EASE-XR: Educator Access to Spatial rEasoning

 The leaky STEM pipeline is a gender equity in STEM problem. 50% of incoming college freshmen choosing to enter STEM fields will leave the STEM curriculum track. The majority of students who leave are women, are of African American, and Hispanic/Latinx descent.  One of the research-driven pedagogical cognitive abilities that is a prerequisite to success in STEM is spatial reasoning. A research tested solution to the retention of female students in STEM is through deliberate instruction in spatial reasoning to remediate the experiential learning differential between genders that begins with early childhood. However, the barriers and lack of support for inclusion of spatial reasoning instruction in K-12 have limited the inclusion of this intervention in routine instruction. This leads to exacerbating the gender gap in STEM as early as middle school, where students’ STEM identity and belonging are reflected in the courses they self-select. The STEM gender gap widens through secondary grade levels, and the small number of females that persevere to enroll in a STEM course in college are more likely to withdraw or change majors, leaving less than 30% female in the STEM workforce. This is even less in computer science careers where less than 20% of computer science graduates are female. The effect of this lack of females creating new technology leads to a cycle of bias. This is a STEM pipeline deluge that we will rectify by providing a resource portal, EASE-XR, with early and often spatial reasoning interventions that can easily be integrated into all content areas, not only STEM classes. Harvey Mudd College and others have found that spatial reasoning skills can be taught, and when female undergraduate students were provided the instruction before beginning their STEM coursework, the demographics shifted to 40-50% female in STEM majors. While the resources in the EASE-XR portal will be easy to implement and curated to assure the greatest impact, teachers need the will and means to teach something new. The EASE-XR portal will be accompanied by the supports necessary to create a culture shift towards deliberate spatial reasoning instruction to all students, therefore, increasing retention in STEM from elementary to workforce.

Spatial reasoning can be developed through physical hands-on activities but presents challenges to teachers who themselves are likely to have underdeveloped spatial reasoning skills and some concepts are abstract and typical hands-on are often difficult to implement due to materials acquisition and management in the classroom. By curating XR resources with prebuilt content, in addition to standard hands-on “off-line” resources, we will increase adoption and usage to improve spatial reasoning skills, and therefore STEM outcomes and gender equity. We will seek to measure some of these interventions with our university and public school partnerships.

With the emergence of AR, there is a huge opportunity to bring easy-to-consume spatial reasoning content into the classroom. Increasing access and adoption of XR (AR/VR) technologies can  broaden teaching this critical pedagogy which is vital for STEM success. Our learning portal, EASE (Easy Access to Spatial reasoning for Educators), is designed for intentional instruction in spatial reasoning using XR and best practices for STEM education.

Experiential, immersive learning platforms that are spatial in nature improve spatial reasoning skills, as demonstrated by the effectiveness of HoloAnatomy® Software at Case Western Reserve University.  

Our value-adds include:

• That EASE will be a learning portal that contains cross-platform and cross-curricular spatial reasoning modules for K-12, designed as a curated, digital, agile, diverse learning platform that is continuously integrated and updated to supply XR modules for IOS, Android, PC, web, Hololens2, Quest2, and other platforms.  

• Our goal is to solve the challenges of equal access across different classrooms while providing modules for learning and practice needed to improve spatial reasoning skills. 

• Within EASE, we will include a gamified tool to measure spatial reasoning ability and recommend specific learning pathways based on results.

• EASE will provide multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) and resources for supporting all learners by embedding principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) in the portal modules and design. 

• Adaptive resources and support for flexible learning environments to accommodate various social-emotional and cognitive needs will be AI-assisted.

The target customer for the EASE portal are the early adopter educators, who are a primary influencer for the early majority educators.  

Through BASE, South Florida’s STEM Ecosystem, we work closely with 

1. The 4th (Miami-Dade), 6th (Broward), and 10th (Palm Beach) largest US public school districts 

2. A network of 4 of the largest colleges and universities in the US

3. 100+ nonprofits

In total, this represents ~1,000,000 students in K-16 and these are largely underrepresented students.  In addition, BASE is part of the global STEM Ecosystems organization, which represents 105 ecosystems serving 42M+ pre-K-12 students. With our industry partners (Microsoft, Minecraft, MagicLeap, Meta, Epic, and Unity among them), and broad reach of educators, we bring a unique perspective to the digital agility adoption challenges in XR and will have greater outreach capabilities to increase access to EASE to deliver spatial reasoning content for students.

The team leads on this proposal (Dr. Milenkovic and Denise Mendez) are also leads of the BASE STEM ecosystem and come from historically underrepresented STEM tracks. They bring a unique and personal lens to the topic of spatial reasoning, having even struggled on this topic during their own careers. In addition to the team leads, team member Dr. JP Keener has an extensive background in STEM teacher professional development and creating STEM curricular materials for underserved populations internationally, and business lead Colleen Lockwood has extensive business development expertise and currently leads the local college access network, specifically embedded within the 11 lowest socioeconomic status zip-codes in South Florida. Lead program developer is Tangy Frederick, a black entrepreneur leading a non-profit skilling and mentorship program for underserved youth. These youth will be hired to develop and support EASE-XR.

BASE serves the South Florida community. This includes Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties. These three school districts serve a majority minority student population. BASE also works with dozens of out-of-school providers that serve historically underrepresented groups to bring aligned resources to classrooms within the three districts. These resources have been developed to promote STEM college and career accessibility to underserved populations with the hope of increasing STEM graduation rates at the college level.

The initial prototype of EASE was built in Gitbooks - a link to the prototype is available here https://easexr.gitbook.io/ease... it is undergoing useability and feature discovery through interviews.  During our interviews, we learned that our early adopter educators are predominantly female, and they don’t know what spatial reasoning is, and once we explain it they realize how critical it is for student success and now the next question they have is how do I integrate it into my classes.

As part of this portal, we are explaining what SR is and providing examples of it including examples and content that are created within the local community through partnerships with the University of Miami (and their Interactive Media Depart) and Miami Dade College’s Magic program (Miami animation and gaming international complex).   Engaging locally made content that promotes and improves spatial reasoning through VR/AR systems while also helping inspire teachers to weave into the narrative that students can be part of that creative journey to build content they wish they would have learned.   While this is specific to South Florida for the time being, as we scale we will seek to provide geospatial content to connect teachers with content that they can relate to in their community.

We complain about a leaky pipeline; we are losing the majority of our diverse STEM candidates in their first year of college; there are a variety of ways we are trying to address this: gendered toys, role models, segregated classrooms, changing teacher biases. But these are not enough!  Our solution aims at building the fundamental capabilities for success in STEM, which is how we understand our 3-dimensional world, aka Spatial Reasoning (SR).  We know SR is vital to success; research has proven it can improve STEM outcomes, that it can be taught, even in the first year of college (Case Western Holo Anatomy and Harvey Mudd College are two examples), but it's not built into the K12 education system which focuses on math and reading scores.  Fundamentally SR is not understood by most people and frankly, the definition itself is lacking for what it really is and how it's applied to the real world, i.e., it enables us to play a chess game, read a map, review 2D Ikea instructions and translate into the 3D pieces we assemble.  STEM goes deeply back and forth between 2D and 3D realms; by exercising SR capabilities the immersive and experiential learning, we attack the problem at the source.  The bonus is SR also improves math scores, so we won’t be “distracting” from passing test scores, we will be enhancing too.  The EASE-XR portal highlights research, socializes the essential nature of SR through relevant examples, and curates tools, projects and 'low-calorie' content that already exist to make it easy to bring into a classroom.

Through the portal and the BASE ecosystem, a collection of early adopters serving marginalized people in our communities, we can learn from, iterate and pilot this content. From early adopter educator (EAE) adoption we will scale.  Currently, EAE's use YouTube for lesson plan inspiration, and practical SR content is non-existent. Our portal seeks to curate content that already exists in a searchable portal.  Empowering EAE’s will inspire the early majority which will reach 50% of teachers!  With the pilot programs that we are planning through content created out of UM and MDC we will measure the efficacy of teaching through spatial reasoning and will also build the data and stories that can influence and change policy so we can get to the rest of the teaching community.

 We are in need of deliberate attention to spatial reasoning. As the research has demonstrated, teaching spatial reasoning helps retain women and underrepresented minorities. One of the key takeaways from customer discovery interviews was the need to raise broader awareness and understanding of the essential nature of spatial reasoning education.  Winning this challenge will help us with the strategic messaging needed to foster culture change with school district officials and staff (influencers) and broaden adoption by educators (customer/end-user). 

It is imperative for our team that this tool remain free to use for educators and students; ramping up to full implementation will aid in securing advertisers and sponsors on the portal.

The team leads on this proposal (Dr. Milenkovic and Denise Mendez) are also leads of the BASE STEM ecosystem and come from historically underrepresented STEM tracks. They bring a unique and personal lens to the topic of spatial reasoning, having even struggled on this topic during their own careers. Both Milenkovic and Mendez are deeply embedded in the community. Milenkovic attended Broward Schools from 4th grade through high school (attended college in Miami-Dade), and then returned to teach science/STEM and lead the district STEM+CS programs for all 200+ schools in the 6th largest district. Mendez is a lifetime member of the S. Florida community, spending much of her own time mentoring students and sponsoring hackathons to engage the majority minority students and help to retain females, especially minority females, in STEM careers.

The EASE-XR portal curates lessons, activities, and other spatial reasoning resources with deliberate attention to saving teachers time in lesson planning to integrate spatial reasoning in any content area. The portal provides teachers with the background knowledge to feel comfortable teaching a subject that they themselves may not have learned. The portal also allows for teacher ratings and for teachers to contribute.  Additionally, the EASE-XR team is committed to supporting teachers with an asynchronous discussion forum for users and a 24/7 chat bot to help guide teachers in real time. The team also provides "teacher labs" - open live in-person safe spaces for teachers to come and "play to learn" from the tools and activities for spatial reasoning. 

EASE-XR is a one-stop-shop but not one-size-fits-all solution to provide support for gender equity by providing a tool-box for deliberate instruction in spatial reasoning.

BASE, South Florida's STEM Ecosystem is a regional collaboration of STEM stakeholders in the South Florida community aligned with a common vision to: 

• Engage and interest youth with hands-on STEM through experiences and competitions
• Ensure foundational skills in collaboration, communication, critical thinking, computational thinking, problem-solving, and perserverance
• Prepare students to be life-ready for future studies and careers in any area, not only those typically thought of as STEM-related

The mission of BASE is to reach our diverse population with a diverse portfolio of STEM opportunities, assuring that STEM is for ALL students.

BASE is a member of the global STEM Ecosystems (stemecosystems.org) and our 5-year goal is to disseminate and spread the use of EASE-XR and the importance of spatial reasoning instruction to supporting gender equity throughout the ecosystem network. This will potentially reach 110+ ecosystems representing more than 42 Million pK-12 students with foundational spatial reasoning skills through the use of the EASE-XR portal lessons.

We are measuring teacher professional learning and embedding spatial reasoning in all STEM workshops across a variety of content (from gardens to robots). Indicators are through a feedback survey exit ticket and a formal follow-up implementation survey.

Input - research indicates spatial reasoning instruction helps retain females in STEM coursework

Pain point - identifying / finding spatial reasoning lessons that are easy to implement and align to course content is difficult

Activities - 

* creating a curation portal specific for spatial reasoning will reduce teacher planning time

* curated lessons will be directly aligned to mathematics standardizzed testing

* spatial reasoning EASE teacher ambassadors will help advertise and market the portal and serve as spatial reasoning "evangelists"

Outcomes

* retention of female and minority students in STEM courseware and extracurricular activities increases

* teacher self-efficacy and seamless integration of spatial reasoning content in all grade levels

The core technology powering EASE-XR is a database with AI assisted search and support (chat bot). It uses cloud computing servers.

part-time volunteer staff = 5

started designing a solution in 2020, part-time intensive work for approximately 1 year.

Our goal is to reach ALL with opportunities. BASE membership focuses on reaching the lower socioeconomic status areas that are highest minority population underserved in STEM opportunities. We work with in and out of school providers to assure educators have the pedagogical skills in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) to adapt lessons and activities to meet the needs of each individual learner. We offer diverse activities so everyone BELONGS in STEM.

EASE-XR will always need to be free to use. 

Financial sustainability will be through advertising, sponsorship, and grant funding.

We are in the 100 projects selected for the Discovery round in the VITAL prize, recently received a donation from Microsoft to support spatial reasoning hackathons, and are part of the STEM PUSH NSF INCLUDES alliance which is focused on pre-college STEM programs. This initial funding is being used to help support the pursuit of additional funding needed to bring EASE-XR to a broader audience.