PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs StoryMaker: STEM-Integrated Student Journalism

In this project, Student Reporting Labs will develop an online curriculum delivery platform called StoryMaker and a unique set of tools called Storymaker:STEM that will supply in-demand interdisciplinary, multi-modal, STEM-infused teaching and learning tools to classrooms across the country. The project aims to produce unique STEM stories from a teen perspective and partners with local public media stations to provide mentorship and amplify the voices of young people.

Full Description

PBS NewsHour's Student Reporting Labs (SRL) is a youth journalism program that creates transformative educational experiences through video production and community engagement. The program aims to produce unique STEM stories from a teen perspective and partners with local public media stations to provide mentorship and amplify the voices of young people. In this project, Student Reporting Labs will develop an online curriculum delivery platform called StoryMaker and a unique set of tools called Storymaker:STEM that will supply in-demand interdisciplinary, multi-modal, STEM-infused teaching and learning tools to classrooms across the country. SRL StoryMaker:STEM will be a free, self-directed online curriculum delivery system designed to guide educators working with middle and high school-age students through videojournalism experiences that highlight and integrate STEM skills, concepts, issues, and potential solutions into the learning process. This program will also develop mentoring connections with 40 journalism professionals and STEM professionals to provide supports for participating teachers and students. The project will recruit and work with about 100 teachers and their students over the course of the project to inform, test, implement and provide feedback on the SRL StoryMaker:STEM platform and resources. The associated research will explore evidence-based strategies for structuring co-learning and mentorship connections for students and teachers with journalists and science content experts around SRL StoryMaker:STEM to best support student and teacher outcomes.

The four-year associated research study will contribute to understanding how teachers collaborate on teaching STEM across academic disciplines through a series of interviews, surveys, and site visits with the pilot teachers and their students using SRL StoryMaker:STEM. The analysis of the data will focus on identifying the benefits of developing a community of teachers who collaborate on teaching STEM across the academic discipline through journalism practice. Specifically, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods will be used to examine the following research questions: What teacher affordances are necessary for using journalism practices to support STEM learning across academic disciplines? How do teacher perceptions of their school constraints influence their use of STEM-based learning activities? How do teachers from different disciplines teach numerical reasoning, communicating with data, and the other essential STEM thinking skills? How might an online support community be structured to encourage teacher-to-teacher scaffolding related to STEM content given variation in their pedagogical training? Meanwhile, front-end evaluation will identify barriers and opportunities specific to this project. Formative evaluation will focus on how each specific iteration is meeting teachers' needs and aspirations, and summative evaluation will examine teachers' STEM learning and teachers' perception of students' STEM outcomes.