This project will meet the needs of rural, high-poverty, and emergent-bilingual Spanish-English communities to increase student achievement in science by scaling a moderate-evidence-based, three-component model. The components are i) three units of hands-on, injury, and standards-based STEM curriculum, ii) evidence-based Professional Development (PD), and iii) sustainable teacher support.

Professor Lynn Cominsky will oversee the work done at Sonoma State University, as well as coordinating the efforts with CSU east Bay and CSU Chico. She will oversee the budgets, provide administrative support to execute the subawards to each institution, and work collaboratively with Profs. Blagrave and Kashinath to identify suitable STEM students at each institution for input into the study, and collate the results of the working groups at each campus. Prof.

NASA's Neurodiversity Network is a five-year program to redevelop existing NASA resources for use with neurodiverse learners, with a special focus on autistic learners. SSU is partnering with Educational Development Corporation and New York Hall of Science to test the resources with northern California high schools that specialize in autistic learners, as well as informal audiences in New York City. This program was inspired by Prof.

Working with Project Management at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, SSU personnel will support press communications, outreach events and scientific illustrations on behalf of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory scientific missions. Dr. Cominsky is a scientific Co-Investigator for both missions, and also serves as press officer. Aurore Simonnet's illustrations of previous Fermi and Swift high-energy discoveries have included covers of two issues of Science magazine, and one issue of Nature.

Across a three-year program, we will develop, evaluate and disseminate two educational modules designed to be infused into STEM professional development/ethics courses. Drawing from social psychology research on gender bias and sexual harassment in STEM,  the modules’ objective is to expand traditional ethics training beyond ethical research practices to encompass ethical behavior among fellow researchers. Modules will be piloted at SSU and then disseminated using STEM-Net to other CSU campuses with an eventual goal of nationwide dissemination.