Wonderful. Hello, everyone. We're so excited to tell
you about our work today on the Oklahoma Science Project. So my name's Kate
LaChance, not Emily Kerr. But this is our team. We're all actually
part of this GSAS. And most of us, all of us are
pursuing our PhDs the sciences. I'm in the
bioinformatics program. And I'm in the biological and
biomedical sciences program. So as you may or
may not know or you may have noticed from the first
presentation in this room, Oklahoma is in a crisis right
now
and really is in need of K through 12 education. So this is just a plot showing
how much K through 12 education has been cut in
the last 10 years. So that represents
over a billion dollars of money that hasn't been
going to students in Oklahoma. And actually if we look
at the numbers right now, Oklahoma spends about
$8,000 per student per year compared to Massachusetts,
$16,000 per year. Moreover of that money
that's available, $0 are specifically
allocated for STEM education. And all these fun
ding cuts
have led to Oklahoma schools-- 20% of them are
closed one day a week. So they're only open
four days a week due to this funding situation. So all of this funding cuts
has led to a dramatic need for teachers in the state. So there are about
500 teaching vacancies currently in the
state of Oklahoma. And they've issued over 1,400
emergency certifications, which means that educators can be
teaching high school science and not have a science
degree themselves. And in fact, this has led to
a
larger class sizes, fewer courses offered. And this has most acutely
affected high school science, math, and middle school math. So is this affecting
the students? You might assume yes. And you would be correct. So this is plot. We're scientists. I have to show the data. So this is a plot of
ACT scores from 2018. In gray you can see the
national average of students across four core competencies. And in blue is the
Oklahoma number. So they're falling behind in
all four core competencies. And jus
t really horrifying
everyone in the room. Only 16% of Oklahoma
seniors are meeting all four of these college
readiness benchmarks. And 42% of students meet none
of these college readiness benchmarks. And this is in the
context that Oklahoma leads the nation for STEM
jobs available for workers with some college education. So what are we going to do? So obviously, I would
call this a crisis. And we wanted to
see if there was something we could
do to try to remedy some of these deficiencies. What w
e wanted to do was
create a resource that could be available
to students who might be interested in
science but really are not able to pursue it through their
normal educational trajectory, because maybe they
have teachers who don't have the
appropriate expertise, or they just don't have
access to materials. And so in order to
do that, we wanted to create a resource
that would be free and that wouldn't require access
to anything except a computer and the internet. So you don't have
to be in scho
ol. You don't have to
have a teacher. And so we built a website which
we call the Oklahoma Science Project to host a couple
of different things. So the first major component
that I want to talk about is programming lessons. So this is just sort
of an image of what our interface looks like. And if you zoom in,
you can see kind of what it looks like as you're
walking through these lessons, but the idea was that
we wanted to create, not just programming
lessons, but lessons that would be sort of co
uched
in scientific applications so that students
would be able to learn a little bit about
what coding might allow you to do in
the context of STEM rather than just kind of
learning coding in a vacuum. And of course, coding
is itself a useful skill for trying to prepare
for the STEM job market. So we've been doing some
beta testing with students through several different
enrichment programs. So at about 10% of the students
that we've worked with actually already have some experience
with this p
articular coding language. And in general, we've been
finding pretty good ratings that students seem
to like the content and to understand the
content pretty well. So we're feeling pretty
encouraged by that. And then the other main
component of the website is we have a blog. And the idea of the
blog was that we wanted to create a space, where
Oklahomans, who've successfully transitioned into STEM
careers could tell their story about how it would inspire them
to do that, what trajectory they took
, and how they
funded their education, so things that might
be really useful for us for students in
Oklahoma to know. So as I mentioned,
we've currently been running these through
mostly enrichment programs that are around kind of
the Harvard area. But of course, what
we really want to do is bring this back to Oklahoma. And so this is something
that we're really hoping that our HILT
funding can help us with. So we're really excited to
have that as a resource. And so we're actually
currently in t
alks with the Oklahoma State
Department of Education, as well as some Native
American tribes. And in particular, we're
interested in rural school districts that are
kind of the hardest hit by some of these
educational discrepancies. So with that, thank
you for your attention. Please visit our
website, contact us. We would love to hear from you.
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