NIMHD Science Education Initiative: K-12 Science Education Initiative

描述（由申请人提供）：为少数族裔和未被充分代表的学生引入并提高他们对科学的兴趣建立渠道，除亚裔美国人外，少数族裔在科学和工程领域获得学士、硕士和博士学位的人数低于其在人口中的比例。然而，少数族裔的孩子似乎比白人孩子对科学更感兴趣。因此，我们必须假设在孩子的成长阶段发生了一些事情，而这些事情并没有增强他们对科学的早期兴趣。为了解决这个问题，我们建议开发一个新的课程，教育和促进青少年科学（EASY 1-2-3），当它完全发展后，将从幼儿园开始，并将持续到12年级，以激发孩子们对科学的兴趣。课程将是多媒体的，使用起来很有趣，很有趣。它还将关注学生感兴趣的一个特定领域，即人体，这是学生可以联系到的。我们的目标是开始向12所学校介绍我们的课程，从6年级到10年级开始，在四个国家市场：巴吞鲁日，洛杉矶，学校是种族混合的；加州洛杉矶，拉美裔学生占学生的大多数；新奥尔良，洛杉矶，那里的学校种族混合，但非洲裔美国人占很小的优势；在俄克拉荷马城，那里的学校是种族混合的，但也有很大一部分美国印第安人的孩子。我们计划先在每个市场每所学校的5名学生中试点我们的课程，在此期间解决任何问题，然后在每个市场每所学校的10名学生中试点。在项目的第三年结束时，我们计划在所有小学、初中和高中年龄段的儿童中全面推出课程，每所学校选择多达30名学生，如果有兴趣，就向不同的学校开放。该研究的第二个部分是向学生的家庭和社区成员提供补充学生所接受的人类健康知识的材料。我们的目标是确定该课程是否提高了学生对科学的兴趣，如他们在课堂上参与科学项目，增加了与家人和社区成员关于科学的讨论，并最终决定追求科学事业。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Building a Pipeline for Introducing and Increasing Interest in Science for Minority and Underrepresented Students Minorities, other than Asian Americans, earn fewer bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in science and engineering fields than their proportion in the population. Yet minority children seem to be even more interested in science than their white counterparts. Thus, we must assume that something happens during the children's formative years that do not reinforce their early interest in science. To remedy this, we propose to develop a new curriculum, Educating and Advancing Science in Youth (EASY 1-2-3), that, when fully developed, will begin in kindergarten and will continue through 12th grade to stimulate children's interest in science. The curriculum will be multimedia, fun to use, entertaining and interesting. It also will focus on a particular area of interest, the human body, something to which students can relate. Our aim is to start introducing our curriculum to 12 schools, beginning with 6th-10th grades, in four national markets: Baton Rouge, LA, where schools are racially mixed; Los Angeles, CA, where Hispanics make up the majority of students; New Orleans, LA, where schools are racially mixed but there is a small predominance of African Americans; and in Oklahoma City, OK, where the schools are racially mixed, but also include a significant proportion of American Indian children. We plan to pre-pilot our curriculum to five students per school in each market, work out any problems during this period, then pilot it to 10 students per school in each market. At the end of the third year of the project, we plan to do a full rollout of the curriculum to children at all elementary, middle and high school age groups, select as many as 30 students per school, and, if there is interest, open it to different schools. A secondary part of the study is to offer material that is complementary to what the students receive on human health to the students' families and members of the communities. Our goal is to determine if this curriculum increases student interest in science, as indicated by their participation in science projects in class, increased discussions with family and community members about science and, ultimately, their decision to pursue a scientific career. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: EASY 1-2-3 Building a Pipeline for Introducing and Increasing Interest in Science for Minority and Underrepresented Students Educating and Advancing Science in Youth (EASY) 1-2-3 is an educational project to present a science curriculum to K-12 students that will interest them through use of information related to the structure and function of the human body. The goal of the program is to increase under-represented minorities in science by exciting children to the science field at a young age, through use of information that the students will find entertaining and interesting. At the same time, the program will engage students' families and the community by presenting similar scientific information to them in the hopes of stimulating a dialogue among the students, their families and the community to aid in support for the students' studies and to increase adults' knowledge of health- related topics.