GP-IN: GLOBE Youth Geoscientists Program

The GLOBE Youth Geoscientists (GYG) project will produce an innovative model for informal STEM education that can support transitions for diverse underserved high school students to postsecondary education and careers in the geosciences. It will provide hands-on, project-based science experiences using scientist-developed data collection protocols from the GLOBE program — Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment — to engage youth as young professionals contributing to scientific knowledge.

These experiences will be coupled with interactions with adult STEM professionals, career exploration, college preparation, and self-reflection activities, all within a safe and supportive setting. The program will help close a critical gap for students to obtain a real geosciences experience as a means to build competence, confidence, motivation, and belonging in the sciences.

In addition, college exploration and preparatory activities will support students at a critical and vulnerable transition point in their education — bridging from high school to college — by providing college and career navigation skills, tours to college campuses, opportunities to interact with college students, and links to organizations that can assist with college and financial aid applications. The aim is to support as well as inspire.

The partnership will facilitate engagement with scientists, industry professionals, and colleges, and will connect with the students’ school-year teachers by supporting senior projects and college application processes that build on the students’ summer experiences.

WestEd, together with its partners, the Lawrence Hall of Science (the Hall) and the College and Career Academy Support Network (CCASN), both at the University of California, Berkeley, will implement this project. The program will combine Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE), career development experiences, college preparation, and youth development/leadership strategies to build a replicable summer geosciences experience for rising seniors in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in California who are traditionally underrepresented in STEM careers and who might otherwise not receive important support at this critical juncture in their educational careers.

GYG leverages GLOBE’s student driven approach to science to expand past work into an informal summer learning setting. It will also create an explicit college preparation component, consistent with the goals of the IUSE: GEOPATHS initiative. The GYG program will take an ecosystem approach to supporting youth, engaging scientists and STEM professionals as critical participants in the ecosystem.

The goals of the project are as follows: 1) Create a GLOBE-infused learning-rich geoscience research experience for local students from populations underrepresented in the sciences to support their college entry and career readiness. 2) Expand the close collaboration between WestEd and CCASN to include the Lawrence Hall of Science and build capacity at the Hall to sustain GLOBE-infused programming beyond this grant. 3) Provide a model for a learning-rich geoscience experience for underserved youth that can be replicated by other informal learning organizations, in support of their local schools, offering summer learning and postsecondary preparation as well as fulfilling the policy goals of schools that promote college and career readiness. The evaluation component will help document the model’s components and processes and contribute to the knowledge base about engagement of youth from populations underrepresented in STEM, STEM career development and college-going, industry engagement, and program features that contribute to positive student outcomes.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.