skip to main content

Explore Research Products in the NSF-PAR

Title: Using co-operative gameplay in outreach to change students’ perceptions of geosciences
Recent studies have found that for students entering college, altruism is a desired aspect of a future career. Problematically, few students perceived geoscience careers as altruistic or even expressed an understanding of the potential career paths in geoscience. This dissonance in incoming student perceptions of geoscience may be linked to declining major enrollment. Classically, geoscientists have often cited job benefits such as high income, working outdoors, and travel as reasons to pursue a career in geoscience, but these may not be as appealing to the next generation of scientists. This research seeks to test if alternative forms of outreach and recruitment that highlight geoscientists’ roles in renewable energy, remediation and environmental fields, and studying climate change alter students’ perceptions of geoscientists. To accomplish this, a co-operative game was developed, originally based on SERC activity 49774, a carbon cycle dice game by Callan Bentley. The activity was first modified by Ryan Hollister for the 2018 Earth Educators’ Rendezvous, where card sheets for reservoirs were introduced and edited to have students more explicitly calculate relative reservoir sizes, fluxes between reservoirs, and the duration carbon may spend in each reservoir. The game was further altered at North Dakota State University to make carbon reservoir cards more specific to the North Dakota-Minnesota region. The most recent iteration adds co-operative gameplay where students actively intervene in the carbon cycle through roles, including geoscientist, that can actively impact the climate. Our goal is to demonstrate the influence geoscience careers can have on modern challenges, such as climate change, in an engaging format. This most recent version of the game will be used as an alternative outreach tool. This research is currently underway, and data will be collected at middle school, high school, early college, and community events through 2022.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1654088
NSF-PAR ID:
10347317
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Earth Educators Rendezvous
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ( , 2021 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition)
    null (Ed.)
    High school counselors play a pivotal role in students’ educational pathways to STEM careers. Guidance provided by these school officials can have a measurable influence on student education and career choices. . School counselors play a critical role in student selection of elective courses, achievement, and fostering an environment through outreach activities. Each of these factors can influence students’ career interests, college choice, and major selection. This is one reason for why it is important to begin planning and having conversations around pursuing an engineering degree in high school to combat the lack of diversity in engineering rooted within the primary and secondary education systems. Recognizing school counselors as an untapped resource and equipping them with the knowledge and resources they need to inform students about engineering will allow them to increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in engineering, especially for historically underrepresented minorities. Such capacity building of school counselors will inherently improve the diversity of our nation's engineering workforce. This research study details the development and evaluation of a professional development (PD) program for high school guidance counselors. The PD was situated within the context of a national high school engineering initiative aimed at demystifying the engineering experience through inclusive, secondary-level engineering curricula. The counselor PD was conducted virtually over the summer of 2020. In total, 15 counselors completed the six-week PD -. Counselors participated in a series of engineering design activities to learn more about the engineering process. They also attended information sessions about engineering stereotypes, stereotype threats, implicit biases, and different disciplines within engineering to better inform their students of future career options. This paper details the development and program structure of the counselor PD. Pre- and post-focus groups were used to gain insight into counselors’ perceptions of engineering. Post-surveys were also collected to determine what counselors thought about the PD. We will provide detail regarding shifts in perceptions of engineering and overall evaluation of the PD. We conclude with a discussion of key takeaways and lessons learned. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; ( , Zone 1 Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education)
    Broadening participation in engineering is critical given the gap between the nation’s need for engineering graduates and its production of them. Efforts to spark interest in engineering among PreK-12 students have increased substantially in recent years as a result. However, past research has demonstrated that interest is not always sufficient to help students pursue engineering majors, particularly for rural students. In many rural communities, influential adults (family, friends, teachers) are often the primary influence on career choice, while factors such as community values, lack of social and cultural capital, limited course availability, and inadequate financial resources act as potential barriers. To account for these contextual factors, this project shifts the focus from individual students to the communities to understand how key stakeholders and organizations support engineering as a major choice and addresses the following questions: RQ1. What do current undergraduate engineering students who graduated from rural high schools describe as influences on their choice to attend college and pursue engineering as a post-secondary major? RQ2. How does the college choice process differ for rural students who enrolled in a 4-year university immediately after graduating from high school and those who transferred from a 2-year institution? RQ3. How do community members describe the resources that serve as key supports as well as the barriers that hinder support in their community? RQ4. What strategies do community members perceive their community should implement to enhance their ability to support engineering as a potential career choice? RQ5. How are these supports transferable or adaptable by other schools? What community-level factors support or inhibit transfer and adaptation? To answer the research questions, we employed a three-phase qualitative study. Phase 1 focused on understanding the experiences and perceptions of current [University Name] students from higher-producing rural schools. Analysis of focus group and interview data with 52 students highlighted the importance of interest and support from influential adults in students’ decision to major in engineering. One key finding from this phase was the importance of community college for many of our participants. Transfer students who attended community college before enrolling at [University Name] discussed the financial influences on their decision and the benefits of higher education much more frequently than their peers. In Phase 2, we used the findings from Phase 1 to conduct interviews within the participants’ home communities. This phase helped triangulate students’ perceptions with the perceptions and practices of others, and, equally importantly, allowed us to understand the goals, attitudes, and experiences of school personnel and local community members as they work with students. Participants from the students’ home communities indicated that there were few opportunities for students to learn more about engineering careers and provided suggestions for how colleges and universities could be more involved with students from their community. Phase 3, scheduled for Spring 2020, will bring the findings from Phases 1 and 2 back to rural communities via two participatory design workshops. These workshops, designed to share our findings and foster collaborative dialogue among the participants, will enable us to explore factors that support or hinder transfer of findings and to identify policies and strategies that would enhance each community’s ability to support engineering as a potential career choice. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ( , Science Education)
    Abstract

    Racially minoritized groups are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degree programs and careers, warranting the need to examine students' racialized experiences in K‐12 settings that may influence their STEM persistence. In particular, the current study explored adolescent perceptions of school racial climate (SRC) as a potential contributor to pre‐college racial disparities in STEM. We used latent class analysis to group adolescents based on their SRC perceptions and explored group differences in their interest in a STEM career and their belonging, psychological needs satisfaction, and engagement in STEM courses. Adolescent participants (N = 412, 50.2% female, 36.9% male, 12.9% other/not reported,Mage = 15.72 years, standard deviation = 1.24) attending five high schools in the Southeastern United States, were grouped into five classes based on their perceptions of SRC: Critical SRC (CritSRC), Average SRC, Average with Stereotyping, Positive SRC (PosSRC), and Positive with Stereotyping. Latent class membership differed by race, age, and learning environment. Results revealed that students with more positive perceptions of SRC reported greater belonging, engagement, and needs satisfaction in their STEM courses and more interest in a STEM career compared to students with CritSRC perceptions. Findings also indicated that White students were more likely than Black students to perceive a PosSRC. Recommendations for areas of future research and policy implications are discussed.

     
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ( , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)
    Despite increased calls for the need for more diverse engineers and significant efforts to “move the needle,” the composition of students, especially women, earning bachelor’s degrees in engineering has not significantly changed over the past three decades. Prior research by Klotz and colleagues (2014) showed that sustainability as a topic in engineering education is a potentially positive way to increase women’s interest in STEM at the transition from high school to college. Additionally, sustainability has increasingly become a more prevalent topic in engineering as the need for global solutions that address the environmental, social, and economic aspects of sustainability have become more pressing. However, few studies have examined students’ sustainability related career for upper-level engineering students. This time point is a critical one as students are transitioning from college to industry or other careers where they may be positioned to solve some of these pressing problems. In this work, we answer the question, “What differences exist between men and women’s attitudes about sustainability in upper-level engineering courses?” in order to better understand how sustainability topics may promote women’s interest in and desire to address these needs in their future careers. We used pilot data from the CLIMATE survey given to 228 junior and senior civil, environmental, and mechanical engineering students at a large East Coast research institution. This survey included questions about students’ career goals, college experiences, beliefs about engineering, and demographic information. The students surveyed included 62 third-year students, 96 fourth-year students, 29 fifth-year students, and one sixth-year student. In order to compare our results of upper-level students’ attitudes about sustainability, we asked the same questions as the previous study focused on first-year engineering students, “Which of these topics, if any, do you hope to directly address in your career?” The list of topics included energy (supply or demand), climate change, environmental degradation, water supply, terrorism and war, opportunities for future generations, food availability, disease, poverty and distribution of resources, and opportunities for women and/or minorities. As the answer to this question was binary, either “Yes,” or “No,” Pearson’s Chi-squared test with Yates’ continuity correction was performed on each topic for this question, comparing men and women’s answers. We found that women are significantly more likely to want to address water supply, food availability, and opportunities for woman and/or minorities in their careers than their male peers. Conversely, men were significantly more likely to want to address energy and terrorism and war in their careers than their female peers. Our results begin to help us understand the particular differences that men and women, even far along in their undergraduate engineering careers, may have in their desire to address certain sustainability outcomes in their careers. This work begins to let us understand certain topics and pathways that may support women in engineering as well as provides comparisons to prior work on early career undergraduate students. Our future work will include looking at particular student experiences in and out of the classroom to understand how these sustainability outcome expectations develop. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ( , PLOS ONE)
    Vasconcelos, Sonia (Ed.)

    Undergraduate research experiences benefit students by immersing them in the work of scientists and often result in increased interest and commitment to careers in the sciences. Expanding access to Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) programs has the potential to engage more students in authentic research experiences earlier in their academic careers and grow and diversify the geoscience workforce. The Research Experience for Community College Students (RECCS) was one of the first National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded REU programs exclusively for 2-year college students. In this study, we describe findings from five years of the RECCS program and report on outcomes from 54 students. The study collected closed- and open-ended responses on post-program reflection surveys to analyze both student and mentor perspectives on their experience. Specifically, we focus on students’ self-reported growth in areas such as research skills, confidence in their ability to do research, and belonging in the field, as well as the mentors’ assessment of students’ work and areas of growth, and the impact of the program on students’ academic and career paths. In addition, RECCS alumni were surveyed annually to update data on their academic and career pursuits. Our data show that RECCS students learned scientific and professional skills throughout the program, developed a sense of identity as a scientist, and increased their interest in and excitement for graduate school after the program. Through this research experience, students gained confidence in their ability to “do” science and insight into whether this path is a good fit for them. This study contributes to an emerging body of data examining the impact of REU programs on community college students and encourages geoscience REU programs to welcome and support more community college students.

     
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email