Progress 09/01/17 to 08/31/18
Outputs
Target Audience: Over the past year we have also started to get more requests for more lessons that are correlated to Engage New York Math. We have learned from our teachers that Engage New York math is being adopated by many of their schools as it is correlated highly with the common core math standards. To that end, we have started development of new lessons, particularly around statistics that can be found here (note they are still in draft stage): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/18g51jzsfjqzm5p/AAB6W5UPY_Mi84_uylXm6gyPa?dl=0. We continue to plan to work on these lessons and will be testing them out over the current year with teachers and their studentsin our program. In terms of teacher impact: In this year we worked with 37teachers that were mostly from the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Specifically 22 teachers were from Massachusetts and 7 teachers were from Rhode Island and we had 3 teachers from Pennslyvania, 3 teachers from New Hampshire, and 2 teachers from Connecticut. The participating teachers served a range of districts and we have broken the distribution of teachers down as follows: Number of districts represented Percent of Under-represented Students Low-income students 10 teachers70 - 90 60 - 75 11 teachers 50 - 69 50 - 59 7 teachers 40- 49 40 - 49 7 teachers 15 - 39 10 - 39 The teacher demographics were 20Caucasian, 4 Hispanic, 3 Asian-American, and 4African-American with the rest choosing not to answer the question. The teacher, like previous years,taught a range of disciplines ranging from environmental sciences, environmental technology, horticulture, biology, chemistry, and culinary classes. The teachers reported that they utilized aspects of the curriculum materials in their environmental classes and if appropriate in their other classes (i.e. using and collecting data in their biology class). To support the teachers we conducted 6 Saturday workshops during the academic year and one intensive summer institute in Massachusetts and one intensive summer institute in Rhode Island. The summer and academic year content focused on how to build and manage their hydroponic systems. The teachers also left with a complete suite of curriculum materials around hydroponics and how to implement those materials in their classroom. We asked the teachers approximately the number of students that had participated in their classrooms while they were using the materials and we correlated that with our on surveys that we asked students complete through their participating teaching. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?We again had an undergraduate student working on the project through Salve Regina and graduate students from Boston College supporting the research and development efforts. This year we trained 37 teachers through our intensive summer institutes. Below was our schedule for this year of the training. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Yes, we presented the work again at the National Association of Science Teaching, Massachusetts Environmental Education Society, and the Massachusetts Agriculture in the Classroom project. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?Our goal at end of the third of year of this work is to sustain the work and to continue to revamp the curriculum materials.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Working with a set of our partner teachers to faciliate the distribution and obtaining the appropriate permission forms we conducted pre-post surveys from the teachesr who noted that they had implemented most of the curriculum materials. We definted most to mean 15 lessons (or about three weeks of instruction). This reduced the total number of pre-post surveys to 500students and from there we eliminated results where students only completed a portion of the survey. That meant that we had 234 students who completed both a pre and post survey. In conducting a paired t-test we found that three of the scales, Desire to do science, Anxiety toward science, and Self-Concept toward science showed significant differences and the value of science scale showed very little change. We found significant changes across all four scales. Specifically (1) Anxiety towards science decreased over time (p < .01, ηp2= .069 = Medium Effect). (2) Desire to do science increased over time (p< .01, ηp2= .17 = Large Effect), (3) Self-Concept increased over time (except for males) (p < .01, ηp2= .061 = Medium Effect). Of particular interest the evaluation found that girls Self-Concept increased more than males (p < .01, ηp2= .062 = Medium Effect). Below is a breakdown of the 234 students across our four teachers who agreed to participate in the research aspect around student impact. Table 2: Student Demographics by Site Total Site 1 Site 2 Site 3 Number of Students 234 (100%) 35 (15.0%) 137 (58.5%) 62 (26.5%) Gender Male 95 (40.6%) 18 (51.4%) 49 (35.8%) 28 (45.2%) Female 139 (59.4%) 17 (48.6%) 88 (64.2%) 34 (54.8%) First Language English 111 (47.4%) 27 (77.1%) 82 (59.9%) 2 (3.2%) Spanish 120 (51.3%) 5 (14.3%) 55 (40.1%) 60 (96.8%) Creole 2 (0.9%) 2 (5.7%) -- -- Other 1 (0.4%) 1 (2.9%) -- -- Ethnicity African American 68 (29.1%) 14 (40.0%) 54 (39.4%) -- Hispanic/Latino 134 (57.3%) 2 (5.7%) 70 (51.1%) 62 (100%) Caucasian 1 (0.4%) 1 (2.9%) -- -- Multi Racial 17 (7.3%) 4 (11.4%) 13 (9.5%) -- Other 14 (6.0%) 14 (40.0%) -- -- Age 8 12 (5.1%) 12 (34.3%) -- -- 9 101 (43.2%) 14 (40.0%) 87 (63.5%) -- 10 49 (20.9%) 1 (2.9%) 32 (23.4%) 16 (25.8%) 11 61 (26.1%) 6 (17.1%) 17 (12.4%) 38 (61.3%) 12 11 (4.7%) 2 (5.7%) 1 (0.7%) 8 (12.9%) In implementing and testing our materials in classrooms we have learned that there are three major challenges that teachers face when doing hydroponics in classrooms. These results have suprised us and we have made changes to our program to address these challenges. What we have found that is interesting is that the two major challenges that impeded the use of hydroponics in classrooms was not pedagogy or instruction but consisted more of logistics around the building and troubleshooting of the hydroponic systems as we noticed similar challenges to other years and our parter teachers and drawing up on experience on how to address these which lead the develop a very robust and now widely used system design for classroom hydroponics. What we have found most interesting in this regard is that the previous challenges which were mostly procedural, technical, and technological impededed the teachers from the important challenges around pedagogy. However, once the teachers got began to concerns themselves with pedaogical issues the major question was how to integrate into a chemistry, biology, or environmental science program. Hence the ideas of reserach questions and the connections to larger issues such as where students' food come from, food justice, and the ecological and economic costs of growing food. This work allowed us to design and manufacture vertical, multi-tier systems that can grow a wide variety of crops and can grow up 60 plants in only a 2' x 4' space that is now in wide use across our partner schools. We are continuing to find, through the work of our external evaluator that (1) the hydroponics systems supported teachers from different disciplines to work together to integrate hydroponics projects into biology, physics, and chemistry classes, and (2) teachers of special education students were the leaders in their schools in implementing hydroponics with their students and began to request to attend our workshops after they saw a system in their school (see one special education teacher's blog here:http://msascienceonline.weebly.com/hydroponics). In follow-up focus groups withspecial education teachers who were responsible for teaching science in their schools is thatwe learned that the teachers found the hydroponic systems to be (1) an effective way to engage their students due to the initial simplicity of growing plants hydroponically (just need nutrients, water and light), (2) motivated the students as they took ownership over "their" plants which encouraged students to observe and collect data regarding the health of their hydroponic plants, (3) engaged the students in learning and applying basic mathematics through the selling of their produce, and (4) one of the first times that they have seen their students really engage in the doing of a scientific experiment that was driven by their interests.
Publications
- Type:
Books
Status:
Awaiting Publication
Year Published:
2020
Citation:
Barnett, M., Patchen, A., Esthers, L., & Knobloch, N. (in press). STEM Learning and teaching through urban agriculture: What the research says
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Progress 09/01/15 to 08/31/18
Outputs
Target Audience:In this final year of the project we focused our efforts on sustaining and building the program. We received additional funds from the HP foundation and from Boston College to conduct another summer institute and to continue to work on the curriculum materials. This summer we we scaled back our summer institute so we could focus on ensuring that the curriculum was well aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. To that end we focused our efforts on Boston Public Schools and schools around provide RI. We had 15 teachers who attend this summer with 10 from Boston and 5 from Rhode Island. All the teachers taught in high need districts including Boston and East Providence, RI. The demographics of the teachers were 12 Caucasians and 3 teachers from Hispanic backgrounds. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Similar to previous years we had 1 undergrdaute student and 3 graduate students working on the project to help with the institute and the program. This year, however, we tested out the idea of having high school youth who did hydroponics with our previous partner teachers to serve as co-leaders/helpers during the summer. This approach worked extemely well and is something that we will continue in the future given the response from the teachers and the students. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?This year we presented the work at the Massachusetts Science Education Leadership Association and the Massachusetts Environmental Education Society conference. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
One of the key aspects of our work that we had not yet had the opportunity to explore was how well the program was in support teachers to help them be better prepared to support their students in thinking about careers. To that end, we explored the survey data around career development and career education self-efficacy. By drawing up on the previous years survey's scales and this year survey scales we had a total of 46 complete pre-post surveys from across the last two years of teachers institutes . level of knowledge about how to guide students into STEM careers; self-efficacy in teaching science field investigations; belief in the usefulness of hydroponics to engage students with scientific content; confidence about teaching students how to formulate explanations, models, and arguments; confidence about teaching students how to design and conduct scientific investigations. The only construct for which the change was not statistically significant was educators' perception of the importance of their own role in providing STEM career information to students. It should be noted that the pre-test mean scale score for this construct was already high: 4.3818 out of 5. Thus due to ceiling effects, it is unlikely that statistically significant change could occur or be detected. It is also worth noting the lower standard deviation at post-test indicates less variability in the participant responses and that the mean is a more accurate indicator of any one particular participant's response. At the pre-test there was much more variability in how participants scored on all of these constructs. Table 10. Self-Efficacy and Other Attitudes Regarding Career Education, Science Teaching, and Technology Use (n=46) Scale Name Survey Item Numbers Pre-Test Scale Scores Post-Test Scale Scores t (df=41) M SD M SD Career Ed.: Ownership 15, 22, 29, 35, 38 4.3818 .61073 4.5727 .51749 1.897 Career Ed.: Competency 19, 32, 42, 44 3.8864 1.01690 4.3561 .54868 2.316* Self-Efficacy Teaching Field Investigations 26, 36, 41 3.7955 1.10066 4.2803 .58052 2.179* Attitude: IT to Engage Students in Science Content 12, 16, 21, 26, 31 4.0909 .75272 4.3818 .45318 2.727* Formulating Explanations, Models, and Arguments 13, 18, 23, 28, 34, 39, 45 3.8896 1.04972 4.3247 .61117 2.462* Designing and Conducting Investigations 11, 14, 17, 20, 24, 27, 30, 33, 37, 40, 43 3.7269 1.17475 4.3218 .60130 2.880** * p < .05 **p < .01
Publications
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Progress 09/01/16 to 08/31/17
Outputs
Target Audience:In this year we worked with 25 teachers that were mostly from the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Specifically 18 teachers were from Massachusetts and 7 teachers were from Rhode Island. The participating teachers served a range of districts and we have broken the distribution of teachers down as follows: Number of districts represented Percent of Under-represented Students Low-income students 6 70 - 90 60 - 75 7 50 - 69 50 - 59 7 40- 49 40 - 49 5 15 - 39 10 - 39 The teacher demographics were 17 Caucasian, 4 Hispanic, 3 Asian-American, and 1 African-American. The teachers taught a range of disciplines ranging from environmental sciences, environmental technology, horticulture, biology, chemistry, and culinary classes. The teachers reported that they utilized aspects of the curriculum materials in their environmental classes and if appropriate in their other classes (i.e. using and collecting data in their biology class). To support the teachers we conducted 6 Saturday workshops during the academic year and one intensive summer institute in Massachusetts and one intensive summer institute in Rhode Island. The summer and academic year content focused on how to build and manage their hydroponic systems. The teachers also left with a complete suite of curriculum materials around hydroponics and how to implement those materials in their classroom. We asked the teachers approximately the number of students that had participated in their classrooms while they were using the materials and we correlated that with our on surveys that we asked students complete through their participating teaching. In sum, we had 2707 responses from the survey with a demographic structure of 65% African-American, 20% Hispanic, 10% Asian or Caucasian, 5% that fell into Cape Verdan and other categories. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?We engaged 25 teachers, 3 graduate students in working on the project as either participants, curriculum designers, and researchers. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We presented the work at the National Association of Reserach in Science Teaching and at Massachusetts Environmental Education Society and the Massachusetts Agricutlure in the Classroom conference. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We hope to continue to build and expand upon the curriculum materials and continue our reach to teahcers. In particular, we are striving to get more diversity among the teacher participants. We also would like to recruit more teachers from cities that are further away from Boston such as Springfield and Lawrence as these cities are often lacking in opportunities. We hope to address some of the issues that teachers brought up in regards to the teacher feeling of confidence and being ready to teach hydroponics as noted below in our focus group results. In particular, we hope to make better connections between the hydroponics content and the disciplines more clear and robust for those teachers who have limited opportunitiy to connect to their teaching during the school day. Current Level of Comfort or Knowledge Most of the teachers felt well-prepared to integrate the HYDROPONIC material into their classrooms and comfortable using the technology. "I can't wait," said one teacher, as several others nodded. A few reported specific concerns, such as integrating hydroponic principles into math classes, teaching students with more advanced skills than the ones who attended the institute, or adapting the curriculum to a low-tech school setting. Teachers were asked how comfortable they felt connecting the HYDROPONIC curriculum to the Massachusetts Frameworks or other existing curriculum requirements. One person pointed out that there are no Frameworks for hydroponic per se, nor are there any for elementary or AP classes, so that certain teachers are exempt from these concerns. Some teachers thought that the HYDROPONIC curriculum aligned well with state standards because of its emphasis on inquiry and scientific method. Others predicted that, once the science MCAS became a requirement for demonstrating Adequate Yearly Progress, teachers of subjects like biology or chemistry would be hard pressed to find time to incorporate the HYDROPONIC curriculum into their teaching. We askedhow comfortable people were with the hydroponic science content, and how HYDROPONIC's view of hydroponic differed from the one they had before the institute. Several teachers found Eric Strauss' ideas, such as hydroponic being a subset of ecology and cities being solutions, to be novel and useful. Several teachers said the institute had heightened their awareness of their own environments. Two teachers new to hydroponic thought there was too much lecture the first week, while two experienced teachers said they heard nothing new. Most, however, thought the lectures were interesting and helpful.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
By the end of this year of the project we had trained nearly 55 teachers on how to use hydroponics in their classroom and their students. We has developed a 2nd set of revised curriculum materials that is posted under the project page. For the teacher professional development our research and evaluation goal was to determine: What effect do the project's professional development strategies have on the skills and content knowledge of participating teachers specific to conducting hydroponics learning in their classroom? To address this goal, we administered a pre-post teacher survey before and after the summer institute, and conducted focus group evaluations after the summer institute and throughout the academic year.. The survey was tested for reliability with a pilot group of 79 undergraduate education students and adjusted based on the results from Chronbach's alpha and factor analyses. The instrument was sufficiently reliable to be administered during the Year 2 summer institute training in July and August, 2007. The findings of the pre-post teacher survey are summarized as follows Participants reported statistically significant levels of skill improvement in their skill with classroom uses of hydroponics (teaching students to use hydroponic systems; helping students to use data collected from hydroponic systems in class as part of a lesson; and designing lessons that make use of hydroponics learning activities to teach science) Participants demonstrated improvement in their ability to define the term "hydroponics" with more complexity, recognizing physical, biological and human components to urban ecology; but remained consistent in describing the primary benefit to society of studying hydroponics as a way to engage their students in learning about sustainability efforts. Also for the Year 2 summer institute, we conducted teacher focus group evaluations of the summer institute, with the goal of evaluating the teachers' perceived level of usefulness of the professional development activities, what could be improved, and what support they needed in order to implement the hydroponic curriculum during the school year. The findings from the focus groups are summarized as follows Most participants were satisfied with the institute and left feeling competent to implement the hydroponic curriculum. Repeated hands-on practice, hydroponic content, and tangible resources were considered the most helpful aspects of this professional development offering. A common suggestion was that administrative procedures and communication surrounding the institute could be improved. We also conducted pre-post surveys with the teachers and validated the survey items (Based upon revisions from the previous year). See Below: Table 1. Scale Reliabilities for the Pre-Post Teacher Survey Domain Scale Name Scale Description Number of Items* n Cronbach's Alpha Career Education Career Ed.: Ownership Educators' perception of the importance of their own role in providing STEM career information to students 5 25 .745 Career Ed.: Competency Educators' level of knowledge about how to guide students into STEM careers 4 25 .873 Science Learning and Teaching Self-Efficacy Teaching Field Investigations Educators' self-efficacy in teaching science through hydroponics 3 25 .927 Technology Use Attitude: hydroponcis to Engage Students in Science Content Educators' attitude about the usefulness of hydoponics to engage students with scientific content. 5 25 .932 Inquiry Science Formulating Explanations, Models, and Arguments Educators' self-efficacy in teaching students to formulate scientific explanations, models, and arguments 7 25 .967 Designing and Conducting Investigations Educators' self-efficacy in teaching students to design and conduct scientific investigations 11 24 .986
Publications
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Progress 09/01/15 to 08/31/16
Outputs
Target Audience:Our primary population has been teachers of under-represented populations in science. This summer we trained a total of 32 teachers from cities across the northeast including Lawrence, Boston, and Sprinfield Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island. Changes/Problems:We are currently on target and a bit ahead of where we hoped to be at this time in the project. This summer we will train 35 teachers (27 from Massachusetts and Connecticut and 8 from Rhode Island). We will continue to expand our work to recruit additional teachers. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?We have implemented two teacher workshops and a summer teacher institute. In total we have opportunities for 30 teachers to participate in our training. We also have 2 Ph.D. students working on the design and implementation of our program. (one was funded in part by NIFA and the other was provided by the university as a part of the matching requirement) We have 2 masters level students (both to be future science teachers) who are working on the curriculum materials. These students worked ont he project but were not funded by the grant. We have 2 Ph.D. counseling pscyhology students who are leading the efforts on the longitudinal research efforts around resilience and STEM career development. We have 4 undergraduates working on the curriculum development and the building of hydroponic systems for teachers. The undergraduates are also participating in designing and building the solar systems that we are training the high school youth in learning how to put together. These students were funded by the university. We have implemented one teacher workshops and a summer teacher institute. In total we have opportunities for 25 teachers participate and just completed our summer institute with 27 teachers attending representing a very diverse area of expertise. Answer Options Response Percent Response Count Middle School Science 50.0% 10 Biology 35.0% 7 Chemistry 20.0% 4 Physics 10.0% 2 Environmental Science 20.0% 4 Other (please specify) 14 How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Yes, we have presented to the Massachusetts Environmental Educationa Association and this coming year we will present to the Massachusetts STEM Summitt and will host a booth at the STEM Summitt where the curriculum materials will be availalble along with demos. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We have a set of initiatives that we hope to undertake over the coming year which are: Continue to review and revise the curriculum material Make the curriculum materials freely available on our website We are currently distributing the materials to those teachers that have attended our workshops and institutes Continue to recruit new teachers and expand to the Springfield Public Schools We will continue to develop our STEM career integration components into the curriculum
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
First order challenges: In working with our early teachers we specifically targeted teachers who had been working with our group for a few years or with teachers who had experience with agriculture in classroom settings. We started our work with 10 such teachers and with a daylong Saturday workshop to introduce the project work to them and the system design. We walked the teachers through the design of the NFT system (tray based system), how to put it together and how to use the schematics diagrams. We focused most of that first workshop on the idea of engaging students in doing research and how to support students in asking and evaluating research questions and how to collect and analyze data. However, we learned that many of the teachers who took a system either didn't set up their systems or set up their systems much, much later in the academic year. The reason for this was due to the "imposing task" of putting the system together and how to make sure that their system worked. To address this 1st order challenge we shifted our workshops and the summer institute to more of a maker institute. To that end, the teachers put togehter the systems they were taking and took them apart to fit them in their cars. We also created a more detailed how to manual, a frequently asked questions document on how to put togehter the systems. Further, we also developed a new design for our hydroponic systems that requires very little in terms of parts and maintaince other than cleaning. In addition, we redesigned our systems so they could be put on wheels and rolled around as needed (as we learned that some teachers wasn't sure where they would be teaching and didn't want to have to take apart their system and put it together again). 2. Second order challenges revolved around troubleshooting the systems. For example, if a system part became clogged or starting to leak, even a little, it was unclear as to how to proceed and was easier for the teachers to just turn off the systems and wait for the next workshop. This situation existed depsite our regular digital correspondence with teachers (as they simply didn't tell us that the systems were off-line). To address this challenge we included an intensive session on troubleshooting and maintaining and caring for the hydroponic equipment. We also simplified both designs where there are now very little opportunity for problems to emerge (but we did specifically have teachers go through how to solve basic common problems). This 2nd order challenge also is why we developed our two tier float system. The only item that can break on the system is the stryofoam that the plants float in. In essence, the float system is a deep water culture system that relies on air stones to keep the water oxygenated which means there is nearly no opportunity for students to accidently leave a pump running or have a pump point in the wrong direction for a water leak (seehttps://www.facebook.com/urbanhydrofarmers/photos/pcb.638302819611298/638302166278030/?type=1&theater). 3. Third order challenges revolved around the pedagogical and logistcs of integrated hydroponics into the classroom. What we have found most interesting in this regard is that the previous challenges which were mostly procedural, technical, and technological impededed the teachers from the important challenges around pedagogy. However, once the teachers got began to concerns themselves with pedaogical issues the major question was how to integrate into a chemistry, biology, or environmental science program. Hence the ideas of reserach questions and the connections to larger issues such as where students' food come from, food justice, and the ecological and economic costs of growing food.
Publications
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Awaiting Publication
Year Published:
2016
Citation:
Patchen, A., Jose, D., Scheilmann, A, Rupani, R, & Barnett, M (2016). Integrating Hydroponics in Science Classrooms. Connected Learning, NSTA Press.
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