- Year 2023
- NSF Award #1758465
- Registration Principal Investigator (PI)
- First Name George
- Last Name Kuster
- Discipline STEM Education (general)
- Institution Christopher Newport University
Abstract
In the summer of 2022, we served as teacher’s assistants in the four-week Newport News Summer Program for Arts, Recreation and Knowledge (SPARK). Through observing and assisting in the implementation of the lesson plans, we saw a need to edit the lesson plans in order to give more direction to the teachers who would be implementing them and make the lessons more effective and engaging for students. We found this need particularly pressing because the teachers implementing the camps may not have experience working in STEM. In order to do this, we reflected on the successes and challenges of the summer program and what parts of the lesson plans were most engaging for the students. Our edits were based on research on discovery-based learning, giving formal structure to the lessons learned in our reflective process. In December of 2022, we provided the NNPS STEM curriculum developers with redesigned lesson plans that incorporated more interactive, discovery-based concepts to be implemented in the 2023 SPARK camp.
