Brigid Barron - US grants

This five-year research program is designed to advance our understanding of how to effectively engage diverse groups of youth in learning core IT concepts in ways that motivate them to continue learning in their future education. Basic research and design-oriented research will be conducted in three inter-related phases. The first phase will focus on expanding what we know about students' access, interest, and experiences with new technologies-with an emphasis on identifying barriers to equity and revealing learning resources. Survey and interview work will be carried out with a large and diverse group of students across socio-economic strata in California's Silicon Valley region to investigate their access to, and interest in, various kinds of learning opportunities. The research will document how creative learning opportunities are distributed across different communities and their effects on student interests. It will also contribute to defining different profiles of student fluency and how these are associated with learning ecologies constituted by the interweaving contexts of self, family, peer group, school, and community. The second phase of the work will focus on co-developing courses with teachers. A core guiding principle of these courses will be a primary focus on the student as designer and a learning goal will be to help students understand design as a human process in which everyone can be involved. The course material will build fluency in the context of projects in which students design, program, and implement information systems that address issues of youth interest. This approach will allow students to be authentic contributors of knowledge and processes while simultaneously building understanding of the core concepts and capabilities outlined in the NRC Fluency report-such as programming, information design, and human-computer interaction. In the third phase, the teaching and learning processes in these courses will be studied systematically, with a particular focus on collaborative design work. A key goal of this research is to contribute to theories of collaborative learning. Productive collaborative design practices will be identified and the ways that such collaborations are often less than productive and can be made more productive will be articulated. Learning properties of collaborative technology design work beyond cognitive outcomes will be identified for empirical study, including motivational, relational, and meta-communicative outcomes.

Beyond the intensive co-development of courses with local teachers, the educational component of this project will include the creation of a library of video case studies that highlight exemplars of more and less productive small group collaborative interaction. These will be used to help teachers (both pre-service and in-service) and novice researchers see ways of engaging students in learning that support fluency and increase interest and the ability to use and understand technology broadly. The use of video cases will support conversations about teaching and learning processes as they provide concrete references that can be revisited and reflected on from multiple perspectives. The video cases will be used to improve existing courses and in dissemination activities directed at the broader community of information technology teachers and researchers.

This research project is investigating how networked technologies can generate excitement and expertise development among middle school students learning to become citizen scientists. The investigators are partnering with "Vital Signs," a citizen science networked system located in the State of Maine, linked statewide to schools and accessible not only to the focal participants (teachers and students in seventh and eighth grade classrooms), but to anyone who wants to learn and contribute. Outcomes of this project include 1) a set of case studies of learners and teachers that that represent pathways of engagement that utilize cyberlearning enabled resources; 2) a set of recommendations about new learning resources and tools that can advance personalized learning for students, teachers, and other learners; and 3) a set of ideas about ways to automate the assessment of uploaded data from learners that can be linked to recommendations about resources that can advance learning.

"Vital Signs" has high potential to generate excitement, interest, and a desire to learn about the natural world by engaging learners directly in observing, documenting, and sharing information about real world phenomena, specifically participating in learning activities designed around scientific issues in their local communities using authentic tools and collaborating with scientists. The Vital Signs program engages teachers and students in seventh and eighth grade science classrooms in inquiry-based science education around activities designed to study and intervene in habitat invasion by non-native species. The STEM content they focus on includes understanding of ecologies, processes of species proliferation, and strategies for intervening in damaged ecosystems. The state of Maine serves a diverse group of learners. Across the state, though average indicators of socio-economic status (home income, poverty level, school lunch qualification, English as a second language, and level of adult education) are close to national averages, there are regional differences. The highest poverty rates in Maine are routinely found in the counties on the west, north, and east borders of the state, where in 2008 rates of child poverty ranged from 24-28%, while in more affluent counties, they were less than half of that. Because all middle school students are involved in the laptop program, this research is able to compare cyberlearning processes and outcomes in relation to economic profiles of communities. Further, the statewide laptop program is unique in the United States and it creates a powerful opportunity to understand how communities who vary in their economic profile, sources of livelihood and technological immersion choose to engage in cyberlearning and what barriers they face.

This Cyberlearning Capacity-Building project brings together learning scientists, experts in media creation, experts in child development, producers of public media assets, parent, and educators in an effort to build social infrastructure that will support bringing what is known about how people learn to the design of public media that can effectively connect school learning and out-of-school learning for young children. The team's theoretical framing and working hypothesis highlights the importance of media as a catalyst for collaboration and learning conversations; according to the theoretical base, these collaborations and learning conversations, when carried out across peers and in families, can play a powerful role in connecting children's school and outside-of-school experiences. Two workshops are being convened for the purpose of shedding light on the pragmatics of doing this -- the R&D partnerships needed, the methods that might be used, and the issues that need to be addressed for success. Through partnerships with children's educational media producers, the team is building capacity for interdisciplinary teams that include learning scientists and media producers to engage in research around how to use public media assets to promote the kinds of learning conversations in and out of school that will connect home and school settings into a distributed learning environment.

This project is laying the groundwork for new interdisciplinary research efforts addressing issues in early learning. The team's theoretical framework points to media as a catalyst for the kinds of collaborations and conversations that might promote learning and connect children's school and out-of-school experiences. Thus, this project is bringing together learning scientists and children's educational media producers (PBS, Sesame Workshop, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center) to seed future collaborations. The goals of this initial collaboration are to work together to establish new methods for studying learning with media and advance understanding of how public media assets can be leveraged to support the learning and interest development of young children and their families.

It is estimated that over 95% of all school children across the country are out of the classroom due to social distancing mandates in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost overnight, families have had to develop and support new practices for learning at home as districts scramble to meet the academic, social and emotional needs of their communities. It is essential to collect data now to develop a deeper understanding of how schools and families are adapting to these changes and will continue to do so in coming weeks/months - the troubles they encounter, and the solutions they generate. Retrospective accounts may mask critical features of what was experienced, minimizing the country?s capacity to conceptualize and build more robust, equitable and transformative learning ecologies for the future. Emphasizing an equity approach to solution development, this research will document how families engage in creative practices to generate powerful learning based on local needs, values, contexts, and histories in this present crisis. It will address the following questions: (1) What resources are schools providing and how are parents navigating and extending these resources to sustain their child?s learning? (2) How are families exploring science and math concepts related to the pandemic? (3) How are parents and families learning to adapt (e.g. communication with teachers; broader social networks) and what challenges do they face (e.g. subscription costs; reliable Internet)? (4) How are digital resources for STEM, curated by the research team, utilized for learning?

Emergency school closures are exposing significant gaps in access to the Internet and communication devices, and the capacity of parents/caregivers and communities to capitalize on technology to sustain health-relevant learning in a time of crisis. This project will use a novel, remote-diary tool based on a smartphone-enabled data collection platform, to reach families across the country. Mobile-phone-enabled remote diary tools make it possible to reach families who are under-connected, not just those with robust technical infrastructure. The data collected will lay the groundwork for creating new socio-technical support systems informed by diverse families? experiences, as the crisis unfolds. Approximately 200 parents with school age children (early and upper elementary grades) living at home will be recruited. This study and a subsequent virtual workshop with other researchers who are also using remote methods to study learning will help establish a broader research agenda to specify the conditions under which socio-technical systems productively augment a family?s capacity to innovate and learn when traditional co-located school settings disappear. It will advance our understanding of how human learning adapts to unexpectedly changed learning environments. This study draws on advances in remote data collection and new analytical tools for innovation in research design.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.