Source: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS submitted to
PROCESS: POPCORN RELATED OUTREACH CURRICULUM AND EXPERIENCES FOR STUDENT SUCCESS
Sponsoring Institution
National Institute of Food and Agriculture
Project Status
ACTIVE
Funding Source
AFRI COMPETITIVE GRANT
Reporting Frequency
Annual
Accession No.
1031347
Grant No.
2023-68018-41122
Cumulative Award Amt.
$748,685.00
Proposal No.
2022-12192
Multistate No.
(N/A)
Project Start Date
Sep 1, 2023
Project End Date
Aug 31, 2027
Grant Year
2023
Program Code
[A7801]- Food and Agricultural Non-formal Education
Project Director
Studer, A.
Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
2001 S. Lincoln Ave.
URBANA,IL 61801
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
Future challenges to agriculture and food security can only be overcome if we educate today's youth. There is no shortage of problems to solve or ways to apply new technology to enhance the productivity and sustainability of modern agriculture. Yet, most young people do not have a direct connection to agricultural production and have limited exposure to agricultural education. Students who lack these positive experiences with agriculture-related topics may be reluctant to explore educational opportunities or embrace science and technology that is vital to sustainably feeding a global population. The proposed project goals are to use popcorn to connect elementary through high school youth with emerging technologies and educate them about their application in agriculture. To achieve these goals, we will use 4-H programs as a framework for developing exciting hands-on activities and engaging curricula. Furthermore, authentic research experiences will be used to get students personally involved in crop improvement. However, non-formal education programs do not reach the majority of students and often rely on prior interest in a topic. Therefore, we will expand our initiative by embracing modernized high school classroom curriculum delivery and developing a popcorn-themed next-generation science storyline. By facilitating youth-designed educational materials that are broadly distributed by science teachers we significantly increase the impact of the project. Finally, we rely on a partnership with Ag in the Classroom to reach younger students of diverse backgrounds. Together these pursuits will make progress toward educating consumers, increasing acceptance of new technologies applied to agriculture, and training a diverse agricultural workforce that will drive innovations in the future.?
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
0%
Applied
50%
Developmental
50%
Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)Subject of Investigation (SOI)Field of Science (FOS)Percent
2061511108115%
2061511108010%
2061511302075%
Knowledge Area
206 - Basic Plant Biology;

Subject Of Investigation
1511 - Popcorn;

Field Of Science
3020 - Education; 1081 - Breeding; 1080 - Genetics;
Goals / Objectives
The long-term goal of this project is to develop, deliver, and evaluate educational programming that uses several modes of delivery, but all share popcorn as a common theme.Objective 1: Use 4-H Programming for cultivating youth-developed instruction. The diversity of programs offered through 4-H provides numerous opportunities that allow for youth-driven development of activities. Specifically, we will deploy 4-H based special interest (SPIN) clubs and a summer academy on the University of Illinois campus; we will also follow the 4-H Ag Innovator Experience model as a culminating activity.Objective 2: Deliver Authentic Research Experiences (AREs) to local high schools. The proposed partnerships with high schools will give students the opportunity for hands-on participation in agricultural research. Students will collect data and personally contribute to advancing crop improvement through their involvement in a public popcorn breeding program.Objective 3: Develop and distribute a Next-Generation Science Storyline. Most curriculum is written from the perspective of the teacher, curriculum developer, or scientist who already understands the knowledge and skills. A Next Generation Science Storyline(NGSS) allows students to view the work that they are doing pertaining to the phenomena or problem rather than simply following the teacher's directions. Thus, learning becomes meaningful because the students collaborate with the teacher to develop and manage the learning process.Objective 4: Broadly deliver curriculum in partnership with Illinois Agriculture in the Classroom. Building on the success of the previous aims, we will work closely with the Illinois Farm Bureau and their network of Illinois Agriculture in the Classroom (Ag in the Classroom; AITC) coordinators to adapt activities developed by high school students for elementary and middle school classrooms.
Project Methods
Objective 1: Use 4-H Programming for cultivating youth-developed instruction. We will use a series of 4-H programs as the core non-formal education modality that will innovate, create, test, and distribute activities across the other aims of the proposal. Working within the 4-H model allows us to leverage existing program structures rooted in a positive youth development framework and with established methods for implementation and assessment of the program goals.Objective 2: Deliver Authentic Research Experiences (AREs) to local high schools. Building on past success with AREs, we will develop methods for students to collect popcorn kernel and flake image data and expand the number of participating high schools. In addition, a website will be developed to connect participants from different schools and for data aggregation that would facilitate meta-analyses.Objective 3: Develop and distribute a Next-Generation Science Storyline. A NGSS is a coherent set of lessons driven by questions students pose as they seek to explain a phenomenon or solve a problem. The heart of a NGSS instructional model is that the lessons are built from using the student's perspective rather than the teacher's or curriculum developer's viewpoint. We will develop, test, evaluate, and disseminate a popcorn-themed NGSS.Objective 4: Broadly deliver curriculum in partnership with Illinois Agriculture in the Classroom. Partnering with the Illinois Farm Bureau on AITC initiatives will allow us to scale up aspects of our programs to reach a broader group of students. The AITC program serves > 600,000 students in Illinois alone and can connect to the National AITC program to further extend highly impactful activities. Importantly, delivering relevant and engaging materials into the hands of teachers will reach students who are not currently participating in agriculture-related programs like 4-H. In addition, this aim will transition materials to elementary and middle school students, which will encourage an early interest in agriculture.

Progress 09/01/23 to 08/31/24

Outputs
Target Audience:The primary audiencesare elementary through high school students, specifically in Illinois with the long-term goal of broadly disseminating educational materials nationally. The goal of the project is to develop, deliver, and evaluate educational programming that uses several modes of delivery, but all share popcorn as a common theme. Changes/Problems:As with many projects, project initiation was slow and recruiting personnel for the project was delayed. These delays caused a delay in offering a 4-H SPIN Club for Objective 1 and classroom content development for elementary school students for Objective 4. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?The project has provided training opportunities for multiple graduate and undergraduate students to engage in education and outreach activities, as well as participate in the development of curriculum pieces for the project. We have 23 pilot teachers from 19 schools throughout Illinois that are pilot testing our curriculum. In addition, approximately 20 teachers attend a 1-hour session Illinois Association of Vocational Agriculture Teacher Annual Conference on constructing explanations based on evidence. A proposal was accepted for hosting sessions at the upcoming Illinois Science Teaching Association's annual conference in October 2025 and the National Science Teaching Association's national conference in November 2025. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?In addition to the in-class and non-formal education contact hours, there have been several press releases about the project. Some of these have been local stories that have been picked up and distributed nationwide, including a highlight by AAAS EurekaAlert! Science News Releases. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/1012374 From snack to science: Innovative grant brings popcorn into the classroom: https://extension.illinois.edu/news-releases/snack-science-innovative-grant-brings-popcorn-classroom The Daily Illini https://dailyillini.com/news-stories/news-features/2024/02/06/popomics-curriculum-genetics What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Deliver a 4-H SPIN Club. Formalize curriculum pieces with activities and learning outcomes for short delivery engagements. Expand the number of high schools participating in the AREs. Pilot test the popcorn storyline. Revised storyline based on pilot teacher feedback and reviewer feedback. Develop elementary school modules distilled from current curriculum from high school activities.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Objective 1: Use 4-H Programming for cultivating youth-developed instruction. Multiple educational opportunities were offered through after-school and summer programs during 2024. These program offerings included materials, protocols, and insights gained from Objective 2. Twenty students from the Fisher, IL 4-H Club participated in a popcorn tasting activity to explore popcorn textures, flavors, and other quality traits that are evaluated when selecting a food crop. Through the College of ACES at the University of Illinois, two sessions were offered that were attended by 33 elementary and middle school students along with 29 adult participants. In these sessions, the cohort collected popcorn kernel images and popping data for a breeding population. These data can be used by future classes that do not have the access, capability, or interest to collect the data. Making the images and data available will facilitate a broader range of student participants in the future who can take part in the data analysis components. The project hosted one of the options for a week-long 4-H Illinois Summer Academy. The Harness the Power: Application of New Technologies to Improve Agriculture Academy provided scholarships for 7 of the 11 student attendees. The students participated in a variety of activities and research experiences focused on the role of technology in modern agriculture. Pre- and post-academy surveys were developed and implemented by 4-H to gather feedback and evaluate the activities. Objective 2: Deliver Authentic Research Experiences (AREs) to local high schools. Paxton-Buckley-Loda (PBL) High School and Olympia High School were the original schools that participated in the popcorn ARE, and continued their involvement in 2024 with 11 and 37 students, respectively. Olympia High School extended its participation by growing a popcorn experiment on the school grounds during the summer. Having the students plant the research plot in the spring, collect phenotype data and harvest in the fall, enabled the students to have more opportunities for hands-on learning with agriculture. In addition to continuing to evolve and deliver programming at the original sites, the ARE offering was expanded to include the Andreas Ag Academy serving Eisenhower and McArthur and public schools in Decatur, Illinois. Sixty-five juniors and seniors participated in the ARE for six hours over three class periods. We will continue to expand the number of schools throughout the project and work on ways to increase the long-term sustainability of the engagement. As part of a general education class, 100 undergraduate students with a diversity of backgrounds and majors participated in a lab that featured activities developed as part of the project. The undergraduate students collected data to contribute to a larger dataset that can be used as part of the high school curriculum. From this class, an Electrical and Computer Engineering undergraduate expressed interest in joining the project to help facilitate the implementation of machine vision and artificial intelligence modeling of popcorn. This helped launch the computer science aspect of the program and enabled the development of new activities for all programming aspects of the grant. Objective 3: Develop and distribute a Next-Generation Science Storyline. The 5-member writing team has developed a rough draft of a 6-week unit storyline on popcorn. Students watch a video about a corn selfie station at the Danforth Research Center, which engages students in conversations about the evolution of corn from teosinte and the future of corn on a changing planet. Students explore relationships between culture and corn as they learn about artificial selection. Students then review basic Mendelian genetics, protein structure and function, and new genetic technologies. Students are then challenged to develop solutions for continuing to increase the productivity of corn through artificial selection and genetic technologies. Objective 4: Broadly deliver curriculum in partnership with Illinois Agriculture in the Classroom. Through a partnership with the Illinois Farm Bureau and Illinois Agriculture in the Classroom (AITC) a popcorn reader was developed. The reader targeted middle and high school students and was distributed during AREs in Objective 2, and more broadly both in print and electronically through AITC (https://www.agintheclassroom.org/media/iuopioy1/23-774-atic_popcorn-reader_web.pdf).

Publications