ABOUT MAINE SCIENCECORPS
The Maine ScienceCorps links University of Southern Maine bioscience graduate students and faculty with rural high school science students and teachers
How does this science education outreach program operate?
What are the benefits of Maine ScienceCorps to the USM bioscience graduate students?
What are the benefits of Maine ScienceCorps to the Maine high school classes?
In what ways does the Maine ScienceCorps program contribute to excellence in science education?
How are high school classes and USM research laboratories collaborating on bacteriophage discovery?
How does Maine ScienceCorps reflect the educational, research, and public service priorities at USM?
Who are the people and schools involved with Maine ScienceCorps?
What is the Maine ScienceCorps?
The Maine ScienceCorps connects science teachers and students at rural high schools with the biosciences research community of the University of Southern Maine (USM) and the Education Division of the Foundation for Blood Research (FBR). Grant support (NSF, DGE-0086341 and DGE- 0440560) from the highly successful National Science Foundation program, NSF GRADUATE TEACHING FELLOWS IN K-12 EDUCATION (GK-12), along with significant USM contributions have allowed the Maine ScienceCorps since 2001 to address critical needs for active laboratory-based learning in science classrooms of rural high schools across Maine . During the first five years, ScienceCorps provided NSF and USM sponsored fellowships for 29 biosciences graduate students and established a strong connection of the USM scientific community with rural high schools across Maine by providing many laboratory based active learning experiences to about 5,000 high school students. The interactions typically involve graduate Fellows bringing activities aligned with Maine 's science education standards (The Maine Learning Results) along with needed equipment and materials into the schools as a part of eight to ten classroom laboratory sessions distributed through the school year.
During the first four years, the graduate Fellows were from USM's Department of Applied Medical Sciences and the program emphasized molecular biology, immunology, microbiology, epidemiology, and biotechnology. Currently the project is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary as Fellows from the Department of Biological Sciences have also been recruited. Through increased collaboration of Fellows and faculty with diverse interests, a more interdisciplinary graduate experience is provided. While rural high school students and teachers benefit from enhanced laboratory-based learning opportunities and strong links to the USM scientific community, the graduate student experience is enriched through development of effective teaching and communication skills along with understanding of the positive impact that involved scientists can have in K-12 science education. ScienceCorps laboratory activities are increasingly based on inquiry and discovery as the work in the high school classrooms is frequently modeling a research process related to ongoing research in USM laboratories and to the curriculum of USM graduate courses. An article in the winter 2004 issue of Focus on Microbiology Education (pages 6-8) describes some of the work of ScienceCorps during the first four years of the program and is available electronically at http://www.bioquest.org/asm_newsltr_winter04.pdf .
Since the inception of the ScienceCorps program, graduate fellows have been required to participate in weekly class sessions that have provided laboratory training and discussion of outreach activities. During the fifth year of the program, the need to further support communication and teamwork has also been accentuated by the increasingly interdisciplinary interests of program participants. To meet the challenges of more effectively engaging collaboration across distance and disciplines, a new graduate course called Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Research and Education was introduced in the fall of 2005 with the theme of Ecology and Evolution of Health and Disease. The course involves active participation of graduate fellows, USM faculty, and the Coordinator of ScienceCorps as well as distance learning opportunities for the participating high school teachers. Planning new inquiry and laboratory based classroom activities and revision of existing ScienceCorps outreach education activities emphasizing inquiry-learning, as well as developing activities which can lead to individualized research projects in the classroom is a major component of this course. It is also regarded as an early step in more clearly defining the role of the University of Southern Maine in the surrounding community starting with the on-going activities of the Maine ScienceCorps program and its outreach to science classes in rural Maine high schools. There is a growing commitment at USM to fostering additional science learning opportunities both for high school students and their teachers which can occur both in the rural schools and at the University facilities through the development of a new Center for Research Experiences and Active Learning in the Sciences which is currently being planned.
How does this science education outreach program operate?
ScienceCorps fellows in teams of two make eight to ten visits annually to twelve participating high schools widely distributed across the state where they present scenario or case history based activities involving nucleic acids, proteins, microbes, viruses, human disease, immune responses, population studies, and ecological relationships. The fellows are challenged to balance outreach activities with ongoing graduate course work and research. The selection committee seeks exceptional student scientists to become ScienceCorps Fellows. Most teams of fellows are assigned to work with teachers and students at two participating high schools. Some of the schools are 200-300 miles from USM and consequently involve overnight stays for the fellows. Extensive communication between the fellows and the cooperating teachers facilitate the integration of the planned activities into the curriculum and promote the necessary team interactions. In the classrooms every student is directly involved in performing the laboratory tasks themselves and in interpreting the results. In this way the ScienceCorps program seeks to provide active laboratory-based learning experiences beyond the usual high school class activities and to stimulate interest in and understanding of how research scientists approach study of the natural world.
What are the benefits of Maine ScienceCorps to the USM bioscience graduate students?
ScienceCorps has contributed greatly to the educational experience of graduate students by:- Providing them with authentic laboratory based teaching experiences in high school science classrooms
- Encouraging them to plan, critique and implement complex laboratory activities which challenge the high school students to gather and critically analyze laboratory data
- Allowing the students to serve as scientific role models as they bring advanced laboratory activities into rural classrooms in Maine.
- Refining the communication skills needed for research presentations as well as for the high school community and gaining the ability to effectively convey complex scientific concepts and topics to peers as well as to people in the community who do not have an extensive science background. The teaching experience they gain is more varied than that of most university teaching assistants.
- Providing experience in planning and implementation of learning activities relevant to their future roles in the professoriate and in collaboration with science education at all levels throughout their careers.
- Having opportunities for professional development including grant writing, attendance at scientific meetings and preparing presentations.
- Acquiring understanding of the roles science professionals can have in support of K-12 education
- Increasing insight into the challenges of instruction promoting the learning of sophisticated scientific concepts
- Gaining skills in design and implementation of active learning strategies at the appropriate level of complexity for the student learners
- Gaining experience in forming a variety of collegial relationships involving both scientific and educational collaborators
- Understanding graduate scientific education in a more interdisciplinary context
What are the benefits of Maine ScienceCorps to the high school classes?
Students in Maine high schools have the opportunity to:- Interact with at least two graduate student scientists regularly and sometimes with their faculty advisors throughout the school year
- Experience a sampling of laboratory methods that are used throughout bioscience and medical research.
- See how their high school science classes are related to the Maine scientific research community
- Consider how scientific knowledge contributes to their own understanding of the natural world
- Gain information about the demands and rewards of scientific careers
- Gain awareness of the scientific topics and issues that surround them in society and how scientists gain understanding of these topics
- Gain hands-on experience with the laboratory methods which are brought into their classrooms
- Become more a part of the Maine scientific community as they interact with the ScienceCorps fellows and university researchers thus reducing the scientific isolation that many science teachers experience
- Form on-going research collaborations with university researchers with opportunities for attending scientific conferences with USM graduate fellows and researchers to present information both about their research and/or the ScienceCorps project itself
In what ways does the Maine ScienceCorps program contribute to excellence in science education?
The Maine ScienceCorps experience and the creativity of the fellows in linking current research projects to active learning in high school classrooms provide both opportunities to evaluate successful teaching strategies and essential knowledge concerning limitations and challenges with this approach. Surveys indicate that
- the scenario-based lab activities have stimulated the interest of most student participants
- teachers report an overwhelmingly positive contribution of ScienceCorps to their classes
- student surveys corroborate teacher impressions that some students are influenced to aspire to science-related majors when they go to college.
- teachers have noticed that students who are not highly ranked academically and have generally been considered among the less motivated students show increased interest in science.
All of this reflects the value of hands-on active learning for these students. The ScienceCorps experience illustrates that bringing active learning into the classroom through laboratory-based activities is quite valuable, but there is also the goal of bringing truly inquiry-based activities linked to selected research projects of the USM research community. One such project links a series of activities to the search for new bacteriophages in the environment. The project not only conveys knowledge of basic virology and microbiology but also engages students in learning about tools of molecular biology (PCR, molecular cloning methods, restriction endonuclease digestion, electrophoresis, gene sequencing, and bioinformatics for comparing DNA sequences with those in sequence databases) as well as gaining fundamental understanding of ecological interactions of living organisms.
How are high school classes and USM research laboratories collaborating on bacteriophage discovery?
ScienceCorps fellows have also provided support for the efforts of several teachers who are working to develop research projects and collaborations that can involve their high school students. Establishing small-scale collaborative research projects that actively involve students at selected schools reflects the long-term goal of creating opportunities for the high school students to experience authentic scientific inquiry. Among the twelve participating high schools, some provide special opportunities in biotechnology education as part of the curriculum or as voluntary after school activities, and one has an on-going research class. Faculty scientists and some ScienceCorps graduate students at USM are currently engaged in a collaborative research project with teachers and students at these high schools seeking to discover, identify, and characterize previously unstudied marine bacteriophages and their host bacteria. There are a variety of questions associated with this project:
- Can unknown bacteriophages be found in natural water sources? Is it difficult to find them? How can we know that they are, indeed, newly discovered and unstudied?
- What role might phages have in controlling populations of bacteria in those waters?
- How is the population of a bacteriophage affected by the environmental conditions?
- Do phage populations and bacterial populations fluctuate seasonally or by location?
- How do bacteria and bacteriophages influence nutrient cycling and important biochemical process such as degradation of chitin in the marine environments?
Students in an after school biotechnology research club at Skowhegan Area High School in 2003, in biotechnology classes at Capital Area Technology Center (Augusta), in a research class at Dexter High School and in a biology classes at Stearns High School (Millinocket) and Messalonskee High School (Oakland) have worked to isolate bacteriophages from environmental sources. Students participating in this research project gain basic experience in research and learn both research methods and about the abundance and importance of bacteriophages in the environment. The collaborating teachers and graduate fellows have presented and will continue to present their findings as well as their perspectives on this collaborative research and education project at scientific meetings. The recent acquisition of a transmission electron microscope with tomography capabilities at USM adds the important opportunity for ScienceCorps Fellows and the high school students they work with to observe the morphology of the newly discovered bacteriophages.
How does Maine ScienceCorps reflect the educational, research, and public service priorities at USM?
University science faculty and administrators view the ScienceCorps program as highly congruent with university educational, research, and public service priorities. Consequently the university is sharing in financial support of the ScienceCorps program and is seeking to sustain the program as an integrated component of graduate education in the sciences. Through collaboration in education and sometimes in research, the Maine ScienceCorps provides a bridge between science education in Maine 's secondary schools and its largest public regional comprehensive university. Targeted enhancement of research capacity at USM is linked to the educational priorities of providing for Maine a scientifically and technologically literate workforce that will contribute to regional economic development and diversity. It is increasingly recognized that to fully foster development of a scientifically and technologically educated citizenry, the university scientific community must form partnerships with K-12 educators that will help in the preparation of new generations of citizens for higher education and for a future that is technologically and scientifically demanding. The Maine ScienceCorps program and other initiatives involving partnership with secondary school science education are creating an environment for faculty in which scientific research, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and responsiveness to community and societal needs are all encouraged and rewarded. Through collaborations such as this, it is expected that all participants will benefit and improvements in the quality of teaching and learning will be evident in both university classrooms and partner secondary schools.
Who are the people and schools involved with Maine ScienceCorps?
| Staff | ||
| Principal Investigator: | S. Monroe Duboise, Ph. D., Applied Medical Sciences, USM | |
| Co-Principal Investigators: |
Walter Allan, M.D., Foundation for Blood Research Ah-Kau Ng, Ph. D., Applied Medical Sciences, USM Stephen Pelsue, Ph. D., Applied Medical Sciences, USM |
|
| Project Coordinator: | Gail Fletcher, Ph. D | |
|
Collaborating Partners Foundation for Blood Research University of Southern Maine |
||
| Biographies of ScienceCorps Participants | ||
| Participants 2005-2006 | ||
| Fellows | Department | Faculty Mentor |
| Katie Avener | Applied Medical Sciences | Douglas Thompson |
| Adam Bemis | Biology | Douglas Currie |
| Adam Curtis | Applied Medical Sciences | Stephen Pelsue |
| Alexa Dayton | Biology | Jeff Walker, Terry Theodose |
| Melissa Hamel | Applied Medical Sciences | Monroe Duboise |
| Jen Jamison | Applied Medical Sciences | Monroe Duboise |
| Michael Johnson* | Applied Medical Sciences | Ah-Kau Ng |
| Jon Letendre | Applied Medical Sciences | Ah-Kau Ng, Monroe Duboise |
| Kim Newcomb | Applied Medical Sciences | Stephen Pelsue |
| Jen Walker | Applied Medical Sciences | Doug Thompson, Stephen Pelsue |
| Schools and Towns | Teachers | Team of Fellows |
| Capital Area Technical Center Augusta |
Luci Levesque | Kim Newcomb, Jen Walker |
| Caribou High School Caribou |
Carol Thibodeau | Katie Avener, M. Johnson* |
| Central Aroostook Jr.-Sr. High School, Mars Hill |
William Lowell | Katie Avener, M. Johnson* |
| Dexter Regional High School Dexter |
Regina Herrick, Alyson Saunders | Adam Bemis, Melissa Hamel |
| Katahdin High School Sherman Station |
Rowena Harvey, Jim Willard | Jen Jamison, Jon Letendre |
| Limestone Community School Limestone |
Bob Hancock | Katie Avener, M. Johnson* |
| Medomak Valley High School Waldoboro |
Pam Ramsey | Kim Newcomb, Jen Walker |
| Messalonskee High School Oakland |
Paul Nelson, Susan Robe | Adam Bemis, Melissa Hamel |
| Oxford Hills Comp. High School South Paris |
Ann Speth, Stacie Hanscom | Kim Newcomb, Jen Walker |
| Poland High School Poland |
Michelle Garcia, Derek Latham | Adam Curtis, Alexa Dayton |
| Skowhegan Area High School Skowhegan |
Barbara Toner | Adam Curtis, Alexa Dayton |
| Stearns High School Millinocket |
David Wilkins | Jen Jamison, Jon Letendre |
* fall semester only