Jim Heath:

Hi, I am Jim Heath. I’m the president of the Institute for Systems Biology, and I’m here today with Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig, who heads our SEE programs and STEM education outreach. And we’re here because Claudia has a paper coming out in the Nature Communication series, Humanities and Social Sciences. The paper is entitled Consequential Insights for Advancing, Informal STEM Learning and Outcomes for Students from Historically Marginalized Communities.

So the ISB, since our very inception, we’ve had educational outreach programs, and you’ve been a part of that for a long time. And this study remarkably enough, goes back and looks at students that we’ve interacted with for the past 20 plus years, I think.

Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig:

Yeah. 21 years. Yeah.

Jim Heath:

And a big emphasis of this paper from my reading was to try to understand for… I think science and engineering disciplines have historically been disciplines that are in the domain of white males. And there’s been significant changes in that over the past 15, 20 years. But it’s still a challenge, especially in historically marginalized communities, to get kids engaged in science and technology, especially as they go on to college and what have you. The impetus of the story, was to really understand what it is that succeeds in getting those kids.

Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig:

Yeah. So the reality is people from historically marginalized communities want to participate in STEM, and they’re seeking opportunities, but sometimes the access to opportunities aren’t there or when they actually get into an opportunity they feel like it’s not for them and so then they change their course. And so what we’ve been doing over the last many years is varying our program models and measuring what leads to successful outcomes, that feeling of belonging, that how can you be your best thriving creative self? And so we’ve compiled a lot of data and looked at many different models to find out what aspects within programming are most effective at supporting those equitable STEM learning outcomes.

Jim Heath:

And then you had a host of different programs that kids could be engaged in from, if I remember right, something around 20, 22 hours and something all the way up to what looked like a whole summer, 400 and plus hours.

Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig:

That’s right. Early on at ISB we started with a standard 8 week or 320 hour internship. But as a relatively small research institute, we can only have so many students. And we realized that as we had up and up of 300 or more applicants each year, that we could work with students over those 320 hours, but maybe we could actually work with more students for less number of hours and be just as effective. And so then that’s what we’ve been trying over the last many years are kind of four different models. One is the 320 hour, one is a 90 hour course here at ISB, another is a 40 hour work group that was virtual online, and then a variety of 22 hour courses both in person and online. And then we measured basically the same pieces of each of those programs. And then from that, we were able to see what aspects are the most important to maintain and strengthen those learning outcomes, especially for students who do not normally see themselves as being a part of STEM or part of the STEM community.

Jim Heath:

Right. And so a take home message I got from your paper was that, I’m sure high school STEM classes are useful, but there was a major differentiator between the types of programs that kids could participate in here and what they get in high school.

Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig:

Yeah, absolutely. I think high schools have a certain purpose and there’s a lot of good that happens in formal high school programs, but there’s really a lot of opportunity in informal programs such as those in research institutes, museums, science centers.

Jim Heath:

And why do you think that is?

Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig:

I think it’s two main reasons I would say that are reasons that kind of reach out to many other reasons and those are, the access to STEM professionals and researchers who have struggled with a lot of the barriers and navigating the systems already. And those two-way developmental relationships with people who are working in STEM are really important. And then also participating in authentic research that is connected to problems that really matter to society. So I think that’s an important piece is actually being able to know that even as a high schooler you can contribute to really high level research and that research is something that has a positive impact on what you care about and some of the big socio-scientific issues we have as a society, whether it’s related to the environment or health.

Jim Heath:

There were sort of two areas in which it seems like students benefited. One is that it seemed like a student could envision herself or himself in such an environment to be in a STEM environment in a way that they hadn’t before. And then also a lot of the practical issues, which I think is maybe dismissed a little bit, people don’t think about that so much. That they felt more prepared to deal with the practical issues of how do you pursue a STEM career, which I thought was actually pretty interesting. And then you had comparisons between online and in-person learning, and there wasn’t really that big of a difference.

Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig:

Right. Which was interesting. It was surprising to us as well. I mean, one of the difference is in the amount of social capital that you can develop, and that’s very important, I would say, in any career field. But what we also learned that knowing that there were just a few programming changes you could make that lead to that improved social capital. So it was interesting that there were always improvements, but they were at different levels for certain aspects, in-person versus online.

Jim Heath:

So how do you make an ideal online course? I am very surprised that online learning was so effective. But, that’s good.

Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig:

So I will tell you, one, the online learning that was so effective, I think one of the important pieces of that is that it was all computationally driven. And so that computational work is something that you can do online. And sometimes it’s even better to mentor a person through a project where you’re sharing a screen and going through data. We tried to do kind of at-home lab-based online courses, those were very hard. So I would say there is a certain type of content and practice that is really well suited for online. And then there’s others that are more suited for in-person.

Jim Heath:

Right. And a lot of these kids have gone on to STEM fields when they go to college, right?

Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig:

Yeah.

Jim Heath:

I don’t think you report this in the paper, but do you have a quantitative feeling for your impact on that decision?

Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig:

We do. And we’ve been kind of measuring it and staying connected with students through LinkedIn and through surveys. Part of this paper was a retrospective survey for our alumni, and we learned that in many cases, they stay in STEM. Or if they do leave STEM, they’re often able to describe what skills they were able to apply from their STEM training to their new field.

Jim Heath:

That’s pretty cool.

Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig:

Yeah.

Jim Heath:

So you’re obviously doing something right, because if you look at the applicant pool that you get, I think this year we have almost 800 or something like that.

Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig:

That’s for our undergrad. Yep.

Jim Heath:

Yeah. I mean, it’s going up, up, up, up. And I think the ISB programs are looked at as sort of a model program, a lot of kids want to get into. What’s next?

Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig:

Yeah. I think a take-home message from the paper is that this is something that’s really feasible for research institutes to do. It’s something that I feel that every research institute should be doing, and not just for undergrad and graduate and post-doctoral fellows, but for high schoolers. High schoolers can contribute at a high level. They benefit from it. It helps us with our research. So, I encourage other research institutes to take some of these very practical methods for either altering existing programs or even starting new programs. So, we’ve been very collaborative with others in the research community, at starting new programs. And it doesn’t have to be a full internship program. It could be something as short as, in the case of our study, 22 hours was kind of the one lowest number of hours that we went to.

So that’s next as far as the paper, it kind of gives a call to action for really this is something that you can do with minimal resources, and there’s capacity within our science funding and grant programs to enable this. But I think you really do need to be careful with what programming you choose to do. And that’s outlined, I think, pretty well in the paper.

And then the other thing as far as what’s next, which isn’t in the paper, is something that we’re working on right now. And that’s in doing all of these surveys we realize that in many cases, students from historically marginalized communities get to a certain level in science and they’re doing well in that level of science, but the leadership opportunities are a struggle. And so now we have a new leadership program that we’re implementing, and that is something that came out of this work as well.

Jim Heath:

Yeah, that’s a big deal. And just say, from my own experience, it’s been a challenge every step of the way through the professional career to maintain the diversity that you get, say, at high school it’s harder, at college it gets harder in grad school, as you go on and on. And so I think a leadership program, like what you’re describing is sorely needed. Good job.

Claudia McLaughlin Ludwig:

Yeah. Thanks. We’re excited about it.