Data-Driven Continuous Improvement
It seems intuitive that assessing and improving science and STEM education programs should be done scientifically. How can we hope to have our students develop a firm grasp of STEM concepts and analytic and critical thinking skills without ourselves practicing these attributes in designing, assessing, and improving the STEM curriculum? Unfortunately, sometimes we don’t practice what we preach.
Too often curricular and programmatic decisions are made with vague impressions of how things “seem” to be going or anecdotal evidence with little grounding in basic statistics or experimental design. To alleviate this problem and bring more certainty to decision-making, we must begin with the collection of the proper amount of data and be able to analyze it in a practical and meaningful manner.
To this end, LabLearner proposes to work with the Diocese of Brooklyn in customizing and implementing a rigorous assessment and continuous improvement protocol.
LabLearner already includes statically valid assessment tools in all of our programs. As one example, formal Pre- and Post-tests demonstrate, on an individual basis, the exact increase in student achievement for each and every unit from kindergarten through eighth grade. Thus, at any point in a student’s elementary and middle school education, educators can know exactly what conceptual and cognitive gains are made by each and every student.
We propose to work with administrators and teachers to collect and analyze large amounts of data to ascertain trends and identify potential issues in STEM implementation over time (longitudinally) across the entire Diocese. Such information and its analysis will provide informed guidance to help teachers and schools involved in STEM education obtain the best student outcomes possible. Outcomes that improve over time. Consequently, the efficacy of everything from the impact of structured community partnerships to specific teacher professional development needs can be based on good, solid data and clear scientific thinking.
Critical Thinking and Cognitive Development
The importance and positive impact of high-quality STEM education should go well beyond simply the content and skills learned from the individual domains of science, technology, engineering, and math in the curriculum. Particularly when using experiential, hands-on pedagogy, the interrelationship between and logical mingling of these conjoined domains necessitates the need for, and therefore the development of, higher levels of cognitive processing. We should be able to measure and monitor gains in this sphere just as we do technical and scientific content understanding by formal testing of students or skill development in the lab.
Quality STEM education should help develop student executive functions and critical thinking (for background on executive functions see Neuropedagogy). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that similar brain structures are involved in both mathematical and scientific thinking and critical thinking and execution functions. Consequently, bringing high caliber STEM curriculum and hands-on science experiences to students can help them develop both critical thinking and other problem-solving skills.
Critical thinking is of paramount importance in today’s professional world and is only likely to become more important in the future. It is one of the most import skills in modern culture, society, and commerce. As a result, we suggest, as a component of this proposal, to collaborate with our colleagues at The Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine departments of Radiology and Neuroscience in designing and implementing grade-level executive functions and critical thinking assessments and studies as a component of our collaboration with the Diocese of Brooklyn. With such tools, we will be able to determine directly and quantitatively the impact of LabLearner STEM interventions on the cognitive development and thinking skills of all students involved in the program.
LabLearner research director, Dr. Keith Verner, is formally a full professor of Pediatrics and Cellular and Molecular Physiology at PSU College of Medicine and Chief of Developmental Pediatrics and Learning. He continues this line of work primarily with his colleague Dr. Paul Eslinger, Professor of Neurology at the medical school and editor-in-chief of The Journal of Social Neuroscience. Dr. Eslinger will collaborate with LabLearner in this aspect of the proposal.
A recent short public talk by Drs. Verner and Eslinger, briefly highlighting the impact of education on fluid intelligence, executive functions, and critical thinking is shown below.
Systems Integration
We highly recommend that a coordinated approach to assessment and data-driven continuous improvement be a component of the Diocese of Brooklyn’s STEM initiative. This system should be interactive and integrated with existing Diocese-wide data systems.
The time to initiate this aspect of the Diocese’s STEM initiative is now so that baseline information from new LabLearner schools can meaningfully be integrated into the database and used for future formative and summative programmatic assessments. LabLearner proposes to work with Diocese administrators and data/technology personnel to get a robust assessment and data-driven continuous improvement system in place.