STEM: How to Excite Students

By and large, are Alabama educators doing enough to interest students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers? If we take the findings of a recent national poll as an indicator, the answer is no – not enough, not yet.

But some Alabama schools are taking action – and if the trend continues, many more may be helping students make the STEM connection in the near future. That’s important, because STEM careers matter tremendously to Alabama, where a growing base of 21st century industries depend on a steady supply of trade and professional workers with engineering, mathematics and scientific expertise.

First, some research:

Last December, Harris Interactive asked a sample of U.S. students in grades 3-12 to rate their teachers on how well they promoted and demonstrated the work of STEM professionals. Overall, teachers earned a middling C. In contrast, 85 percent of students gave A’s and B’s when asked about those same teachers’ knowledge of science topics.

A spokesman for the American Society for Quality, which sponsored the survey, offered a couple of explanations. One was that “some teachers aren’t doing all they can to connect the dots between the math [and] science work that students are doing on a daily basis and how it relates to the real world and their future careers.”

But he also acknowledged that teachers are under considerable pressure to cover a wide range of topics and required curriculum on which students will be tested. Because of time and budget constraints, “career discussions are often left out.” Teachers, he concluded, need all the extra support they can muster from parents and the community to get the careers conversations going.

What the spokesman didn’t say, but what is certainly true, is that the best time to talk about STEM studies in relation to careers is when students are doing exciting things – solving problems using the scientific method, discovering engineering principles through hands-on projects, and so forth. These kinds of instructional strategies emerge only when teachers have the time, skills and motivation to support students as they dig deeper and apply what they’re learning in interesting ways.

Dr. Susan Pruet totally understands this connection between kid engagement and career interest. Last spring I spent a full day talking with Susan about her vision of promoting interest in math and science through hands-on learning opportunities rooted in engineering principles. Susan may be best known as the developer of the Mobile Maysville Math Initiative, a program of the Mobile Area Education Foundation (MAEF) where she is a director. Now she’s the driving force behind EYE (Engaging Youth in Engineering), a program I wrote about in the Fall 2009 issue of ABPC’s “Working Toward Excellence” journal.

Through a MAEF partnership with the Mobile County Public Schools, the EYE initiative is intriguing students in grades K-9 about STEM subjects through clubs, summer camps and (in middle school) hands-on learning activities that fit neatly into state math and science standards. EYE focuses (for now) on a single MCPSS attendance zone – the elementary and middle schools that feed students to Davidson High. It’s a near-perfect match, as Davidson is earning national recognition for its Engineering Pathways Integrated Curriculum (EPIC), a challenging four-year program offered as a “major” or a “minor” to all students willing to accept the challenge.

Pruet told me last spring that while one important objective of EYE is “to provide a model that the district can use to produce STEM-ready graduates across the entire system,” EYE is not just about producing engineers for the Mobile region. “We’re building awareness in the schools and the larger community of the need for ALL students to take more and higher levels of math and science. Engineering provides an engaging way to ‘hook’ youngsters around that idea.”

EYE’s capstone middle grades program is built around several standards-based, hands-on engineering “modules” that science and math teachers can blend into their Alabama course-of-study curricula. One example we described in our story last fall was a watershed unit being piloted at Burns Middle School under the daily leadership of Judy Duke, a retired Burns math teacher and instructional coach. Pruet’s hope was to secure enough federal funding to develop three such units for each of the three middle school grades (6-8). When we spoke last May, she was waiting to hear on a National Science Foundation grant application that could make that happen.

Here’s what I learned about EYE’s progress since last summer, during a recent chat with Pruet:

Most important, last September the NSF approved the grant application – for $3.6 million – allowing MAEF to conduct a five-year study that “enables the EYE team to complete a coordinated sequence of nine engineering modules designed for 6th, 7th, and 8th grade mathematics and science classes and analyze their impact on students’ STEM coursework selections, and also on teachers’ instructional practices, knowledge, and beliefs.” (See MAEF’s news release)

The EYE Module Study grant represents a four-way partnership among MAEF, the Mobile County Public School System, and the University of South Alabama’s College of Engineering and College of Education. “It was a collaborative effort from start to finish,” Pruet told me.

During the first half of the five-year grant, the partnership will refine several draft modules already in use at Burns and Clark Middle Schools and develop enough new modules to offer three at each grade level. “We want the modules to look more alike and to be useable with less ongoing hands-on support after initial training,” Pruet explains. “We want each one to be enough alike that as teachers learn to do one, they need less support to implement the others.”

The grant, she says, “has taken curriculum development from a mom-and-pop operation to a full-scale effort to produce products that can be used far and wide. NSF imagines these as part of a national effort to promote STEM interest through engineering. So the stakes are higher.”

“We already had creative folks working on this work, and now we’re able to engage them more deeply and add others who can bring their expertise to the enterprise,” explains Pruet. Anne Jolly, a former science teacher at Burns who is now a learning consultant and published author, is continuing to support the science side of the work, collaborating with math expert Suzanne McGill, a recently retired professor of mathematics and statistics at USA.

“The project will not just be about curriculum development but research,” Pruet notes. “What are the effects when these modules are tested in real classrooms? How is it working for teachers and for students, for what kinds of students, and so forth.” Rhonda Waltman, a retired MCPSS assistant superintendent and former middle grades math teacher is coordinating the research strand of the grant.

The main goal of the work hasn’t changed, Pruet says, although its potential reach and spread has. “We want to impact the interest and beliefs of both students and teachers and positively influence their thinking about who can succeed in STEM. We want to make this kind of inquiry-based learning in the STEM subjects so compelling that not only Mobile educators will embrace it, but educators in many other districts in Alabama and the nation.”

Ultimately, Pruet and her collaborators want a product that “feels authentic, is completely do-able, and is seen to be an effective tool to reshape STEM curriculum for the 21st century.”

There’s much more to learn about the EYE initiative than I can cover here – including the program’s increasingly effective strategy for engaging volunteer professionals with students, teachers and schools, and its plans to continue early engagement efforts in grades K-5. “We use the multiple dose analogy,” Pruet says. “When you treat a problem with antibiotics, you’ve got to take all the pills. STEM interest really needs to start in elementary and take in all the grades.”

Pruet sees more and more activity beginning to take place around the idea of using hands-on engineering projects to boost interest in science, math and technology studies. In Mobile County, school leaders have formed a group to begin exploring what a fully formed engineering curriculum might look like. At the state level, with new federal funding in place for STEM educational programs, the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) is getting involved. And the three-year-old Engineering Academy Initiative of Alabama is championing the growth of high school engineering programs, using models like Davidson High’s EPIC as examples.

“Curriculum reform is key to sustaining the learning concepts behind programs like EYE,” Pruet concludes. “If we can begin to embed inquiry-driven STEM learning in school curricula on a sizeable scale, we’ll make a huge leap in our readiness to meet the demands of the 21st century.”

To learn more about EYE, contact Susan at [email protected].