Cargando…

Four guiding principles for effective trainee-led STEM community engagement through high school outreach

To address ongoing academic achievement gap, there is a need for more school-university partnerships promoting early access to STEM education. During summer 2020, members of our institute initiated QBio-EDGE (Quantitative Biology—Empowering Diversity and Growth in Education), an outreach program for...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Luecke, Stefanie, Schiffman, Allison, Singh, Apeksha, Huang, Helen, Shannon, Barbara, Wilder, Catera L.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10212071/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37228029
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011072
Descripción
Sumario:To address ongoing academic achievement gap, there is a need for more school-university partnerships promoting early access to STEM education. During summer 2020, members of our institute initiated QBio-EDGE (Quantitative Biology—Empowering Diversity and Growth in Education), an outreach program for high schools in Los Angeles. In the hope of contributing to increasing diversity in academia, QBio-EDGE aims to make STEM education more accessible for students from historically excluded communities by exposing them to scientific research and diverse scientist role models. This program is led by early career researchers (ECRs), i.e., undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers. In our first year, the outreach activities took place during virtual learning, presenting challenges and opportunities within the program development. Here, we provide a practical guide outlining our outreach efforts, key factors we considered in the program development, and hurdles we overcame. Specifically, we describe how we assembled our diverse team, how we established trusting partnerships with participating schools, and how we designed engaging student-centered, problem-based classroom modules on quantitative biology and computational methods applications to understand living systems. We also discuss the importance of increased institutional support. We hope that this may inspire researchers at all career stages to engage with local schools by participating in science outreach, specifically in quantitative and computational fields. We challenge institutions to actively strengthen these efforts.