Learning and Performance Systems Active Awards
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Dr. Heather ZimmermanInstitute of Museum and Library Services STEM Pillars: Supporting Rural Communities with Science Stories, Experts, and Inquiry Activities This project aligns with the IMLS learning performance goal for inclusive and accessible learning. The six informal sites (four libraries and two museums) will work together with Penn State learning scientists to develop narrative- and inquiry-based materials for families with elementary aged children (aged 6 to 10 years old) that reflect science relevant to rural communities.
Transforming Outdoor Places into Learning Spaces is a 4-year Innovations in Development project that investigates how rural families learn in outdoor places when engaging in mobile learning experiences. By employing a distributed scaffolding framework, the team conceptualizes an innovative learning technology as a learning tool well-suited to outdoor education to advance design on multidimensional context-sensitive learning. The importance addresses the societal need for transformation of everyday outdoor places visited by rural families into child-centered learning spaces. Rural communities are underserved by indoor museums; however, they are places rich with outdoor trails, parks, and forestlands. We offer an innovative solution: the development of the SPACES (Supporting Place-based Augmented Contexts for Engaging Science) beacon and augmented reality system, which can add content to outdoor spaces' without ruining the aesthetic experience of being in the outdoors. SPACES partners include rural libraries, outdoor learning centers, and university researchers. The objectives are to build knowledge for the informal STEM education field by conducting three iterations of design-based research study investigating how rural families learn about science in their community and to have a strategic impact on outdoor education practice with the contribution of empirically-vetted design conjectures for place-based mobile computing to support participatory family science learning. |
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Dr. Rebecca TarlauSpencer Postdoctoral Fellowship: Teacher Activism Across the Americas: Union Politics and Educational Change in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States
Under what conditions do unions start acting beyond their economic interest and become broader actors for social change? In this study, I answer this question by analyzing instances of “oppositional unionism” within teachers' unions in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. Oppositional unionism occurs when union members come together to contest the leadership of their union and transform the union’s daily practices, priorities, and demands. By examining the diversity of internal groups and theories of social change within unions, I contest the assumption that teachers’ unions are unitary actors simply “blocking” education reform efforts. Instead, drawing on the labor studies and social movement literature, I argue that unions are complex organizations that reflect their political-institutional contexts, which shape their forms of political engagement. This research is comparative and ethnographic, focusing on the internal politics of teachers’ unions in three countries. Through participant observation, interviews, and archival research, I examine the relationship between teachers’ unions, the state, and political parties; internal union divisions; the moments when teachers organize for broader demands; and how union disputes influence education. This project will shift our understanding of teachers’ unions as simply “self-interested” or “selfless,” to a more nuanced assessment of the role teachers play in politics, the diversity of political groups within unions, and the ways that teachers’ unions in diverse contexts go beyond self-interest and become social movement actors.
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Dr. Gabriela RichardSpencer Postdoctoral Fellowship: Cultivating Inclusive Ecologies of Learning through Making and Gaming: Interrogating Culturally-Sustaining Pedagogical Approaches and Technology-specific Material Affordances for Learning and Diverse Engagement
Despite influential theories and designs, research and practice continues to face significant questions around key crucial relationships between the scale of influence of informal or interestdriven technology activities to lifelong pursuits, and the complexities involved in scaffolding culturally-sustaining, equitable and accessible STEM learning in informal making and gaming contexts. For instance, youth-supportive content creation communities, such as Scratch, have become increasing critiqued for agnostic design, while commercial content creation platforms that have traditionally operated from content agnostic positions have become increasingly leveraged for formal and informal education. The proposed research for this project will integrate this collective body of work to interrogate how culturally-situated tools and culturally-responsive practices are (or are not) designed within wide-reaching, informal learning ecologies around making and gaming, how learners respond to those designs, and how we can bring effective applications from more formally-influenced environments to these naturalistic, interest-driven ones. Richard will utilize naturalistic observational techniques, mixed methods and iterative design-based research techniques to (1) better understand the ways that learners integrate playing and making in their naturalistic learning ecologies, by utilizing livestreaming as a participatory learning and teaching tool; (2) interrogate the affordances and limitations for culturally sustaining practices in informal learning, including in naturalistic learning ecologies; and (3) explore alternative models for fostering inclusivity by utilizing and reframing implicit values in digital media and content creation tools. Results will provide groundwork for scalable interventions aimed at designing informal learning environments and systems for socioculturally diverse and prosocially supportive computational participation and STEM pathways. Since the last quarter of the 20th century, researchers and educators have explored the influences of digital games on learning and career aspirations. In particular, a long line of research has proposed that digital games have an impact on career trajectories in computing and STEM fields (Cassell & Jenkins, 1998; Kafai, Richard & Tynes, 2016; Kiesler, Sproull & Eccles, 1985). In recent times, in particular, researchers and journalists have underscored the relationship between physical and digital gaming and tech spaces, and pervasive patterns of discrimination against non-dominant groups, particularly women and historically minoritized people (Kafai, Richard & Tynes, 2016; Richard & Gray, 2018). In fact, scholars have continued to find relationships between these patterns of discrimination, and the increase in hateful rhetoric and disinformation online (Richard, 2016; Richard & Gray, 2018). With the rise of social media platforms, such as Twitter, and, increasingly, livestreaming environments, such as Twitch, these communication patterns have become increasingly public and consumable by a wider audience, and evidence shows that youth can even transfer these problematic practices in supposedly “safe” and educational social media environments, such as Scratch and other content creation platforms (Richard & Kafai, 2016). The research plan proposed is part of a larger research project that interrogates how diverse youth and adults participate with and may encounter barriers to engagement with digital play and content creation through the use of contemporary digital and physical tools. Here I focus on how learners, across gender identity, race and dis/ability, utilize popular, yet increasingly complex leisurely and informal technology-based content creation platforms to teach and learn with others. The project itself explores how diverse individuals engage with popular livestreaming and esports platforms where people broadcast not only their digital game play, but also a wide variety of skillsets and interests, including coding, cooking, crafting, drawing and design. |
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Dr. ChanMin KimCollaborative Research: Scaffolding Pre-service, Early Childhood Teachers to Debug Block-based Programming
Engaging early grades students with STEM content in an inquiry-oriented manner is challenging. One way in which this can be done is by having students participate with robots in dramatic play and other student-centered approaches to early childhood education. Programming, and, by consequence, debugging, is critical to the ability to control robot movements. And it is unreasonable to expect early grades students to gain these skills without being helped by a teacher who has the ability and self-efficacy to engage in debugging. In this three year, collaborative research project, the project team will prototype and research the effectiveness of strategies to help preservice, early childhood education teachers learn to debug block-based programming. In so doing, the project has the potential to invite members of a population that is overwhelmingly female (early childhood education pre-service teachers) to participate in computer science, a field in which women are drastically under-represented. But it also has the potential to positively influence the teaching of computer science in the early grades among students who are from low-SES and ethnic minority backgrounds - a very important goal for both social justice and ensuring the widest possible talent pool for the computer science workforce of the future. This aligns with the goals of NSF's Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program, in that it seeks to enhance STEM education process and outcomes among preservice, early childhood teachers, who often suffer from weak STEM education preparation. The specific project aims are (a) to determine the nature of the motivational and cognitive challenges that impede successful and efficient debugging among preservice early childhood teachers, and (b) match scaffolding techniques with specific learner characteristics to promote successful and efficient debugging among preservice early childhood teachers. To address these aims, the project team will engage in 5 studies - (1) an exploratory study of cognitive and motivational challenges that impede successful and efficient debugging among pre-service early childhood teachers, (2) meta-synthesis of exploratory studies (including pilot studies prior to this project) and clusters of participants according to challenges, (3) data mining of a scaffolding meta-analysis dataset and prototyping scaffolding strategies, and (4-5) implementation studies of scaffolding prototypes. Furthermore, the project team will disseminate results to (a) university educators through workshops and webinars, and (b) STEM education researchers through publication of peer-reviewed journal articles. Using Collective Argumentation to Develop Teaching practices Integrating Coding Within the Science and Math Curriculum (Grades 3-5) |
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Dr. Tanner VeaLearning to Engage: Politics and Civic Engagement in the Learning Sciences
For learning scientists who believe that education should be a practice of freedom, how should we account for and adapt to rapid contemporary changes in politics and political participation? The proposed four-day conference builds on a growing body of scholarship in the learning sciences addressing questions of power and politics as inherent aspects of learning. Bringing together an intergenerational group of scholars for collaboration across three strands -- learning in schools, extra-curricular learning, and learning in social movements -- we will workshop empirical papers contributed by participants, use Open Space Technology (OST) facilitation to identify and develop cross-cutting issues, and collaborate in interest groups to develop an edited volume for an academic audience and web-based multimedia resources aimed at a broader audience. These deliverables will identify (1) core principles that inform how we theorize learning for democracy and justice and (2) areas of distinction between contexts that enable and constrain opportunities to learn and engage. We will contribute to setting a robust research agenda in the learning sciences with the promise to transform relations and learning environments for justice and provide practitioners with a set of tools for designing learning opportunities based in emerging theory about learning through and for democratic engagement. |
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Dr. Simon HooperStepping UP with Avenue: Progress Monitoring: A software suite helping teachers improve literacy progress for Deaf/ Hard of Hearing students Increasing students’ literacy using efficient and effective software tools that provide teachers with evidence-based and meaningful data to guide instructional decision-making in the areas of reading and writing. We will identify strategies to implement effectively Avenue: Progress Monitoring (Ave: PM), a suite of evidence-based technology tools developed in OSEP Stepping Stones 1 and 2 that help teachers, parents, and students monitor academic progress. Ave: PM is designed specifically for students with varying degrees of hearing (i.e., students who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing) and/or language differences or delays (i.e., students who are English Language learners with disabilities). The project will validate and develop existing and new software tools, and disseminate Ave: PM and professional development materials. Research data will generate insight into how teachers, parents, and students interact with the materials and will be used to support teachers in their instructional decision making and accelerate students’ development of general reading and writing outcomes. |
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