Health in Our Hands: Building and sustaining student engagement in genomic and environmental health sciences through a community-school partnership (Health in Our Hands)

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Contact PD/PI: Bayer, Irene Project Summary/Abstract This proposal requests supplemental funds for our current SEPA grant, Health in Our Hands: Building and sustaining student engagement in genomic and environmental health sciences through a community-school partnership, 1R25GM132964-01 to expand our research protocol. Health in Our Hands connects the science classroom to the community to give youth and adults an understanding of modern concepts in genetics through curricula designed to meet the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The current project is creating summative, pre/post assessments for our curriculum to measure impact of student learning. Teacher partners expressed the need for more assessments to measure student learning throughout the unit for both formative assessment purposes and requirements to have more grades measuring student performance throughout the marking period. To investigate the feasibility, embedded classroom-based assessments were developed for the first unit on diabetes adapting the Next Generation Science Assessment Group process (Harris et al) and piloted with teachers and their students. Results indicated that teachers found value in the assessments and used them in multiple ways. This supplement will primarily serve to enhance Specific Aims: #1 and #2 of our parent SEPA: 1) Assess the impact of a coherent set of place-based, technology-rich, NGSS- aligned science curriculum materials on student genomic and environmental health learning and interest in STEM careers across middle and high school grades; and 2) Conduct innovative professional learning experiences bringing together secondary teachers, informal educators, and community-based experts to support curriculum and mentoring activities by strengthening our current project through improvements in assessment of the impact of the curriculum materials on student learning and enhancing teacher data literacy. The objectives of the new component of the project will: 1) Design, test and analyze a full set of pre/post and “embedded assessments” (end of learning set assessments) for both of our middle school curricula; and 2) Build teacher data literacy to understand and use NGSS- aligned assessments. This proposal is significant as it takes place in predominantly marginalized Communities of Color experiencing opportunity gaps in state assessments and success in science overall. Our work with teachers in these schools seeks to address some of these inequalities by empowering teachers to prepare students in 3-dimensional NGSS assessment and use data to inform instruction for success in science learning.