Neurodiversity in S.T.E.M. Education, with the TERC Team | EDB 304
Team members from TERC share the organization’s innovative work for making S.T.E.M. education more inclusive for neurodivergent learners.
TERC team members featured are:
Dr. Jodi Asbell-Clarke is an educational researcher focusing on game-based learning, computational thinking, and neurodiversity in K-12. Dr. Asbell-Clarke’s academic background includes an MA in math, an M.Sc. in astrophysics, and a Ph.D. in curriculum, teaching, and learning. Early in her career, Jodi was an onboard software verification analyst for IBM during the first 25 missions of the space shuttle and later taught Physics and Astrophysics at the laboratory school at University of Illinois. She has led national and international STEM education projects involving curriculum development, professional development of teachers, and educational research. In 2009, she co-founded the Educational Gaming Environments group (EdGE) at TERC to study how game-based learning and is now a co-founder of NDinSTEM at TERC to focus on innovative pedagogies can foster inclusive STEM education.
Dr. Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki is a senior research scientist at TERC. A cognitive psychologist by training, his research focuses on the use of theories of cognitive science to improve STEM learning for neurodiverse populations of learners. Dr. Dahlstrom-Hakki is a first-generation Arab American who is particularly interested in better understanding and supporting learners with an intersectionality of identities that impact their learning. His current projects include exploring the use of VR, AR, and other technologies to teach science to neurodivergent learners. Dr. Dahlstrom-Hakki was the director of the Landmark College Institute for Research and Training, conducting research and providing professional development training to educators working with students with LD, ADHD, and autism.
Dr. Zachary Alstad is an experienced educational consultant, teacher, and researcher. He has been accepted into top publications such as the Journal of Writing Research. He has taught at almost every level from kindergarten through college and adult education. Dr. Alstad is currently a researcher on several National Science Foundation grants exploring educational technologies for neurodiverse students. His ongoing mission is to help students who struggle with school to feel capable and be successful. Dr. Alstad is passionate about neurodiversity because of professional interest and personal diagnosis.
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Note: the following transcription was automatically generated. Some imperfections may exist.
DR HACKIE REITMAN (HR):
Hi, I’m Dr. Hackie Reitman, and welcome to another episode of Exploring Different Brains. Today, I’m very excited to welcome part of the team from TERC. And I’m going to have all of our participants today give brief introductions of yourself, starting with Jodi.
DR JODI ASBELL-CLARKE (JAC):
All right, thank you. It’s great to be here. I’m Dr. Jodi Asbell-Clarke, I’m a senior researcher at Turk. Turk is a nonprofit in Cambridge mass that focuses on innovation and equity in STEM education, mostly K through 12. But all ages, for the most part, and I have been there for about 30 years in the last 10-12 years have been focusing on a team that we call EdGE – Educational Gaming Environments group. And we do a lot of different learning, not just games, but a lot of learning technologies and innovations to reach marginalized learners in STEM. Most particularly, we’ve been focusing on neuro diversity, and we’ll be talking a lot about that today. I’ll let my colleagues introduce themselves first.
HR:
Well, I’ll tell you — Ibrahim, you’re next.
DR IBRAHIM DAHLSTROM-HAKKI (IDH):
or I’m Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki, Senior Research Scientist at TERC as well. My work has mostly focused on working with neurodivergent learners. So prior to joining joining TERC, I worked at Landmark College, which is a college that exclusively serves neurodivergent learners for about a decade. And I’ve been with TERC now for about five years, and really focused on working with students to find ways to best support their learning in terms of science, technology, engineering, and math.
HR:
Pretty cool stuff. Zach?
DR ZACHARY ALSTAD (ZA):
Hi, everyone my name is Dr. Zachary Alstad. I’m very interested in how we can use new emerging educational technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, to help students who learn differently and to make in a more accessible space through these technologies, both in terms of what the technologies do, but also what the students can do for the technologies, how they can design and find new and innovative ways to implement these kinds of tools on. I’m also someone who is diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. So I am very interested in helping make the educational experience better for the next generation.
HR:
Excellent. So from TERC’s perspective, what are the connections between neurodiversity and stem problem solving, so important to explore?
JAC:
So we’ve been working, as I said, to look at innovative ways to reach marginalized learners. And in our work in areas such as computational thinking, which is a big new area in K through 12 education that we can talk about, and problem based learning, project based learning. All what we’ve noticed is sometimes with these innovations, it is the learners that may not succeed in other areas in school sometimes become the go to people. For example, we have a game called Zoombinis, which is it’s been around for 30 years. It’s a great, great learning game. We’ve studied how kids develop computational thinking through this game, and it’s a bunch of logic puzzles. And as we’re doing this research, teachers are coming up to us over and over again, going, Oh, my gosh, that kid that has been failing is becoming a rock star in this in these puzzles. And not only are they doing well, other kids are going to them to figure out why, how they’re solving these puzzles. They’re becoming a go to person and a resource. And so their whole identity and stature in the class is changing. And we started to see the snowball effects and wanting to explore the connections between the talents that many nerve divergent learners have. And lo and behold, the research shows there’s lots of them pattern recognition, systematic thinking, creativity, they’re all out there. And so we’re just looking at ways to highlight those while also supporting things like executive function, working memory and self regulation, which may be struggles for some learners. And rather than sticking to any one diagnosis, we look at these things, what are the cognitive assets that we can highlight and what are the executive function and other supports that we need to scaffold and how do we do that to make learners reach their potential no matter who they are.
HR:
I love that whole approach. That’s that’s the way to Do it it’s strength based, but not ignoring where you need some shoring up. That’s great.
JAC:
Exactly and it works for everybody, it doesn’t matter. But you know, almost everything we do ends up working for all students. So that’s, that’s to us that’s really inclusion.
HR:
Yep. The whole principle being it’s not a one size fits all, world.
IDH:
A lot of innovation in the in the STEM field comes from those that think outside the box. And many new neurodivergent thinkers approach things from a different perspective. And that often can open up whole areas of innovation in STEM fields, and and so we’ve, we feel strongly that finding ways to adapt learning to work for a broader audience is not only benefiting those individuals, but is bringing talent into areas of stem tthat really need that energy and creativity and different way of thinking to innovate and grow.
HR:
Anybody else want to add anything to that great overview?
JAC:
I’ll — go ahead Zach.
ZA:
I just want to say, you know, if, if a neurodiverse student has had a potentially negative experience in their, you know, educational journey, I think that opinion that perspective is especially important to incorporate when developing new educational technologies and interventions. So finding those that have been marginalized and reincorporating their perspectives, in these kinds of development efforts, is really important.
HR:
So if somebody wants to take advantage of what you guys have to offer, who are they? And how do they get to you?
JAC:
Know, we, there’s multiple answers to that question. I’m going to start with one just tying in what we talked about, we’re just talking about is, so I have an upcoming book, coming out with Rutledge, Taylor and Francis towards the end of this year, about reaching and teaching neurodivergent learners in STEM. And one of the things that I did to prepare for that book was interview a bunch of companies, people, both neurodivergent employees and the directors of nerve divergent hiring programs for in STEM companies. These are Microsoft SAP, ey, the big top global companies. And I kind of expected the story to be oh, you know, the CEO had a nephew with autism or something and that’s it, or some philanthropic reasons for doing this. And they just laughed that off. And that is not why they’re doing it. It’s the talent, they use the term “competitive advantage”. For the last 10 or more years, the the top companies have realized this. And so what we’re trying to do is, is have education systems work towards what these this workforce is already figured out. So we have several projects doing that. I’m going to tell you briefly about one that’s called, in fact, including neurodiversity and foundational applied computational thinking. It’s a curriculum set of teaching and learning materials for grades three through eight, by going to TERC’s website, and what maybe at the end of the podcast, we can give a bunch of URLs, because but we will. We have open access, teaching and learning materials there that are for teachers. And I’m so so the books for educators and administrators and policymakers. We have materials for K through 12, and particularly Elementary, teachers, educators. And now I’m going to let Ibrahim and Zach talk about a couple of projects that are for different age ranges.
IDH:
Sure, thanks. A big part of what we do is co-design and that is working directly with teams of neurodivergent youth college students. Sometimes when we’re working with educators or parents, and really ensuring that all the work we do is informed and driven by the population we’re serving on the one hand, and also ensuring that individuals who have interest in research and stem and this type of work get the type of work experience and training they will need to go into these fields. So for are newer divergent individuals who may be interested in education, design work, working with new technologies. We’re working with them as co-designers and we have internships that that we we paid internships essentially for individuals to work with us. A couple of the projects that are currently active is one project is called the neuro vivid project and work, we’re working with the New York Hall of Science, and some other partners on developing a maker experience for neurodivergent, middle schoolers, to learn the very basics of brain computer interfaces and how the brain works the basics of neuroscience. And it’s a new project, but it’s something we’re very excited about. And, Zach, you want to introduce the other project?
ZA:
Sure. And as I had alluded to earlier, the students that we work with neurodiverse students just seem oftentimes naturally very capable with technologies. And so one project that we’re working on also is called Augmented EF, we’re in developing augmented reality interventions for students with executive function issues. Were co-designing with them, and bringing describe eloquently the process of co-design. So this is developing interventions in these new systems. Now, with the release of the apple vision Pro, the Augmented Reality headset, we’re orienting towards that. So ideally, it’ll be an app in the Apple Vision Pro. Two, I’m actually in Seattle right now to meet with our software developers to work on this. We’re co designing with our students to find the best way to prompt to reengage students who might be off task to encourage and to help steer people’s focus into a place that they want it to be a simply. That’s a little overview of what the tool will ultimately do. And it is, again, through this process of co-design, designing with the students with executive function issues to try and produce the most effective and useful tool for students with executive hedging issues.
HR:
With sounds very, very specific. So you’re, you’re strength oriented, you’re helping any of the weaknesses. What is your economic model for you?
IDH:
We’re primarily grant funded. So all three projects you heard about are funded through federal grants. So the newer than augmented the F projects are funded through the National Science Foundation. And the impact project is funded through the Department of Education’s EIR program. And so we’re primarily grant funded, we do have some, some, some work that is published. So there is a curriculum that investigations curriculum that’s not developed by our team, but as a turret curriculum that’s commercially available. The Zoombinis game that Jody mentioned, is also commercially available on the App Store. But primarily grant funded work.
HR:
And do you work with other organizations?
JAC:
Yeah. So for example, the impact project the computational thinking project worked with for other university partners who are expert in education in computational thinking and and that and we brought in we teamed with Landmark College and now it became in Zach have both come to TERC from landmark, but we still work with landmark. And so yes, we, we work very closely, sometimes even in emerging aspects with partners.
HR:
We interviewed the people from Landmark a while ago, they’re doing great, great stuff. And if we’re have any other potential partners we’ve interviewed maybe I’ll send them your way as I kind of thought more about what you’re doing. Because what you’re doing is so important, and what I love about it, too, it’s when when I meet people who are CEOs of large companies and stuff I you know, I say, look, don’t do this recruiting neurodivergent individuals to be a goody two shoes, do it because this is going to improve your bottom line. It’s just a matter of matching the individual.
JAC:
Yeah. And we also are launching a site called ND and Stem. neurodiversity is neuro diversity in STEM. It should be. It’s, it’s it’s up, but not publicized yet, but we’re launching it in the next month or so. And that is our, our materials about K through 12 education, but also a place for other partners to get their message out and share social media and do all those things that you do these days. So the end, there’s very few players in this field right now, I think a lot of people are thinking it, but we need to get the message out there, like you said.
HR:
Can you talk a bit more about how you design education activities, specifically for neurodivergent learners?
ZA:
Yeah. So I think designing activities for neurodiverse students, it’s really WITH neurodiverse students in in this context. And I think an important part about it is making explicit first your assumptions that you are working with, and what is actually productive in those assumptions, right, we might have assumptions about how an activity is appropriately designed, but maybe that’s just because it’s something that we’ve inherited, and it’s, you know, maybe actually not very productive for those students. So listening, listening very carefully to them. And, and then meaningfully incorporating their feedback. I think starting in a place that, you know, places that they love, if they’re into video games, listen to what kind of video games they like, and what kinds of tools are effective to them, and especially how they have adapted those tools to meet their needs. Right? If it’s organizational tools, how are they using those organizational tools in a unique, unique way, there’s often something really important that can be learned there, and then hopefully, generalize.
IDH:
Yeah, and there’s two, I would say, two main theoretical models that help guide us in some of the design work we’re doing. So one is the idea of universal design. And the idea behind Universal Design is considering the needs of as broad an audience as possible from the get go, and trying to meet, anticipate and meet the needs of a broad range of learners by providing many different options for engagement, different options for allowing people to gain knowledge or experience what they know through multiple means. The other other model that really helps guide our thinking, is cognitive load theory. So the idea behind Cognitive Load Theory is really paying attention to what sort of loads are imposed by the educational intervention we’re designing. So think about, for example, an individual who may have dyslexia. So if we give them an algebra problem using sort of a word based algebra problem, we know that their processing load is going to be higher for that algebra problem than maybe one of their neurotypical peers. And so we have to take that into consideration when designing that algebra problem, and maybe look for an alternative way to present the same problem without imposing such a high cognitive load on the individual. And so those those theories helped guide our design work as we’re thinking of ways to make content more accessible to a broader audience and play to individual strengths.
HR:
Since you brought a broader audience, which I think is key, what is your plan for your organization going forward? How to achieve a wider and wider base?
JAC:
Well, so one is that we just wrote a mid, the disc research that we described for the impact problem project, the one that’s funded by the US Department of Ed, that was early phase research, and we’ve just deprived applied for the mid phase which would allow us to scale up to districts and state level involvement in that in both the dissemination and the research of that product. So, so the federal funds often enable some Have that scale up as research projects. The other things that we’re doing, we haven’t always done as well as we should, but we’re doing trying to do better is to partner with commercial partners who were not in dissemination, Meccan organization, we aren’t a publisher, we’re not a video game developer producer. But we know people who are so teaming up with them and letting them do what they do well, so we can do what we do well, which is research and innovation is is the ideal on that.
HR:
Anybody want to add anything to that?
IDH:
I’ll just say that, you know, TERCs been around since the 60s. And TERC is continually innovating and reinventing itself, we’ve been focused on STEM education from the get go. But we’re constantly adapting to the needs of student populations, you know, reflecting changes in technology changes in pedagogy, changes in the field. And so that’s, that’s how we’ve stayed relevant for all this time. And so we try to keep our finger on the pulse on what’s happening in these fields. And, and often, to be successful as a soft funded organization relying on grants, you really need to keep up with where the national priorities for national funding agencies and private funders are, to be able to stay.
JAC:
A really good example of that is when Ibrahim received this neuro vivid grant from the National Science Foundation, they pushed, they love the project, and they want the project, but they pushed on intersectionality with racial diversity as well, what’s happening with the other facets, racial and other forms of diversity? How does that come into account in this Makerspace when kids are doing that? So we’re so fortunate at TERC to have a breadth of colleagues, we have some of the top scholars in intersectionality research of, in their case, women and color in color in STEM. So but they have wonderful, innovative research methods to to really dig deep into those aspects. So we teamed up with them, and now they’re on the project. And we’re going to be looking at that those aspects of the project as well.
HR:
Is there anything we have not covered that you all would like to cover?
JAC:
I would like to tell a story from another project about this code design. There’s another project that we’re all working on. It’s led by our colleague, Deon Edwards called universal access, and it’s a V, a virtual reality project. They’ve developed a game like experience virtual reality experience on which you when you’re on a space station outside Europa, and there’s all these STEM problems to solve dealing with all the being there, and what you’re finding there. And these, I’m gonna say these guys, because I’m just an advisor. So these guys came in and brought a bunch of co-designers from landmark and develop the narrative. The goals were to pay attention to sensory attention and social needs have divergent learners. And they ended up with storylines, ideas about characters that were maybe communicating in a different way than the player would come in, and that those that communication had to be negotiated as part of the game mechanic. And these ideas that would you know, you I don’t think you hear a game, AAA game design team that’s mostly focused on neurotypical audiences thinking about those kinds of things. And I think they make them such richer game experiences. So it’s just an asset of how this co-designed to an example of how this code design team gives us things that are so much more imaginative and wonderful for everyone. Because of their unique perspective.
HR:
how can people learn more about TERC?
IDH:
I think, easiest way is to visit our website. So TERC.edu and TERC’s work, you know, spans a lot more than what we’ve described here. So as I said, We’ve been around since the 60s. There are many different research teams at TERC our particular team you can you can find and more details on TERC.edu/edge and that’ll get you to many of the projects that our particular team are working on.
JAC:
And EdGE at TERC and TERC both are on Facebook. And I, well, Facebook and LinkedIn. I’m not sure the status of Twitter X right now. Certainly those two,
HR:
it seems like TikTok is up there nowadays.
JAC:
Maybe we’ll have Reels, but I don’t think we’re gonna have a TikTok account for a variety of reasons but. But we have, we had a fantastic intern this summer, we had three fantastic interns this summer, to at least I’d self identifying as neurodivergent. And they — and one of them did a whole social media campaign designed for our ND and Stem side. And she’s going to come back and help us roll it out. It takes a lot of work to do that. And but we really want this message of neurodivergent learners in STEM and the value that that has to get out there.
HR:
Alright, so I’ll go around the virtual room and ask each of you this question, which has been answered in different ways, but we’re going to kind of segregate it a little bit. Why do you personally consider this work so important? And we’ll start with Zach.
ZA:
Yeah. So as a student, again, as from when I was growing up, I was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, and one, there were a lot of ways that I did not fit into the educational system. You know, and a lot of painful experiences in informal educational environments. And one way that I found a way in was through technology and through games and, and learning through these kinds of virtual experiences. And so I think this work is really important, because not only can we make these kinds of tools, for students that learn differently, but we can co make these kinds of tools are students who learn differently, they can be a part of this process, we can incorporate new technologies that they’re interested in, that we already know that, that they find compelling and effective, because they’re using them. Right, that should be the most important question for if we should use this tool is are they already using it? Do they like it? Right? Instead of this old antiquated model of I have this idea, and I’m going to impose this on, on students and and so yeah, that’s why I think this work is especially meaningful.
HR:
Right, Jodi you’re up.
JAC:
Um, I think the reason why it’s most important to me is because I’m a citizen of this planet, and I’m scared. And I see huge, huge problems. And we need really great innovators who think differently and persist, and don’t conform, necessarily, and, and are systematic and great detail oriented thinkers and think of the unintended consequences as well as the intended consequences. And when I work with neurodivergent learners, I see so much of that there. And I just want more of that, in my problem science solving society.
HR:
Very well said. Ibrahim?
IDH:
Yeah, I started out as a cognitive psychologist, and I sort of stumbled into education and educational research. I’d always felt that math and science education wasn’t where it needs to be. Many students hate math and science. Many students find math and science inaccessible to them. They I often hear students talk about what point is learning algebra, it’s useless, it’s difficult and so on. And I think it doesn’t need to be and I think the key to make it accessible to the entire student population is really meeting the needs of students who may be at the margins of what we what we see as today’s educational system. And I’ve always felt strongly that if we meet the needs of a broader audience, we’re going to produce a better educational experience for everybody. So that’s really what drove me into the field of educational research and in working with neurodivergent learners who I think can help shape a better educational experience for all students across the board.
HR:
Well, this has been terrific. Thank you very much for all you’re doing and for spending time, Zack, Jodi, Ibrahim, it’s been very educational, wonderful and we hope you will stay in touch with us here at different brains. I want to wish you luck on all your future endeavors and keep up all the good work. Thank you very much.
