Hi Joni, Thanks for your comment! The only program component that was existing prior to the NSF INCLUDES funding, was Youth Ocean Explorers. With INCLUDES funding, we are able to expand that program, add new undergraduate curricula and internships, and create the Bridge to the Ph.D. Program. In addition to these three interventions, we are also providing mentoring, career planning, and family programming events for participants with the INCLUDES funds. We are measuring the impacts of the project in a couple of ways: (1) on participants by using pre- and post-surveys, open-ended questionnaires, and observational data to measure how these interventions and programming components support science identity construction and increased interest and engagement in STEM, and (2) on partners, by mapping new partnerships formed as a result of the project.

Thanks! It would be great (if you had the funding) to conduct a longitudinal study to see the impact on participants' future pathways in STEM. This is such an interesting project. You might be interested in another pathway project presented in the Showcase  http://includes2017.videohall.com/presentations...

I agree! And thanks, I'll check out the project you suggest! It looks really interesting.

Hi Jeanne, Thanks for your questions! In the past, Youth Ocean Explorers (YOE) has kept track of some of this information, especially for former YOE participants who go on to attend UVI. For example, we know that one young woman who participated as a high school student is now majoring in marine biology at the University of the Virgin Islands and has recently applied for one of the new internships provided by our project for Summer 2017. Moving forward, the Project Team plans to track participants through a more formalized system, but acknowledges that this will likely be difficult, especially for YOE participants and Science 100 students because of the number of students participating – numbers for the undergraduate internships and the Bridge to the Ph.D. program, are smaller, so we expect to be able to track those participants more easily. To answer your second question, at this time, we think that the basic project structure is transferable to other communities, especially those who seek to broaden and increase participation in the field sciences (though not necessarily marine sciences). But, we will learn over the course of the project, which components are most impactful and the degree to which those components are culturally- and context-specific and/or how generalizable they may be.

Thanks for your reply, Kristin. We have done a lot of work on model articulation and measuring implementation of those models (for the purpose of seeing what components are and are not working) and to see which components might be present (or working) in one place but not another. I'd be interested in knowing more, if you know yet, how you are going to be approaching these. If it is of interest, here is a link to a study we are doing on STEM school models (as an example of measuring components and impacts of components). http://outlier.uchicago.edu/s3/

Hi Jeanne, I'm not sure that we have completely figured this out yet. I look forward to reading the information you shared to see what we can learn and to see which aspects of your work we may be able to apply here!

Hello Jeanne, in addition to this project, I'm also working on another project that is exploring the impacts of components within a model. Like Kristin said, this is an area that we haven't completely figured out yet and I will be checking out the link you posted as well.

Hi Mia, Thanks for your comments and questions. Your observation is on-point - we targeted these strategic loss points intentionally, based on what others have learned about drop out points for students in STEM and from our own observations and past experience with students in the USVI. We purposely decided to include all three components in our project to align and reinforce project activities and hopefully, increase overall impact of the project. As a historically black college and university (HBCU) the University of the Virgin Islands is partnering with three other HBCUs through the External Advisory Board for the project (Savannah State University, Jackson State University, and Prairie View A&M University). It is our hope that these institutions (and others) will be interested in becoming Alliance partners in the next phase of the NSF INCLUDES Program.

Hi again, Kristin. I'm glad to know about involvement by advisors at other HBCUs and plans to partner with them in the next INCLUDES phase. It seems to me that you have planned this project well into the future! You mentioned in your response to Jeanne about a young woman who participated in the Youth Explorers program who is now a marine biology major. I do hope that you can continue to track the students as they go through your programs, complexities notwithstanding. I was wondering whether your project attend to the intersectionality of gender and race/ethnicity at all? Specifically, women of color are especially underrepresented in marine biology and the ocean sciences. Have you given thought to how you might uniquely support students who are girls of color or women of color in each phase of your project? Thanks.

Good morning Mia, This is an important point that our team has discussed, but not yet formally addressed for the project. I will bring this up at our next leadership meeting to see how and in what ways we might be able to do this - I suspect there may be modifications to the support programming aspects (mentoring, individualized development plans, and family programming) that could be implemented with these considerations in mind. Thanks for this thoughtful insight!

Hi Mia, I can answer one of your questions. We are tracking a number of demographics for each of our participants including gender. During this first phase we'll be looking at correlations between our different demographic groups such as male Afro-Caribbean vs female Hispanic participants within our interventions. We will also be tracking with Island (St. Croix, St. John, St. Thomas) students are from as well since that is a unique research variable for our population. Some of the interventions will have more participants than others so what the correlations between demographics look like will be a bit different (i.e. case studies for the bridge program vs larger data sets for freshman science classes).  If anyone has suggestions I would love to set up a time to chat!

Thanks, Carrie Jo and Kristin! It seems that you are being thoughtful in your data collection and analyses. My work is with women of color in STEM higher education. If I can be of help in thinking about intersectionality as you move forward, please do reach out!

Thanks Mia! We will do that!

Thank you, Jennifer!

Thank you, Olivia! I agree, it is inspiring to hear from program participants - it's my favorite and most rewarding part of the project!

Thank you Josh, we are excited to share our project with others and discuss the impact the INCLUDES community can make in STEM Education. 

Thank you Josh! Marilyn and I are looking forward to the April INCLUDES conference.

Caitlin, 

That's great! It's exciting to see the different ways our projects intersect as parts of our teams meet at the different conferences. 

Chris,

It would be great to be able to introduce students from across the country to the Virgin Islands Community and vice versa. We are using a variety of published instruments, like the Is Science Me? assessment (Aschbacher, P. R., Li, E., & Roth, E. J. (2010). Is science me? High school students’ identities, participation and aspirations in science, engineering, and medicine. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 47(5), 564-582), observations, and open-ended questionnaires that we are developing. We are also mapping when, and with which aspects of the project, connections between partners are made in an effort to identify our collective impact. 

Hi Carrie Jo! I'm very glad to learn about the Is Science Me? instrument. Thank you for sharing the reference! If you are sharing your other instruments, I'd love to learn about them.

Hi Mia,

The rest of our instruments are currently in development. We are developing and observation protocol that we can train observers to use to mark peer, student-instructor/leader/mentor, and student-environment interactions. It is based off of an observation protocol from an other project and we will inquire about sharing permissions depending on stage of publishing it is in. In general, if researchers are looking for specific types of instruments these sites: http://www.pearweb.org/atis/dashboard/index & http://stelar.edc.org/resources are great resources. You can search the instruments based on your needs. I'd also love to talk with anyone about the instruments they use. 

Good morning, Ms. Lake-King! Thank you for taking the time to view our video! We are so excited about the project and the impacts it will have on UVI students and the greater USVI community.

Good morning Janice! Thank you for your comments and question. The title of the program was intended to do just what you describe - to have students envision the future they want for themselves and go out and seize it. To answer your question, we hope to learn while doing the project, which aspects can be scaled and which may be transferable to other communities and institutions. We think that much of what we will learn will be transferable to other HBCUs especially, which is why we have partnered with three additional HBCUs as part of our External Advisory Board for the project. We hope to partner with the in the Alliance phase of the INCLUDES program, as well as other launch pilots that have a similar focus on how hands-on, place-based, field experiences can contribute to building science identity and increased interest and engagement in STEM.

Thank you, Cathy! Great to know that Penn State is also part of the InTeGrate project and we will look to see how we may be able to connect with them through the Bridge Program this summer. What a great connection, thank you! To answer your question, we are working with four amazing scientists at Penn State - Monica Medina (Co-PI), Iliana Baums, Roberto Iglesias-Prieto, and Joe Pollock (all senior personnel). They are all accomplished coral reef experts who bring a diversity of experiences and perspectives on coral reefs to our students - we are excited to be working with them!

Thank you!

I agree! I am grateful for their expertise on the project.

Hi Sandra, Yes! Provost McKayle's comment really gets to the core of this project. We are lucky to have her leadership!

Hi Allie! Thank you for your comments!  I agree that our projects have a lot in common, especially because of their place-based, geoscience foci. Dr. Musavi and I talked about this both at the PI and San Diego INCLUDES conferences! It was a lot of fun to hear about what you're doing in Maine and across the country through your project. One long-term goal of SEAS Your Tomorrow is to have continuity across project components - ultimately, we would like our middle and high school students coming to UVI to pursue marine science degrees, participating in the internships we offer, and applying to and graduating from our Masters program before going on to pursue a Ph.D. And yes, we have thought about expanding the Youth Ocean Explorers program to include more structured offerings throughout the academic year. This is in the project plan as something to explore in Year 2 of the grant. I would like to talk with you more about how your year-long program works. I think our project lead for Youth Ocean Explorers, Howard Forbes, Jr., would be interested too. In terms of engaging community partners, we have tried to facilitate activities and roles that involve them across all three components of the project, so there are mutually-aligned and reinforced activities and so they feel vested in whole project success rather than any one particular effort.