Resources
Researchers at the PEAR Institute: Partnerships in Education and Resilience presented findings from a survey of STEM Learning Ecosystems’ thoughts about collaboration on evaluation and assessment STEM Learning Ecosystems: Evaluation and Assessment Findings. Results revealed that half of the ecosystems are using at least one data collection tool to evaluate STEM learning, and the level of evaluation progress can be […]
Researchers at the University of San Diego’s Institute for Entrepreneurship in Education asked the question, “How do partners building and running a STEM learning ecosystem define the parameters of an “effective” ecosystem?” The findings from the year-one study can be found in the recent report: Design for Success: Developing a STEM Ecosystem. The findings explore dimensions of eight critical factors identified and […]
A few months ago, Expand ED Schools – a partner in the New York City STEM Education Network, released a new research brief reporting on the promising findings of the STEM Educators Academy, an ExpandED Schools initiative where classroom teachers and after-school educators engage in joint professional development at premiere science institutions and then work together back at their schools to […]
Expanding access to computer science courses — now available at just one out of 4 high schools – is the focus of several efforts at the state level that complement the President’s Computer Science for All Initiative and the Computer Science Education Coalition. Loretta Goodwin, Senior Director of American Youth Policy Forum, details efforts in Arkansas and Massachusetts that provide […]
The U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights Division this summer released data from the 2013-2014 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), a survey of all public schools and school districts in the United States. The data showed that only 48 percent of high schools with high black and Latino student enrollment offer physics, compared to 67 percent of high schools with […]
Ecosystem cultivators understand that it’s not enough to come up with an innovative new program or practice; their goal is to catalyze change in the way communities approach STEM learning. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Vanessa Kirsch, Jim Bildner and Jeff Walker explain how social entrepreneurs need “a set of tools and a framework designed to address the complexity […]
This call to action by the Harvard Family Research Project and Public Library Association may surface some new ideas among ecosystems interested in improving family engagement by tapping the power of their libraries. The new report Public Libraries: A Vital Space for Family Engagement, is a call to action focused on strengthening the role of libraries in engaging families. The […]
The Afterschool Alliance has released a new guide: Getting Started with the Next Generation Science Standards, intended to help afterschool educators and programs understand what the standards are and why they are important, provide selected resources for further reading, and ideas for what to do next.