Welcome!  ¡Bienvenidos! 

Thank you for visiting the CHISPA video showcase! We hope you enjoy learning more about the project as you watch the video. You might also want to peruse the project web site, especially the showcase, to learn more about how science/children’s museums and their local Hispanic community organizations have been working together to engage children and families in science.

The CHISPA leadership team and project evaluators are on hand all week to share their project experiences as well as preliminary findings from the summative evaluation.

Please use this space to share your experiences, ideas, questions or comments about how to address the challenges of making STEM resources more accessible to all.

Hasta pronto! 

I love how tangible/hands-on all the activities are! What a great way to get kids and parents working together for shared learning experiences. One of my projects shares a very similar goal - to trigger interest in science - and we are interested in measuring the impact of our intervention and whether or not the interest can be sustained. How are you guys tracking interest changes in your project? Will you be able to look at it longitudinally, at least for some of the kids?  

Great questions, Chad. For this project, the evaluation focused on engagement — the extent to which youth were physically, intellectually and socially engaged with the activities — and the extent to which youth were able to articulate specific science concepts or experiences that stood out for them. It would be really great to look at those changes longitudinally but, unfortunately, that was not within the scope of the current project. 

Looking at interest in follow up work would be a very promising direction to take. Now that these young people have engaged with STEM content in their afterschool programs, do we see individual interest emerging? What supports are needed to foster that individual interest once situational interest in these activities has been sparked? How can the parent component of the program equip parents to support that interest development?

Thank you for this video, Cheryl, Rebecca and team. Hopefully the strong, authentic partnerships you have built will provide for long term opportunities to do longitudinal work, with additional support. Given the significant intergenerational dimension to this work, have there been lessons learned that can be applied to the wider field?

Yes, Jamie, there are some very interesting lessons for the field that have arisen from this project. Our final evaluation report (that we'll post to informalscience.org!) will outline those in detail; however, two things stand out as particularly noteworthy.

First, the evidence indicates there is a need for this type of whole-family approach that is based on curricula that are flexible, adaptable, and usable by leaders who have varying levels of experience and skill. The parent piece, in particular, appears to have great potential for broadening participation in STEM. For example, the CHISPA parent sessions helped parents who weren't educated in the US school system to understand how to support their children's STEM learning. This included understanding of how to interact with the school system, understanding the relationship between STEM topics and future careers, learning what was required to go to college and pursue STEM majors, and identifying strategies to engage their children in STEM as part of family life.

Second, the evaluation found that adaptation and customization to local context were a key factor in CHISPA's success since program sites varied greatly in terms of populations served, communities, organizational structures, and logistics. Therefore, successful “scaling up” of a project like CHISPA is more likely to be accomplished through a process of adaptation rather than one of replication, since customizing the program to local context is a key factor that contributes to success. This requires careful attention to context and considerable planning, even when expanding a strong, successful program, to ensure that new contexts are taken into account.

Hi Cheryl and CHISPA team, thanks for sharing this great video! You have assembled a very impressive and impactful slate of partners for this project. Can you talk a bit about some of the challenges you encountered, if any, in developing and sustaining a collaborative model that involves multiple organizations who have not collaborated before?

CHISPA has accomplished a lot clearly. What have you learned about the struggles that after-school educators face in learning the materials and then turn-key teaching to children? Relatedly, what have you all learned about how to deal with turnover in after-school sites? Has that impacted the program's ability to sustain in those sites?

What a great program engaging parents and children together in science! What were some of the key activities you did to ensure that parents would attend the workshops, and use what they learned to play with their children?

What an impressive program. So many transferable lessons and resources. What are you finding about interactions around science at home for parents engaged in programs or workshops? DO these parents receive support (in addition to information) to try at-home STEM activities with their kids or to engage in conversations about the STEM in their world? 

I think it is great that this program gets families and parents involved in the STEM activities while creating bridges in culture and education. The hands-on, interactive, bi-lingual, and bi-cultural aspects of the program push the bounds of great STEM learning! 

First, thanks to H Chad, Jamie, Kalie, Preeti, Doris, Jennifer and Jessica for your thoughtful comments and probing questions over the past couple of days. We appreciate that you have taken time in a busy week to learn more about CHISPA.  I have to admit here that this discussion format is not an environment that I find to be easy or comfortable, but I am trying to take a lesson from the CHISPA families who trusted us enough to say "Si!" when we invited them to visit and explore our museums. While about 54% of the families had never visited the museum before, more than three-quarters rated the activities as very educational, agreed strongly that the event provided opportunities to learn about interesting science topics, agreed strongly that they would feel comfortable returning to the museum, and agreed strongly that they gained a greater understanding of what the museum had to offer their family. So here I am, trusting the video showcase process, and already starting to feel a little more comfortable!

The project team is very excited to have this venue be able to share CHISPA with a broader audience, and we hope that the video revealed how passionate we are about finding ways to build bridges between Hispanic families and their local science/children's museums, and to provide K-5 afterschool program leaders with resources that help them build excitement about science.  And speaking of passion, we have another video - we call it The CHISPA Journey - that I encourage you to view as well. 

Second, we are in our final year of the project, and the summative evaluation, prepared by Garibay Group, will be posted in all the right places, starting with informalscience.org, by the end of this year. It addresses the issues that have surfaced in the questions posted here, and more, and provides key findings, as well as recommendations and lessons for the field.

We will all try to respond to your questions, and would love to hear your ideas and experiences. If only we were sitting in a little cafe, drinking a cafecito, and getting to know each other before delving into the deeper questions! (That is a CHISPA strategy for bridge building, by the way!)

The additional video is inspiring Cheryl, thanks. Looking forward to the summative evaluation and to helping disseminate your findings when and where we can.

Under-representation of females and minorities in STEM careers is a topic of interest of mine. As an educator, I work hard to provide equitable learning to all of my students. Your research and the CHISPA program piqued my interest, as I am going to be teaching a Migrant Summer Program this Summer whose theme is "STEAM into the World Cup." I am currently a 5th grade math and science teacher, working on a master's degree in STEM education. I am excited to provide these children with opportunities to explore STEM activities and learning throughout the summer. I'm curious if the CHISPA program incorporates their science activities and curricula into the other disciplines as well. As I am thinking about my plans for the summer program, I am the most nervous about providing these students with authentic learning experiences that encompass math, language arts, science, and social studies as well as an emphasis in STEM. Through further investigation, I appreciate and am looking forward to researching the CHISPA resources on your website. They will be very helpful in working with families and students to ensure they are being provided with hands-on experiences throughout their short time with me. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks again Cheryl And Rebecca.  CHISPA provides a great model for learning about holistic factors that spark and sustain interest and engagement and we look forward to reading the evaluation when it becomes available.

Thanks for sharing your project. I love how CHISPA brings families, education, and museums together. There are so many incredible educational community resources that parents either do not know about or cannot readily access. Kudos on bridging that gap and doing it with bilingualism and biculturalism in mind! Any chance CHISPA will make its way to Dallas?

Hi Jiilian,

Thanks for your comments! It would be great to see CHISPA in action in Dallas, or at least a version of it. We are in the process of thinking through what that might look like now that the federal funding period is ending. Check back on the CHISPA website in a few months!