In 2008, the Battelle Center sponsored a pilot study at one of Ohio’s flagship STEM schools, the Metro Early-College High School in Columbus, Ohio. The study examined how the public-private management partnerships evident in Metro’s launch and early successes enabled and advanced this STEM innovation. The Center also sought to understand the Metro network's structure and processess and how they affected key outcomes. In 2008, the Battelle Center released, “Metro High School: An Emerging STEM School Community” (ESSC)and identified the following findings:
Public-private partnerships require a new type of teacher, principal, and administrative framework
The community building process requires activation, mobilization, actualization, and synthesis to support effective
group action;
Operating latitude must be explicitly established in initial phases of school development; and
The public-private partnerships and the school community compromise one network.
The next phase of this study, the OSLN Network Snapshot Project, began in July 2009. The Snapshot Project aims to:
Capture and track the formation, operation, and evolution of OSLN as a network, identifying the key
phases, structures, processes and behaviors involved thus far;
Identify and accelerate the spread of lessons-learned for the formation of useful relationships across the network;
Identify the knowledge most essential to successful replication;
Develop guidelines and tools to support cross-network data capture on questions that are most needed by
current network operators;
Foster the development of a continuing, network-wide conversation on research agenda-setting and strategy;
Begin developing a theory of action for STEM innovation networks.
“Model development and exploration [has been] guided by three primary goals: reproduce history, project history in to the future, and test alternative futures”
- Daniel Sturtevant, 2009
The Center’s interest in applying the discipline of systems modeling to the challenges of SEM education was inspired by the pioneering work of Jay Forrester, one of the early leaders in applying these techniques to social science and organizational problems. In 2007, the Center joined forces with a nascent effort then underway within the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF). This effort, propelled by Raytheon Company CEO Bill Swanson, resulted in the development of the U.S. STEM Model. This is a robust system dynamics model intended to serve as a tool that can help policymakers, educators, and researchers better understand the complex nature of the U.S. education system and better identify potential actions that could double the number of U.S. students earning STEM degrees by 2015.
The model uses census data and standardized test scores to represent the flow of students through the K-16 education system and into careers in STEM teaching or STEM industries. To capture some of the nuances of persistence in STEM disciplines, the model sorts students by gender into high and low levels of STEM interest and math proficiency. Many factors affect the number of students who ultimately pursue STEM careers. The model attempts to capture these factors through a series of dynamic hypotheses and feedback loops that together determine the behavior of the system.
Left to Right: Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), Bill Swanson (CEO, Raytheon), Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan (Director, Battelle Center)
Along with BHEF, the Center conceived of and launched a collaborative innovation structure, dubbed the STEM Research and Modeling Network (SRMN), to support open-source access and evolution of the U.S. STEM Model and other simulation tools. The SRMN was launched at a public event in Washington D.C. on July 8, 2009. The SRMN is managed by the STEM Modeling and Management Partnership (SMMP), which consists of team members from the Business Higher Education Forum (BHEF), Raytheon, and The Ohio State University (OSU). In 2008, OSU became the official host site for the U.S. STEM Model, with the Battelle Center serving as the model administrator.
“...the greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see."
- John Tukey
Though the world of education policy sometimes seems awash in data, the field is very often starving for information and has few tools that offer both analytical and communications power. Visualization is one very effective way to identify patterns and information that are buried in large and diverse sets of data and to accelerate shared comprehension of large amounts of data.
Starlight is a 3-D, geo-referenced visual analysis tool that allows the user extract meaningful information from large volumes of data by identifying relationships between different attributes and examining these across time and space. Starlight handles large volumes of data quickly and easily, including structured data, free text, geospatial and multimedia. Used by Battelle to analyze dynamic patterns such as infectious disease, propagation and supply chain. behaviors.
The challenge and opportunity of visualization are greater than any single tool, of course. In August 2009, Battelle Center staff joined a group of eminent researchers at Stanford’s MediaX Center for a sand pit exercise aimed at identifying key research and policy questions that might frame a national agenda for visual analytics in STEM education.
Public-private partnerships require a new type of teacher, principal, and administrative framework 