1. Is the study specifically on the impact of positive growth mindset activities and the interest of girls in STEM subject disciplines? If so, do you have any results to date?

2. How are you approaching scale within the project, e.g. how many teachers/students are part of the project?

Hi Jennie - thanks for your questions. 

1. Growth mindset and interest in STEM are 2 indicators. We have baseline data and will publish our year-end growth within a month or so. We are also measuring achievement in STEM subject for students, and teachers and each teacher in the project contributes their own action research on using a research-based recommendation in their own classrooms. 

2. We have 14 core teachers in 7 school districts - most from very rural, isolated locations. in Year 2, we added 7 more teachers from 4 additional districts and we anticipate adding about 5 more teachers (3 districts) in year 3. This will help us reach about 50% of the districts we serve in Southwest Washington. 

1. We also have goals to increase student achievement in math and science and teacher content knowledge in STEM disciplines. We have not yet collected all of data on change in mindset and interest in STEM.  We are currently collecting that information as the school year winds down. 

The one of the most beneficial parts of the project has been the teacher visits to local STEM business and increased career awareness with a focus on the skills needed. Teachers were also able to bring real world/local STEM projects into their classroom instruction.

2. The grant serves district with high economic needs and started with very small remote districts with few teachers and few students.  We had funds to add more teachers this year from larger districts and had 18 teachers involved in the project. This summer we are going to look into scaling up the project to reach more teachers and impact more students. 

We have a 20 question Mindset Survey that our grant evaluator has located for us.  We also have an interest in STEM survey.  We should have data by the end of this summer.  I will check with our evaluator to find out more about where these were developed.

Ben, Here are the links to the survey we are using.  teachers found it easier on the students if we would change the name to mindset survey and not use mindset quiz.

This is a PDF version that also shows the scoring and categories: http://www.edpartnerships.org/sites/default/files/events/2016/02/Mindset%20Quiz.pdf

Here's the citation for the STEM survey: Friday Institute for Educational Innovation (2012). 

Middle/High School Student Attitudes toward STEM Survey. Raleigh, NC: Author.

 And here's the full article with all the items:

https://eval.fi.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Student-Attitudes-toward-STEM-ASEE13-ERM-Final.pdf

Thanks very much for sharing these tools! The STEM survey seems enormous. Have there been issues convincing students to stay with it?

We narrowed the STEM survey down to 26 questions from the link above. 

And as of this week, we realize we may need to tweak the language as we expand the program into lower elementary grades. 

Thanks. Very interesting!

Hi Barbara

We have developed a teacher self-implementation rubric that is aligned to our theory of action and what we would expect to see of teachers, students and curriculum from a basic-proficient-distinguished framework. We can look at this data and compare to student interest in STEM career data. 

Hi Laura. After our site visits, teachers develop classroom instructional materials and then invite our female (and male) STEM mentors into the class as content experts, to talk about career options and to mentor small groups of students. Our program covers 6 counties, and so far we've found mentors in each. Sometimes, mentors Skype or ZOOM into rural classrooms, and we help facilitate that technology. 

In addition to Sue's response below, we also partner with state and federal agencies such as Fish & Wildlife and the US Army Corps, and in the planning stages for next year are agricultural sciences, animation technicians and advanced manufacturing. These are more prevalent in our rural areas. We've found that students in all locations need more explicit examples of what STEM careers represent- and for girls, defining what their STEM-relevant skills are. Nearly all of our industry partners thus far have expressed deep interest in connecting more with teachers and students, and we certainly don't lack for community support across Southwest Washington and the Portland Metro area. We try to dig into our local 'STEM ecosystem' and look for businesses that are out-of-the-box...we've actually visited a box company to learn how robotics supports manufacturing! 

Hi Mary - all of our teachers just presented yesterday on their year-long action research. We ask them to choose from the Recommendations presented on Page 9 of this document Encouraging Girls in Math and Science and craft a research question. One example is a teacher in Ridgefield, WA who's question was "Will creating a growth mindset increase students’ perseverance when faced with a challenge?" She collected multiple forms of data, including using our Growth Mindset Survey (based on Dweck's work) and also measured time it took for her students (disaggregated by gender) to ask for help on a problem. Overall, student 'perseverance time' increased over the course of the research, while interestingly growth mindset mostly stayed the same. This has led her to pursue additional research questions based on the explicitness of her teaching mindset moves. He hope to share all teacher findings toward the end of the project via our website. 

Thank you for watching and taking the time to hear about our approach! 

Hi Kip - we use the DTAMS Assessment from Louisville. We chose geometry and physical science as our test domains for growth. We assessed teachers in the summer of 2015, and we will assess in the spring of 2018. Anecdotally, we hear a great deal on how much content they are learning from our career-related site visits. Just like students, it places STEM in the context of authentic application.