GSE/COM: Telling STEM Stories through Content Clips

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This project assembles and distributes a digital collection of multimedia clips and online activities to highlight careers, challenge stereotypes, and introduce strong role models. The STEM Stories collection facilitates children's exploration of the lives and work of a diverse group of women through a combination of career-related content and personal stories. The project builds on the outcomes and insights of two prior NSF-funded research projects that resulted in the Telling Our Stories: Women in Science CD-ROM and the Content Clips web system environment, which was developed through the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) program. The primary audience is girls in Grades 4-8 and the educators that interact with them, in both formal and informal settings where computers with Internet access are available.Intellectual Merit--The STEM Stories collection offers in-depth, multidimensional profiles of 12 women with diverse careers, through a combination of online interviews, virtual field trips, personal photos, and interactive investigations that reflect their lives and work interests. This collection also includes text biographies of more than 200 women and their accomplishments in STEM fields, along with web links, photos, and other media. Prior research identifying key factors that influence children's attitudes toward STEM content and careers will inform the design of this project. These factors include the continued importance of positive role models to counteract the persistence of negative cultural stereotypes. To address these influences, this project updates high-value content from a popular but outdated CD-ROM and integrates it with new multimedia materials. It combines these elements within a unique, dynamic online environment, to capitalize on the features and flexibility of current technology and to freely distribute the resulting collection to a wide audience.Broader Impacts--The Content Clips web environment system supports the distribution of additional profiles, research papers, and gender equity materials from other organizations. It also allows users to add personal web links to their own customized resource sets. Evaluation is focusing on rural and urban classrooms and an after-school outreach program for at-risk girls. The compelling content also appeals to a broad audience, including boys in Grades 4 - 8, high school and college students, parents, and other interested adults, such as researchers and curriculum developers in gender equity and STEM education fields. The STEM Stories collection is distributed through the Content Clips web site and promoted to appropriate organizations, outreach programs, museums, science centers, and educator groups, through press releases, articles, web links, conferences, workshops, web seminars, and publications, including outreach activities and events sponsored by the NSDL.