INFORMAL SCIENCE Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley
Featured News:
The Noyce Foundation announces the launch of the Inside Mathematics website, a professional resource for educators passionate about improving students' mathematics learning and performance. Too often, teachers who excel at reaching students have few ways of sharing these strong practices with others – and teachers who struggle, struggle alone. Our classroom doors have remained closed too often and for too long.
Inside Mathematics opens those doors with video examples of innovative classroom instruction, rich mathematical tasks, full sets of student work, and reflective video interviews with teachers and students about the teaching and learning going on. There are resources that will be immediately applicable to the classroom, to a school setting, and to a district’s work around mathematics. Teachers who have used the materials in Silicon Valley have found that they build understanding of mathematics not only in students, but in teachers themselves, and help increase student learning and achievement.
The website grew out of the Noyce Foundation's Silicon Valley Mathematics Initiative. SVMI is based on high performance expectations, ongoing professional development, examining student work, and improved math instruction. The initiative includes a formative and summative performance assessment system, pedagogical content coaching, and leadership training and networks. Coaches in SVMI learned strategies of re-engagement with students around mathematics assessments, and demonstration lessons on re-engagement are featured.
Program in Education, Afterschool & Resiliency (PEAR), a Harvard University-McLean Hospital team led by Dr. Gil Noam, has launched the Assessment Tools in Informal Science website, an online resource designed to help practitioners, evaluators, researchers, and policymakers select instruments to assess science learning and child outcomes in out-of-school programs. The site includes reviews and ratings by practitioners who are using these tools. and you are also invited to write reviews on instruments that you are using. The site will be continuously updated in collaboration with youth development researchers at 4-H.
News About Noyce Foundation Grantees:
Project Exploration, the Chicago-based afterschool science program, received a Presidential Award for Excellence in Mentoring Science, Mathematics, and Engineering earlier this year. In her visit to DC to accept the award, Executive Director Gabe Lyon of Project Exploration met with key policymakers at the intersection of science and education, including members of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the Department of Education, National Science Foundation, and the Office of Science Policy. President Obama mentioned Project Exploration as a model during his “Educate to Innovate” remarks on January 6th. See Gabe's blog posts from DC, along with a transcript and video of the President’s remarks.
The After-School Corporation (TASC) is infusing science into afterschool programs throughout New York City by training afterschool staff on good science curricula. In its article "Got Science?" TASC draws attention to the many opportunities for kids to engage with science after school and the promising work in the emerging field. As Ron Ottinger notes in the article, the Noyce Foundation is supporting TASC's model of informal science learning along with several other models, with an eye to backing those models that can scale up effectively.
BuildIT is an after school and summer youth-based curriculum for underserved middle school girls to learn IT design and to develop IT fluency, interest in mathematics, and knowledge of IT careers. It’s a recipient of an NSF ITEST (Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers) grant, and it’s profiled on the Inside ITEST website. Watch the video here!
Techbridge is collaborating with the Girl Scouts to bring their middle school science and engineering curriculum to Girl Scouts of Northern California in the San Francisco Bay Area and Girl Scouts of Central Texas. With support from the Noyce Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Techbridge strives to encourage girls to pursue STEM education and careers. Read more about it here (page 2).
News About Friends of the Noyce Foundation:
Phil Daro, a Noyce Foundation Trustee since 2005, has helped to support “the Eddies,” The International Society for Design and Development in Education's award for excellence in design of educational products and materials in science or mathematics. (Official Press Release).
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Noyce Foundation Areas of Interest:
Alan Friedman, a Noyce Foundation Trustee since 2007 and a faculty member of the Noyce Leadership Institute wrote a timely essay at the conclusion of the Noyce Leadership Institute mid-point retreat held this October in Philadelphia. The essay focuses on financial crises and discusses tactics that science centers, children’s museums, and related institutions have utilized to handled such crises in the past.
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