STOMP lessons enable K-12 students to work with given materials to design projects and achieve goals around the new concepts.
Benefits of Educational Outreach Programs
Evaluations and pilot studies implemented by STOMP at Tufts have shown
that engineering students participating in STOMP gain both leadership and
communication skills.
STOMP participants also realize the value of community service. In fact, the
past three Tufts STOMP program managers have received the Tufts Presidential
Award for Active Citizenship and Public Service, which recognizes Tufts
students for their community leadership, public service and civic
engagement.
In 2009-2010 there are 35 Tufts students who spend an average of 5 hours per week developing and implementing hands-on STEM activities. Eighteen other universities have also adopted the STOMP model and contribute to STEM K-12 education beyond the Boston area.
STOMP Networking
To further expand the STOMP Network, STOMP at Tufts offers starter
equipment grants ($3,000 - $5,000) to other universities interested in
developing a STEM outreach program.
All activities, photos, and project videos from past Tufts STOMP classrooms
are available on the website for programs to adopt or gain ideas for the
development of new STEM activities.
How to Join STOMP
Become a member of the STOMP network to gain access to STOMP manuals and
program resources. The STOMP Network brings outreach programs together,
fostering collaboration and sharing of resources, curriculum and classroom
materials.
There are two ways to get involved with STOMP at Tufts:
Methodology
Six middle-school teachers were selected to participate in this study
and all taught the same LEGO robotics-engineering curriculum developed by
the researcher and collaborators. Each of the teachers previously
participated in a summer teacher professional development workshop led by
the researcher or collaborators. Data from these teachers was collected in
the form of: (1) semi- structured interviews, (2)videotaped classroom
observations, (3) hands-on think-aloud tasks, and(4) student projects.
Miles and Huberman's (1994) qualitative data analysis approach will be
applied in the analysis of the interview, task, observation, and student
project data. The approach incorporates different types of data into
displays and matrices to help reduce and organize data for analysis. The
data is then analyzed by noting patterns and themes, clustering data, making
comparisons, and noting relationships and then organizing the data into
conceptually ordered matrices and charts, which help tell the story. A
complete content analysis of the curriculum and results from the previous
pilot study (see Hynes, 2007b) provided the basis for the coding scheme that
has been developed to this point. Both within-case analysis for each teacher
and cross-case analysis among the teachers will be used to examine the data.
Implications
The results from this study may help inform engineering educators prepare
teachers,develop teacher resources, and create curriculum that will foster
students' knowledge and interest in engineering. The research may also
provide valuable insight into methods of analyzing teacher knowledge and how
it can be researched further. If nothing else a small handful of teachers
and their students will experience the excitement of engineering with LEGO!
Methods Overview
In this quasi-experimental intervention study, the experimental teachers
participate in a week-long summer training program on two of the
engineering-based curriculum modules and then implement those modules in
their classrooms during the following academic year. The comparison teachers
are teachers in the same districts who continue to use their conventional
curriculum to address equivalent content. These teachers become experimental
teachers the year after they provide comparison data. The metrics for
studying the curriculum enactments include pre and post-intervention
knowledge assessments of all students, pre- and post-intervention interviews
with selected students, videotaped classroom observations, and attitudinal
surveys of all students and teachers.
During the 2008-09 year, we conducted a study of science content
learning in 14 experimental (engineering-design-based curriculum) and 6
comparison (traditional curriculum) classrooms. Pretests and posttests were
used to measure science content performance in the domains of material
properties, sound, simple machines, and animal adaptations.
Overall, paired t-tests revealed significant gains from individual pretests
to posttests, across all four domains and both treatment groups. However,
there was a main effect of treatment (engineering vs. traditional
curriculum) on the magnitude of the pre-post gain score. On average, in
three of the four science domains (material properties, simple machines, and
animal adaptations), the engineering-design-based science students improved
significantly more (p<.01) than the comparison students, as shown. In the
domain of sound, the engineering students' average gain was higher than that
of comparison students, but this difference was not significant. However,
the engineering students earned equivalent sound posttest scores, despite
having significantly lower sound pretest scores than the comparison
students. Thus, after the engineering-design-based curriculum module on
sound, students were able to achieve at levels equal to those of comparison
students who had previously been outperforming them.
Methodology
Students in the 5th grade at a Boston area middle school were
participants in this study. The study consisted of each student
participating in three interview-based sessions where they produced
representations in various systems. The science task/exploration in question
is the linked syringe problem (below). In this demonstration, the outlets
(nozzles) of each syringe are linked using a piece of clear plastic tubing.
As the participant pushes the plunger of one syringe down, the other plunger
extends.
Students were asked to share what they know about air and air pressure,
based on the device, using oral language, drawing, stop-action movies, and
physical constructions. All students participated in a classroom project
that familiarized them with the SAM Animation software prior to
participating in the research. The interview sessions were ordered as such:
(1) oral language and drawing, (2) animation, and (3) physical construction.
Students were presented example representations in each session, produced by
students in the pilot study, to see how students were able to critique other
ways of expressing how air works in the linked syringes.
Pilot Study Results
A pilot study was conducted with a very similar methodology, and the
results are as follows. In the four primary forms of representation used in
this study (oral language, drawing, animation, and physical construction),
there appears to be two trends in students' explanations about air and air
pressure. Students have a tendency to attend to the "material substance"
aspects of air in certain circumstances and to the "process" of air moving
in other circumstances. The material-substance aspects of air include
descriptions of gases, of how gases fill spaces, and of the particle nature
of matter. Process descriptions refer to how air can move objects, how air
is compressible in specific contexts, and how it flows as a fluid quantity.
Alongside these two perspectives, state and process, students tend to use
semblances of some basic explanatory frameworks, depending on the context.
These models include "air takes up space", "air as a continuous, fluid
material", and "air as a collection of particles". Each model is used in
different ways to make sense of different aspects of the linked syringes.
Therefore, the analysis of these data will be guided by the notions of state
vs. process and of the primary explanatory models employed by the students.
One hypothesis for the relationship between process ideas and animation is
the inherent temporal nature of stop-motion animation. In order to make an
animation, the student must generate a sequence of images. Each image
comprises an instance in time, and the collection of images represents a
some change over time. While the student generates an image, he or she is
aware of the prior image and anticipating the next image - in a sense,
considering three instances at once. Therefore, the medium forces students
to think over some temporal span (albeit, relatively small), which provides
them with a method for analyzing change over small amounts of time. In the
case of change-over-time, we believe this helps students to better
understand processes by helping them break down changes over time.
Goals and Overview
The overall purpose of this research project is to measure the
effectiveness of engineering service experiences as pedagogical methods for
teaching engineering and to examine how these experiences attract a more
diverse set of engineering students than is currently represented in the
population of engineering students. This project will conduct an
investigation of how participation in engineering service relates to the
dynamic interplay between students' engineering design self-efficacy,
engineering epistemological beliefs, and understanding of fundamental
engineering concepts. Our analysis will be used to quantify the role that
such programs - specifically the Student Teacher Outreach Mentorship Program
(STOMP), Engineers Without Borders (EWB-USA), and Engineering Projects in
Community Service-Learning (EPICS) - have in attracting and retaining
students to engineering.
Furthermore, because these engineering service experiences tend to have a
disproportionately high percentage of women participants in relation to the
overall percentage of women in engineering programs, this project will also
use these three constructs to explain why these programs are particularly
attractive to women in engineering.
Research Questions
Methods
To investigate the research questions, engineering undergraduate students
participating in STOMP, EWB, and EPICS will be compared to engineering
students going through traditional classroom learning and undergraduate
research opportunities. Each participant will be given a set of surveys and
and a design task to analyze their self-efficacy toward engineering design,
their engineering epistemological beliefs, and their conceptual
understanding of the engineering design process. The first two assessments
will be conducted using online surveys that have already been validated. The
latter instrument will be administered as a hands-on design task.
Preliminary Results
Pilot studies of the design task using verbal protocol analysis have just
been completed. The results of these studies can be viewed in our REES
Conference publications, Design Studies publication, and ASEE conference
proceedings. The results of these studies have been used to develop a
digital workbook (using Robobooks) designed to collect quantitative data.
The purely quantitative study is currently underway and will hopefully have
presentable results by the Summer of 2010.
Problems
What problems do first grade students identify?
Methods
This study, still in development, will use qualitative methods for
documenting classroom interactions. In addition, students performance on
tasks used in the pre and post assessments will be evaluated to generate a
performance score.
Methodology
The study conducted was a one-time cross-sectional assessment of multiple
constructs designed to provide an in depth characterization of learning
through service students who volunteered to be part of the study. These
combined sources were designed to provide a broad overview of the students
attracted to learning through service. The chosen constructs analyze how a
student perceives service compared to traditional coursework as a source of
learning professional and technical skills, what their epistemological
beliefs are toward engineering, what their personality traits are, and their
self-concepts toward the key service component of engineering design. Each
construct was measured and analyzed to investigate the dynamic interplay
between constructs and the predicting power of achievement.