The Gateways to Science Careers (G2SC) program is designed to provide undergraduate students with access to innovative science and mathematics education research. As a Research Experiences for Undergraduate (REU) site at Stanford University, this project would place 15 students per year in a summer training program and mentoring project that involves two primary activities. First, students will work as research assistants in three STEM education laboratories. G2SC will recruit students from across the nation to participate in the program, with particular focus on recruiting African-American students and through a collaborative effort with Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Second, students will receive year-long training and mentoring regarding graduate admissions. The objective of this project is to provide students mentoring and apprenticeship programs that will support their interest in STEM education careers. The students' participation in research and publishing in STEM education has the potential to help build capacity for participation of underrepresented groups in STEM education research.
The G2SC program intends to impact the way students interested in STEM careers envision themselves as members of the STEM education community. Through their direct research with leading African-American scholars in STEM education and their research groups, the participating students will be engaged in authentic apprenticeships that extend beyond a summer academy into the academic year. By offering this program to 15 students per year, the goal is to assist 45 students towards careers in science and mathematics education research. The broader impact of this project involves its capacity to provide a model for the recruitment and training of STEM education researchers. This project has the potential to produce 45 STEM educators and education researchers. The REU site and the research associated with this project may also provide evidence regarding the effectiveness of pipeline programs.
In the three years of operation of the program, we focused on offering students a multidimensional access to STEM education careers by combining four types of activities. First, all 45 participating students participated in direct research training and instruction. Second, all the students were participants in ongoing research and data collection activities. Third, all of the students had an opportunity to participate in STEM education outreach initiatives. Fourth and finally, the students had an opportunity to participate and observe STEM curriculum development. Collectively, each of these activities provided the Gateways to STEM Education program with access to STEM Education careers in diverse ways. Training The participating graduate students designed statistics training focusing on the basics of experimental social science research. This included a focus on t-test, mean scores, normal distribution, effect size, normalized gain, standard deviation, and ANOVAs. To teach them these statistics measure in context, student learned about these constructs in the context of research and ran data analysis to practice each of these methods. To provide the students with qualitative analysis, students were taught how to take field notes, discourse analysis, and interview analysis. In a fashion similar to the quantitative coursework, these research skills were taught by working on specific data sets in preparation for their research application. Collectively, these training courses introduced students to a diverse set of research approaches in STEM education. Promoting careers Along with research training a major emphasis was to provide students with access to research careers. The Gateways to STEM education program was able to do this in a number of ways. First, as students joined the program our orientation session served as a research conference where researchers from UC Berkeley, Stanford, and San Francisco State presented their research to students. This all African-American research team included professors and graduate students from a number of academic disciplines. The researchers included linguists, educational psychologists, teacher educators, and sociologists who studied STEM education. Second, our 3-site structure allowed students to rotate between a number of research types and careers options. As students worked on their specific research projects they were able to visit other sites and experience how the projects at the different universities approached issues of STEM education differently. Finally, our approach to promoting careers involved direct instruction. Dr. Brown taught three sessions that outline the types of careers options in STEM education. Research Training Another major activity involved research training via apprenticeship. The group at the university of California, Berkeley worked on coding, cleaning, and analyzing data about how Oakland Unified school district attempted to improve the Math performance of African-American men in the school district. The San Francisco State Group worked on a project with Spottily, and the Musical and Mural Arts Program (MMAP) that focused on creating free online STEM educational videos for 5th graders. The students in this project worked to conduct field notes of the curriculum development process and worked as aides in the production of the educational videos. The Students in the Stanford group worked in data collection and data analysis on a project that examined how students learned using digital textbooks. On this project participating students, conducted interviews, collected pre-and post-test data, cleaned data, and conducted t-tests, and effect size analysis on the results of the story. The structure of the research programs offered daily access and participation in STEM education research. Each afternoon from 1:00pm to 4:00pm the participants traveled to one of three sites to participate in research. Given the goal of providing students with exposure to professors and graduate students these sub groups were lead by a team of African-American graduate students and professors. Providing students with direct access to young STEM professionals was designed to create opportunities for direct mentorship and role modeling. Outreach Another aspect of the project's operational activities involved outreach work. The goal of creating and offering a controlled randomized control study of students’ using technology provided daunting. To create such and environment, the team focused on creating a hybrid environment where we could conduct controlled data collection, while engaging in meaningful outreach activities. To do this, we offered the Science In The City Summer Camp. These camps provided 4 days of low cost summer camps to minority students, while creating and environment where the teach could control the conditions of our research. Curriculum Development A final aspect of the program involved curriculum design. This was an unintentional result of working with the MMAP project to created educational learning videos. Given our concern that teachers would view these videos would not have access to sound lesson planning to use the videos appropriately, we created lesson plans for the video series we created. The result is the development of a free online STEM curriculum using a culturally relevant approach.
