Discipline: Science and Mathematics Education
Subcategory: Education
Kaila Trawitzki - New Jersey Institute of Technology
This ongoing study addressess the challenges facing childhood educators regarding science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. The project will be completed by the conference in March. It can be difficult for STEM educators to retain students, especially female and minority students. This research serves to see which settings and activities/topics (robotics, programming, aeronautics, etc) students best respond to. I will sort the students by specific class (for example Wednesday vs Thursday session), and two controls could be a student who has never attended any classes, and one who attends daily sessions. I will have separate data sets by gender and ethnicity. I strive to see the students engaged in learning while still keeping the content informative and practical. I will use the feedback to help ensure efficient utilisation of instructional time at both my workplace and various public school settings. I will report with my results back to NASA Langley’s Office of Education. With this information, I hope to improve student mastery of STEM topics and prepare them for higher educational settings.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): Montclair Learning Center; EntryPoint.
Faculty Advisor: Dan Brateris, Brateris@njit.edu
Role: I work at the Montclair Learning Center, so I conducted this research there. Although there are three other instructors, I am the only one recording this data.