Experts, Partners, and Narratives: Mapping Informal STEM Challenges Across a Cohort of Four Similar Projects

• In Event: 47.073 - Weaving Stories Into STEM Learning

Abstract

Purpose:
We provide an external evaluator’s synthesis of the work of the cohort of projects that were funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services as part of its STEMeX grant initiative, conducted by the external evaluators hired by the funding agency. The original RFP called for design-based research projects to study public programs delivered by STEM experts to children aged 6-10 and their families in museum and library settings. The four awardees (all presenting in this poster session) were: High Desert Museum, George Mason University, Loyola University, and Pennsylvania State University.

Perspective:
This poster will characterize the design process of each of the four projects, and focus in on tracking three key emergent challenges in that process: 1) recruiting and training appropriate STEM experts, 2) integrating narrative into inquiry-based STEM activities, and 3) establishing working partnerships among the central organizations: universities, museums, and libraries. By tracking their trajectories through a space of critical design decisions, we are able to characterize the project’s responses to a highly-constrained RFP from the funder, and to examine the projects traveling through a common design space, making different decisions but with very similar approaches, audiences, and goals.

Methods and Data Sources:
The evaluators visited each site once, and conducted four sets of semi-interviews with project team members, both in person and online, over a period of two years. The interviews focused on the design process details: activities of the team to date, challenges faced, solutions found, changes made. All interviews were uploaded into NVivo and coded by a single coder into emergent categories, with particular focus on challenges faced and decisions with reasoning.

Results:
1) Project teams identified as a key challenge the recruitment, support, and training of STEM experts who had sufficient STEM background, informal education abilities, and age-appropriate activities to lead the programs. Solutions varied in terms of: recruitment strategies (e.g., existing colleagues, recommendation of CBO’s, or open advertising); number of times a public program was delivered (from once to multiple iterations); and support and training (different forms of highly mediated encouragement and guidelines, with cycles of feedback).

2) Based on their theoretical framing, projects differed in how they defined the hands-on inquiry component of their programs (focusing on separate topics or integrated project-based STEM) as well as the narrative component (telling of a life-story, describing a related project, highlighting the steps of engineering or science processes, bringing in children’s literature, or reflecting on their own program experience).

3) The projects varied in terms of their degree of integration of the partners, process by which goals were jointly negotiated, integration of research and practice, and cycles of iteration. This is an area where the DBR process was particularly helpful at the organizational level.

Significance:
This work provides a rare opportunity to show trade-offs and alternative solutions to a shared complex design problem. We will also attempt to synthesize the decisions made into a single representation that is accessible to practicing educators at museums and libraries.

Authors

• Sue Allen, Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance

• Scott Byrd, Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance

• Alexandria Brasili, Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance