While students often have a positive view of science in society, they often express negative attitudes towards school science and often do not connect relevance of subject matter in the classroom to their own future. The Dow Corning Foundation/SVSU Community STEM Partnership is designed to directly address common attitudes of students at the K-12 level about STEM fields to correct misconceptions and promote productive perceptions towards school science. K-12 teachers are selected through a competitive process to participate in a two week workshop at a local university and are given funds to buy materials for a STEM project with their class to be conducted the following year. During week one, the program invites university faculty and local professionals to speak on a variety of attitudes and present research with teaching strategies to promote positive attitudes about STEM. This includes attitudes such as: science is hard, science is not relevant to real life, I need to be naturally talented to be a scientist and how to address failure during the course of learning science. The program also explores the scientific process with teachers, particularly focusing on misconceptions about the process held by the public. A third component informs teachers about careers in each of the disciplines. During week two, the participants are paired up with a faculty mentor and a Dow Corning professional to formulate a year-long project to address attitudes and demonstrate the scientific process with students. The projects are uniquely designed by each team, with teachers encouraged to design projects that will result in real and previously undiscovered data to give students the opportunity to conduct real science. These projects have included examples such as foundry science in the classroom, Lego robots to conduct pH measurement, water quality analysis of pollutants in local bodies of water using ROVs, and storm water runoff pollutant modeling. Evaluation data from the participating teachers indicate very high levels of satisfaction with the program. This presentation will share rationale of the program, workshop design, subject matter of talks, approach to design projects, example projects that have been developed and evaluation data collected during the first two years of the program.

STEM outreach program designed to address attitudes of students about chemistry, math and other sciences that collaborates university faculty, local professionals and K-12 teachers on a year-long curriculum based research project

251st National Meeting (2016)

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