- PAR ID:
- 10054209
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- MRS Advances
- ISSN:
- 2059-8521
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 5
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Educational research supports incorporating active engagement into K-12 education using authentic STEM experiences. While there are discipline-specific resources to provide students with such experiences, there are limited transdisciplinary opportunities that integrate engineering education and technological skill-building to contextualize core scientific concepts. Here, we present an adaptable module that integrates hands-on technology education and place-based learning to improve student understanding of key chemistry concepts as they relate to local environmental science. The module also supports disciplinary core ideas, practices, and cross-cutting concepts in accordance with the Next Generation Science Standards. We field-tested our module in three different high school courses: Chemistry, Oceanography and Advanced Placement Environmental Science at schools in Washington, USA. Students built spectrophotometric pH sensors using readily available electronic components and calibrated them with known pH reference standards. Students then used their sensors to measure the pH of local environmental water samples. Assessments showed significant improvement in content knowledge in all three courses relating to environmental relevance of pH, and to the design, use and environmental application of sensors. Students also reported increased self-confidence in the material, even when their content knowledge remained the same. These findings suggest that classroom sensor building and collection of environmental data increases student understanding and self-confidence by connecting chemistry concepts to local environmental settings.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Interactive science centers are in a unique position to provide opportunities for engineering education through K-12 field trip programs. However, field trip programs are often disconnected from students’ classroom learning, and many K-12 teachers lack the engineering education background to make that connection. Engineering Explorations is a 3-year project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) program Research in the Formation of Engineers (RFE) (EEC-1824856 and EEC-1824859). The primary goal of this project is to develop and test engineering education modules that link K-12 students’ classroom learning to field trip experiences in an interactive science museum, increasing student learning and extending the field trip experiences. Each Engineering Explorations module consists of one 50-minute field trip program completed at an interactive science center and curriculum for three 50-minute lessons to be implemented by the classroom teacher before (2 lessons) and after (1 lesson) the field trip program. Our paper will present both development and research outcomes.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1557/adv.2018.37
