Science after school: way cool! A course-based approach to teaching science outreach.

OUTREACH EFFORTS DIRECTED toward improving STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) literacy are vitally important to ensure that all of our citizens are prepared to fully participate in an increasingly complex and technology-driven world. Attempts to maximize the effectiveness of STEM outreach have focused on younger populations, targeting high school, middle school, and even elementary school students. But who provides this outreach? Outreach typically originates at the university level, delivered by undergraduate and, more commonly, by graduate students, often with faculty supervising them (2, 3). These efforts often are discrete, limitedduration events. As a representative example, graduate students in the Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program at Oklahoma State University-Center for Health Sciences (OSU-CHS) provide outreach to a local elementary school in the form of an annual 3rd grade science fair. This is a week-long event that culminates each year in a poster competition. The elementary students love it. Their teachers love it. Our graduate student volunteers love engaging with the elementary students. As one of the judges of this science fair since its inception in 2008, I love it. However, I also appreciate the challenges in identifying projects for elementary students that are age-appropriate and interesting and can be completed in one or two afternoons so that the posters can be finished in time for the competition. As a result, we tend to use easy-to-conduct experiments with predictable and reliable outcomes that lead to straightforward poster presentations. Moreover, no matter how well-intentioned graduate student volunteers may be, the necessity of taking courses, conducting research, writing papers, taking exams, etc., often impedes their participation. This reinforces the need for experiments that are simple and reliable, and with minimal prep time, so that graduate students can more readily assist elementary students in conducting the experiments and, when schedule conflicts arise, step in more easily and cover for each other. Despite these issues (which undoubtedly are common in outreach efforts), our science fair is an annual tradition that we feel is sparking an interest in science in these elementary students. But this raises the question of how the people in the outreach trenches (undergraduate students, graduate students, and even faculty) learn to effectively deliver science outreach, especially to elementary students and particularly within the existing elementary science curriculum. Certainly, there are resources that can be utilized (and many are first rate); in addition, partnerships can be developed with professional societies, community groups, and elementary educators. But our experience is that outreach efforts that rely on volunteers, especially graduate student volunteers, are notoriously difficult to coordinate and sustain, and requiring additional time for training in how to deliver outreach is likely to reduce the number of volunteers. At OSU-CHS, we capitalized on our existing partnership with a local elementary school to take a different approach and developed a semester-long, for-credit course to train graduate students in delivering science outreach at the elementary level. This approach arose from the realization that although outreach has become an important part of a career in academic science, we seem to expect it of undergraduate and graduate students without actually training them in how to do it. Indeed, in a statement to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in 2016, the American Physiological Society identified “mentoring and leadership” and “educational outreach” among the key skills that graduate students should develop (1). However, it is difficult to train volunteers in providing outreach without requiring additional time. So, to achieve the longer-term commitment necessary for a meaningful training experience, we opted to give graduate students two credits toward their degree for completing the training (i.e., taking the course). This course never was intended to replace the science fair. Indeed, we take advantage of our interactions with 3rd grade students at the science fair to “recruit” them as participants for the course next year. The goals and strategies of the course are different from those of the science fair, as are the challenges and rewards, and after two semesters of serving as the course instructor, I am increasingly confident that we are onto something with this approach. Both the graduate students and the 4th graders are learning skills, science-related and otherwise, that will benefit them in their education and in their careers. Accordingly, the goal of this report is to share our experiences and the strategies we employed in the hope that others may use the information to develop their own outreach courses. In designing the course, I had an overall vision of what we wanted our graduate students to do (expose 4th graders to “everyday science,” i.e., using the scientific method for real-life problem solving) and how to go about it (pairs of graduate students, each working with two to four 4th graders during hour-long weekly meetings at the elementary school over the course of a semester, a strategy that also would allow graduate students to serve as scientific role models for the 4th graders). I developed a syllabus with an overall Address for reprint requests and other correspondence: K. S. Curtis, Dept. of Pharmacology and Physiology, Oklahoma State University-Center for Health Sciences, Tulsa, OK 74107 (e-mail: [email protected]). Adv Physiol Educ 41: 10–15, 2017; doi:10.1152/advan.00107.2016.