An official website of the United States government
As part of the STEP UP 4 Women project, a national initiative to empower high school teachers to recruit women to pursue physics degrees in college, we developed two lessons for high school physics classes that are intended to facilitate the physics identity development of female students. One discusses physics careers and links to students' own values and goals; the other focuses on a discussion of underrepresentation of women in physics with the intention of having students elicit and examine stereotypes in physics. In piloting these lessons, we found statistically significant improvements in students' identities, particularly recognition beliefs (feeling recognized by others as a physics person) and beliefs in a future physics career. Moreover, female students have larger gains than male students in future beliefs (seeing themselves as physicists in the future) from both lessons, which makes it promising to contribute to alleviating the underrepresentation of women in physics. Using structural equation modeling, we test a path model of various physics identity constructs, extending an earlier, established model. In this paper, we also compare a preliminary structural analysis of students' physics identities before and after the career lesson, with an eye towards understanding how students' identities develop over time and due to these experiences.
more »
« less
The STEP UP project: A national and international movement to engage high school teachers in cultural change
The STEP UP project (STEPUPphysics.org), based in the United States, includes physics teachers, researchers and professional societies who have collaborated to design high school physics lessons to empower teachers, create cultural change and inspire young women to pursue physics in college. Starting in 2017, the STEP UP project co-created and piloted a set of lessons that support cultural change in high school classrooms. Pilot and quasi-experimental studies on the lessons showed that the materials had a positive impact on students’ self-perception of themselves as a “physics person” and increased interest in pursuing a physics degree in college. As of June 2021, around 1,600 teachers have signed on to the project, along with 1,900 other supporters (physics faculty, undergraduate students, and other community members). International expansions in 2020 and 2021 have brought STEP UP adaptations to Brazil and Canada and recruited teachers from more than 30 countries to the community.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1938815
- PAR ID:
- 10556654
- Publisher / Repository:
- AIP Conference Proceedings
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 060009
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
The goal of this program, funded by the National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (NSF ATE) program, is to provide additional professional and technical skills to cohorts of high school students through a Saturday Program. The program has provided inner-city high school students with out-of-school, hands-on educational experiences focusing on both professional and technical skills. Participant demographics will be discussed in this paper as diversity is a key objective of the program. The program utilizes industry-driven, project-based learning (PBL) and lessons in career and college readiness to prepare students for the workforce. Each student session consists of five consecutive Saturdays and is taught by a team of high school teachers, community college faculty, and instructors with expertise in professional skills, teambuilding, leadership, technical writing, coding, and STEM disciplines. The program is held on community college campuses as a way to show students that they are welcome in a college environment, which has inspired participants to have confidence in their own abilities to attend college and pursue educational and career goals in technology fields. Principals from participating high schools have commented that students who attended the Program have demonstrated an improvement in their academics and behavior due to the knowledge of professional and technical skills that they have gleaned from the program. The program’s leadership team disseminates best practices through presentations, social media, publications, and workshops at national conferences. The virtual four-day Summer Teachers’ Workshop allows high school and community college educators from throughout the United States to experience the same program that is used for the high school students. Although the workshop is virtual, participants are provided with materials and supplies, so they have the same hands-on experiences as the students in the Saturday program.more » « less
-
Our NSF-funded ITEST project focuses on the collaborative design, implementation, and study of recurrent hands-on engineering activities with middle school youth in three rural communities in or near Appalachia. To achieve this aim, our team of faculty and graduate students partner with school educators and industry experts embedded in students’ local communities to collectively develop curriculum to aim at teacher-identified science standard and facilitate regular in-class interventions throughout the academic year. Leveraging local expertise is especially critical in this project because family pressures, cultural milieu, and preference for local, stable jobs play considerable roles in how Appalachian youth choose possible careers. Our partner communities have voluntarily opted to participate with us in a shared implementation-research program and as our project unfolds we are responsive to community-identified needs and preferences while maintaining the research program’s integrity. Our primary focus has been working to incorporate hands-on activities into science classrooms aimed at state science standards in recognition of the demands placed on teachers to align classroom time with state standards and associated standardized achievement tests. Our focus on serving diverse communities while being attentive to relevant research such as the preference for local, stable jobs attention to cultural relevance led us to reach out to advanced manufacturing facilities based in the target communities in order to enhance the connection students and teachers feel to local engineers. Each manufacturer has committed to designating several employees (engineers) to co-facilitate interventions six times each academic year. Launching our project has involved coordination across stakeholder groups to understand distinct values, goals, strengths and needs. In the first academic year, we are working with 9 different 6th grade science teachers across 7 schools in 3 counties. Co-facilitating in the classroom are representatives from our project team, graduate student volunteers from across the college of engineering, and volunteering engineers from our three industry partners. Developing this multi-stakeholder partnership has involved discussions and approvals across both school systems (e.g., superintendents, STEM coordinators, teachers) and our industry partners (e.g., managers, HR staff, volunteering engineers). The aim of this engagement-in-practice paper is to explore our lessons learned in navigating the day-to-day challenges of (1) developing and facilitating curriculum at the intersection of science standards, hands-on activities, cultural relevancy, and engineering thinking, (2) collaborating with volunteers from our industry partners and within our own college of engineering in order to deliver content in every science class of our 9 6th grade teachers one full school day/month, and (3) adapting to emergent needs that arise due to school and division differences (e.g., logistics of scheduling and curriculum pacing), community differences across our three counties (e.g., available resources in schools), and partner constraints.more » « less
-
The goal of this program, funded by the National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (NSF ATE) program, is to provide additional professional and technical skills to cohorts of high school students through a five-week Saturday Program. The curriculum is continuously reviewed and modified to address current skills needed by the technician workforce. While this program was originally proposed and planned as in-person, the leadership team decided to shift to a virtual environment as the pandemic caused the closure of community college campuses where the program was to be held. Program modalities and curriculum were modified to shift to an online experience. In Fall 2022, the program was able to return to an in-person format. The program’s leadership team disseminates best practices through presentations, social media, publications, and workshops at national conferences. The four-day Summer Teachers’ Workshop brings high school and community college educators from throughout the United States to experience the same program that is used for the high school students. The Program’s outreach efforts and the national dissemination of best practices for engaging underrepresented populations in technology careers has a national impact that will potentially increase the diversity of the technician workforce. The program has inspired participants to have confidence in their own abilities. Principals from participating high schools have commented that students who attended the Program have demonstrated an improvement in their academics and behavior due to the knowledge of professional and technical skills that they have gleaned from the program. The program has provided inner-city students from four high schools with out-of-school, hands-on educational programs focusing on professional skills, technical writing and engineering technology competencies. Participant demographics will be discussed in this paper as diversity is a key objective of the program. The program utilizes industry-driven, project-based learning (PBL) and lessons in career and college readiness to prepare students for the workforce. Each student session consists of five consecutive Saturdays and is taught by a team of high school teachers, community college faculty, and instructors with expertise in professional skills, teambuilding, leadership, technical writing, coding, and STEM disciplines.more » « less
-
When implementing lessons connecting advanced undergraduate mathematics to school mathematics, challenges arise for faculty and for the undergraduate students. The Mathematical Education of Teachers as an Application of Undergraduate Mathematics (META Math) project has created, piloted, and field-tested lessons for undergraduate mathematics and statistics courses typically part of a mathematics major that leads to secondary mathematics teacher certification. Lessons in calculus, discrete mathematics, algebra, and statistics explicitly link topics in college mathematics with high school mathematics topics prospective teachers will eventually teach. The goal of this poster presentation is to discuss our preliminary observations of the challenges faced by faculty and undergraduate students when implementing or using these lessons. We also wish to gather feedback and suggestions on the study design and potential directions for further research.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0175578
