Abstract
We present NetSci High, our NSF-funded educational outreach program that connects high school students who are underrepresented in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics), and their teachers, with regional university research labs and provides them with the opportunity to work with researchers and graduate students on team-based, year-long network science research projects, culminating in a formal presentation at a network science conference. This short paper reports the content and materials that we have developed to date, including lesson plans and tools for introducing high school students and teachers to network science; empirical evaluation data on the effect of participation on students’ motivation and interest in pursuing STEM careers; the application of professional development materials for teachers that are intended to encourage them to use network science concepts in their lesson plans and curriculum; promoting district-level interest and engagement; best practices gained from our experiences; and the future goals for this project and its subsequent outgrowth.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Project 2061: Science for all Americans. Oxford University Press, New York (1990)
Barabási, A.-L.: Linked: How everything is connected to everything else and what it means. Plume (2002)
Blansky, D., Kavanaugh, C., Boothroyd, C., Benson, B., Gallagher, J., Endress, J., Sayama, H.: Spread of academic success in a high school social network. PLOS ONE 8(2), e55944 (2013)
Buldyrev, S., Parshani, R., Paul, G., Stanley, H.E., Havlin, S.: Catastrophic cascade of failures in coupled networks. Nature 464, 7291 (2010)
Cohen, R., Erez, K., Ben Avraham, D., Havlin, S.: Resilience of the inter-net to random breakdowns. Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 4646 (2000)
Harrington, H.A., Beguerisse-Díaz, M., Rombach, M.P., Keating, L.M., Porter, M.A.: Teach network science to teenagers. Network Science 1(2), 226–247 (2013)
Lazer, D., Pentland, A., Adamic, L., Aral, S., Barabàsi, A.-L., Brewer, D., Christakis, N., Contractor, N., Fowler, J., Gutmann, M., Jebara, T., King, G., Macy, M., Roy, D., Van Alstyne, M.: Computational social science. Science 323, 721 (2009)
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, Common Core State Standards. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, Washington D.C. (2010)
NGSS Lead States, Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. The National Academies Press, Washington, DC (2013)
Pastor-Satorras, R., Vespignani, A.: Epidemic spreading in scale free networks. Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 3200 (2001)
Sanchez, A., Brandle, C.: More network science for teenagers. arXiv:1403.3618 (2014)
Trunfio, P., Hoffman, M., Shann, M.: Partnerships between graduate fellows and Boston area high school teachers. Presented at Annual meeting of American Chemical Society, New York, September 7 (2003)
Watts, D.J.: A twenty-first century science. Nature 445(7127), 489–489 (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cramer, C., Sheetz, L., Sayama, H., Trunfio, P., Stanley, H.E., Uzzo, S. (2015). NetSci High: Bringing Network Science Research to High Schools. In: Mangioni, G., Simini, F., Uzzo, S., Wang, D. (eds) Complex Networks VI. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 597. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16112-9_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16112-9_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16111-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16112-9
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)