ITEST Strategies is a 3 year project for grades five through eight students and teachers. Pooling resources from a host of collaborators and previously funded projects such as ?From the Ground Up? curriculum created for use with the MicroObservatory network of robotic telescopes, teachers engage students in exploring themes that researchers have found to be difficult for middle school youth. These themes include light and color, size and scale, laws of motion, and more. Activities include programming and controlling robotic telescopes from home and school. This involves imaging of galactic and extra-galactic objects and manipulating images. Students also create animations and simulations of common topographic and space-related features. Collaborators include Harvard?s Earth and Planetary Science Department, the Initiative for Innovative computing, the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, five public and charter schools, and the Retirees School Volunteers. The project plan provides for a teacher component that includes at least 60 hours of professional enhancement each year. Additionally, the project plan includes a student component with a two-year sequential curriculum having weekly sessions, summer activities, online courses, and student-parent/guardian evenings. With this structure, the project advances knowledge and understand across the fields of information and communication technology and astronomy. The project leaders target 100 girls and disadvantaged youth. Each year there are 120 hours of exposure for the students and 60 hours of professional development for teachers. Students are involved for a minimum of two years. The PI utilizes a quasi-experimental, non-equivalent research design. The following questions drive the research: 1) How effective is the project in enhancing student STEM understanding, and in creating and sustaining a link between the STEM experiences and ICT careers for the participants? 2) What factors or settings most effectively enhance the ICT experiences for middle-school youth, and how well does the SED project support that enhancement? 3) To what degree do students perceive that the skills and conceptual knowledge developed in the project are potentially valuable for entering an ICT career or another STEM vocation? To study these questions, the PI uses distracter-driven multiple choice concept inventories developed by the Harvard Science Education Department to assess the conceptual knowledge of teachers and students both as diagnostic pretests to develop workshop content and as posttests of knowledge acquisition.
was the creation of an age-appropriate, out-of-school (OST) time Information and Communication Technology (ICT) program that targeted middle-school youth, particularly girls and minority students. It drew upon the widespread, intrinsic interest of grades 5-8 youth with space science and robotics as entrée for increasing their interest in and disposition toward ICT and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) careers. The centerpiece of ITEST Strategies is the Science Education Department’s (SED) MicroObservatory network, a collection of robotic telescopes. The SED is part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The skills and aptitudes developed and practiced by the students when working with the telescopes are transferrable across all ICT and STEM fields, and provide a solid foundation for 21st century careers. Using data-rich, portable findings, the broader impacts of the project included informing policy makers and school stakeholders about the effects of intensive and sustained ICT experiences for the persistence of students in taking STEM courses, their self-identification and interest in STEM or ICT careers, and their STEM content knowledge; employing a theory-based research design that produced robust findings; providing a transportable model for creating a synergistic and sustainable partnership between formal and informal educators, industry partners, and OST programs; documenting directly any changes in student achievement in STEM learning; demonstrating that a challenging OST program can promote attitudinal changes in students’ views toward STEM and careers in ICT; and disseminating findings to the research and STEM education communities through peer-reviewed journal articles and research and education conference presentations. Our original objective in ITEST Strategies was to provide sustained, enrichment experiences each year for 60 girls and disadvantaged youth (or 180 youth) over the course of the three-year project. With supplementary funds and judicious budgeting we were able to carry on the project for five years. We carried out the project in five Eastern Massachusetts schools. Added together, the five-year student participant total is about 550. This number overstates the number of participants somewhat, since many were involved two or three years. We estimate there were at least 350 individual student participants in the project. The demographics remained constant throughout the project. Each year upwards of two-thirds of the participants were girls. At least 70% of the participants were from minority populations (Asian, Hispanic, and African Americans), and more than 80% of all the students qualified for free or reduced-cost lunch. On average the students met weekly for 60-90 minutes; they met about 30 times throughout the academic year. In each of the first four years there were upwards of thirty hours of face-to-face professional development for participant teachers, plus regular online updates and telescope support. Annually project staff made more than 30 separate visits to the schools’ OST sessions; in total, volunteers made as many as 100 visits. Both students and teachers controlled the telescopes (two located at the CfA in Cambridge, MA, and two others on Mt. Hopkins, AZ, a Smithsonian observatory location) from their homes or schools, requesting images of solar system and deep space objects; the images were then posted on the MicroObservatory Website and available for downloading by the next morning. Another important element of the project was the regular participation of volunteers from the Retirees School Volunteer Association (RSVA) and the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston (ATMoB); two volunteers were assigned to each school. In the project’s first two years we assessed the subject matter knowledge of students. We found, for example, statistically significant gains in the students’ abilities to describe moon patterns, size and scale, and motions in space, all free of gender, race, or school bias. We also conducted affective surveys with the participants (students, teachers, and volunteers), all completed online. For students we focused on their sense of competency in and disposition toward STEM and ICT. We did not find any apparent difference between girls and boys in their expressed interest in STEM or ICT. The girls in our project appeared to embrace technology more extensively than boys. What we found of concern was the inclination by girls early in middle school to reject most STEM fields as options. We also found that applied STEM (medicine and health fields) appeals more to girls of color than to white girls or males of any race or ethnicity. Teachers and volunteers both found the most valuable experiences included the regular day-long workshops held at the CfA, along with working besides one another and the shared discussions at the CfA and the schools. Volunteers found that learning how to work with students in urban classrooms was particularly valuable. Going forward we found the most important need in having volunteer participants was addressing the issue of planning, for they were somewhat uncomfortable with the unscheduled and random changes that at times can be a part of any school day.
