• Biological Database Explorer
• Bringing Life to the Physical Sciences
• Hopkins Ocean Literacy Program
• Improving AP Biology Labs
• Integrating Science and Health into a Life Long Learning Journey
• Linking Mindset Theory to Effective Practices in Middle School Classrooms
• Promoting the Creative Arts in Elementary Schools and Classrooms
• Stanford Institutes of Medicine: Summer Research Program for High School Students

Biological Database Explorer
Russ B. Altman – Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics and of Medicine
Daniel Schwartz – Professor of Education

The completion of the sequencing of the human genome in 2003 by the Human Genome Project marked a major turning point in science, ushering in a new era in which vast and ever increasing amounts of genetic data are generated.  The fields of bioinformatics and computational biology have emerged in tandem with major biological databases to store, process, and analyze this explosion of data.  Students need to be aware of this new model for scientific research and to understand current genetics-related topics and practices relevant to human health.  We will design and implement a World Wide Web-based Biological Database Explorer (BDE) targeted at high school students that will function as a portal through which modern human genetics concepts will be introduced using a visual and interactive platform.  The rich information in the Pharmacogenetics and Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB), which is hosted at Stanford, will serve as the basis for the BDE.  It will enable students to learn about the relationships among genes, diseases, and the drugs that treat them.  Through hands-on exploration, students will learn how to navigate a biological database constructed to contain information that is interesting and appropriate for their age and education level.  For example, a gene involved in alcohol metabolism and a gene contributing to a common disease in teens, such as asthma, can be included in the BDE.  We will pilot-test an instructional unit utilizing the BDE in a local high school classroom, employing a combination of instructor-led guidance and hands-on explorations by students.

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Bringing Life to the Physical Sciences
Scott Delp – The Charles Lee Powell Foundation Professor of Engineering
Paul Mitiguy - Consulting Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering

The space age brought rockets and roller coasters to physics classrooms.  Advances in manufacturing motivated high-school robotics competitions around the country.  These teaching innovations inspired thousands of teenagers to learn more about physics and engineering early in their academic lives.  As we enter an era in which bioengineers are inventing revolutionary medical and environmental technologies, our goal is to bring exciting new tools into high school classrooms. We will place the world’s most advanced software for biological simulation into the hands of millions of teenagers, to inspire them to learn more about biology and physics.  All of the software and educational simulations will be freely available to teachers and students from the website of Stanford’s Center for Biomedical Computation (www.simtk.org).  The design of the educational simulations will be based on published best practices in educational simulations.  We will develop initial prototypes quickly, allowing us to develop and evaluate new educational modules with at least 100 teachers and students in the first year of the pilot project.  The expertise and experience of the team we have assembled will allow us to achieve our long-term goal: motivating thousands of young people to master the basics of physics and biology by interacting with graphical simulations of living systems.

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Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station and the Hilton Bialek Habitat (affiliated with
Carmel Unified School District) are collaborating on a program in which Hopkins graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty teach K-12 students from underserved communities in Monterey County about the oceans and marine conservation and sustainability, using a place-based, outdoor learning experience.  We call our collaboration the Hopkins Ocean Literacy Program.  The learning objectives include demonstrated student understanding of the oceans and how oceans relate to all forms of life in the watershed, as well as an increased sense of environmental stewardship, as indicated by demonstrated changes in attitudes and behaviors.  Activities will include ocean-based restoration projects, weekend ocean and watershed explorations, after-school programs, and trips to Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station.  Through our curriculum, students in communities without outdoor programs will have the opportunity to learn from nature by participating in place-based learning activities that are both informative and fun.  We will use the experience gained through this program to develop an on-line curriculum to help students, teachers, and parents to enhance their understanding of marine science and the central role healthy oceans play in the global environment.  These web-based learning tools will be hosted by Stanford and made available to teachers nationally.  We will evaluate the effectiveness of these different approaches in collaboration with colleagues at Stanford’s School of Education.

Genetic engineering and the human genome project are profoundly affecting science and society.  Simple biotechnology experiments such as PCR/gel electrophoresis have become much cheaper and more accessible, and it is now possible to teach state-of-the-art concepts to high school students.  Furthermore, biotechnology is shaping our lives in many different ways, such as genetic engineering of plants and animals and using the human genome for personalized medicine.  It is tremendously important to begin to teach genomic and biotechnology concepts to pre-college students in order for them to more fully understand how these new biological advances can inform and shape their world.  This pilot project will develop four new laboratory modules for High School AP Biology including: genetic engineering of bacteria, C. elegans genetics, DNA fingerprinting of different species, and human genome mapping.  Stuart Kim is a Genetics Professor at Stanford and will be responsible for developing the laboratory protocols.  Katherine Moser is the AP Biology teacher at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, and will use these four laboratory modules in her AP Biology class involving 185 high school students.  Two Stanford Genetics graduate students will work on developing the laboratory protocols in the Kim lab, and then will assist Ms. Moser at Gunn High School with the new experiments.  Beyond this pilot project, our goal is for these AP Biology laboratory projects to spread to other high schools in the Bay Area and then to other high schools nationwide.

Our goal is to develop and test an innovative, science-based health education module for 7th grade students that could be integrated into the regular school curriculum and also used by children, parents, and educators. In partnership with the Kennedy Middle School in Redwood City and its 300 students in grade 7, we will test a service-learning model in which Stanford students will teach a health science curriculum and a web-based adaptation of that health curriculum.  The Stanford researchers will build on previous linkages of Stanford faculty and students with the Redwood City School District. The project considers the reality of schools and the dynamics of the learning situation by testing and evaluating two different teaching strategies. Through this work, we hope to enhance educational opportunities for students from low income and under-resourced schools and communities.

Student motivation often declines during middle school, which is particularly troubling for low-income students and language minorities, and for their teachers in need of strategies to help students succeed. Stanford Psychology Professor Carol Dweck has found that changing students’ beliefs about intelligence has significant effects on their academic outcomes. Stanford School of Education Professor, Milbrey McLaughlin has found evidence suggesting that teacher-learning communities can be a significant resource for teacher professional development and are associated with gains in student achievement-related outcomes. There is, however, a need to better understand both the aspects of teacher-learning communities that might affect changes in students’ motivation to learn, and the factors that lead to sustainability of teacher-learning communities in middle schools. This relationship is an important problem to investigate in our effort to develop effective practices and tools that will transform teacher practices toward increasing student motivation to succeed.

Our long-term goal is to develop a tool-kit to guide middle schools in institutionalizing structures and practices that meet the developmental needs of all students. The objective of this project is to co-design, implement, and research school-based learning communities in Redwood City middle schools focused on instructional practices that increase student motivation. Our central hypothesis is that teachers will change classroom practices and social processes as a result of participation in learning communities. The rationale for this project is that an understanding of factors that influence change in teacher practice will form a basis for improving teacher practice and student achievement more broadly.

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(Project is Co-Funded by the Initiative on Improving K-12 Education and the Arts Initiative)

This project seeks to improve opportunities in the arts for local elementary school children by providing teachers with learning experiences in the arts and art education. It will utilize campus-wide resources and expertise in the creative arts to provide a rich and sustained professional development program for local elementary educators. It will foster an appreciation of the role the arts play in education and society, and provide teachers the arts knowledge and pedagogical skills necessary to implement arts experiences in their own classrooms. In doing so this project seeks to strengthen the capacity of local teachers and, in turn, expand opportunities and outcomes for their students. The project will offer a model for teacher professional development that will be both scalable and sustainable, one that could serve as a foundational component of the new Stanford Alliance for Instructional Excellence.

We will establish a professional development program and create a supported professional community for local teachers, for teacher candidates in the Stanford Teacher Education Program - STEP, and for Stanford students in the arts. This project will build collaborations and tap resources across campus, bridging the knowledge of elementary schools and pedagogy of STEP Elementary in the School of Education, with the creative arts expertise and programs of Stanford Lively Arts, as well as the knowledge and expertise of different arts disciplines, such as music, dance, drama, and art & art history in Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences. Teachers, students, and artists will learn together how to integrate the arts into the elementary classroom, using each other and the valuable expertise in these different departments as resources.  A fundamental goal of the project is to provide arts experiences and opportunities to schools and children frequently lacking this vital education resource.

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The Stanford Institutes of Medicine Summer Research Program (SIMR) seeks to train the next generation of researchers and to inspire and provide opportunities for diverse high school students to participate in medical research. This K-12 Initiative pilot project is aimed solely at increasing participation of under-represented minority (URM) students in SIMR, as we launch a program to recruit, support, and retain these students. We will leverage established SIMR infrastructure for soliciting applications, organizing lectures, and placing students in laboratories. In the SIMR program, students perform independent research by designing and carrying out hypothesis-driven experiments under the direct tutelage of a senior graduate student or post-doctoral fellow in a laboratory of their choice. This experience has led students to co-author papers in scientific journals (Nature Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, PNAS, Immunity, among others) as well as to win awards at the national level (Siemens and Intel Competitions).  In addition, students are given the opportunity to attend lectures, participate in field trips, and present their work at a special poster session attended by Stanford faculty and members of the local community.  SIMR also will provide critical training to graduate students and post-doctoral fellows through formal education on mentoring, lecturing to high school-level students, and science literacy. The SIMR program will serve as a model for other universities in offering high quality research experiences for high school students and in particular, for under-represented minority students.  The program goal is to increase the pipeline of these students into medical research.

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