NSF Awards: 2005793
Dr. Ricardo Valerdi (PI) gives an overview of the Growing Mathletes project, including its origins in the Science of Sport and the purpose of the current NSF-funded project. Footage of youth participating in Growing Mathletes activities at local Boys and Girls Clubs is shown, with project members explaining the salient math and growth mindset concepts and how these are integrated into the context of baseball. For example, in the Strike Zone lesson, youth measure, draw, and calculate the area of their personal strike zone, an invisible rectangle of unique area for each player based on their height and batting stance. After practicing pitching into their strike zones, youth discuss the importance of mistakes in learning and how professional pitchers use mistakes and persistence to become successful. In the Baseball Positions lesson, youth write their own strengths on strips of paper, which are then used to create a strengths chain representing the strengths youth bring to a team. Youth participants also describe the impacts of the project on their own lives. The video closes with the next steps of the Growing Mathletes project, credit to the funders and partners, and a link to the project website.
Cynthia Callard
Executive Director and Faculty
What a cool and interesting project! I love baseball, I love math, and I believe in all kids, so this project really speaks to me! I am curious to hear more about your longer-term intended product. Is it to develop comprehensive sets of experiences that could then be "picked up by" leaders in informal learning spaces to use with students? Say in summer camps? I am also curious about how you are measuring impact on students' growth mindsets and/or math knowledge. Have you incorporated some kind of pre/post measure? Or do you have other measures that you are capturing? Looking forward to hearing more.
Christina Baze
Postdoctoral Research Associate I
Hi Cynthia,
Thank you for your questions! We are iteratively designing both curricular materials (with the goal of sharing these with informal educators) and a professional learning model. We are also refining our initial set of lessons and adapting the program for a summer camp-type setting, with implementation this summer.
We are using a Likert-type scaled pre- and post-survey, along with qualitative data from youth artifacts and interviews, to measure both math and mindset outcomes.
Cynthia Callard
Cynthia Callard
Executive Director and Faculty
Thank you Christina! I look forward to hearing more about your efforts and impact!
Christina Baze
Postdoctoral Research Associate I
Hello everyone, welcome to our presentation!
I am a postdoc on the Growing Mathletes research team. My background is in STEM Education, with a focus on biology education, but I am so glad to be broadening my experiences!
Our project is in its early stages of implementation, having experienced some delays in implementation and data collection related to the COVID-19 pandemic. But we are happily moving forward, having piloted a small set of lessons last summer, as well as a set of 10 lessons and two performance-based culminating tasks between fall and spring.
We hope to engage with informal educators and education researchers. With our project in its early stages, we would be grateful to hear your thoughts about our program overall and invite educators to share their experiences integrating different topics (such as math, mindset, and sports). This comes with many challenges, but also many opportunities! What have you found to be successful? What pitfalls should we be avoiding?
I look forward to the discussion!
David Lockett
David Lockett
Data Science Outreach and Grants Development
What an amazing project. Project-based learning challenges provide opportunities for students to solve real problems in an authentic and meaningful way. Incorporating a growth mindset into math teaching makes all the difference.The implications of this mindset are profound -- students with a growth mindset work and learn more effectively. Looking forward to hearing more about the impact and measures of success with the project.
Christina Baze
Erin Turner
Professor
Thank you so much for your comment David! We are looking forward to analyzing outcomes from our first round of participants this summer - we will have data related to growth mindset, disposition towards math and math learning from a group of youth in boys and girls club settings, and then a group in a summer camp at a baseball facility. We will make sure to post updates on our project website. Thanks for your feedback!
Andrew Jackson
Did your participants develop a greater appreciation for Geometry in baseball?
Christina Baze
Postdoctoral Research Associate I
Hi Andrew,
We are not measuring appreciation or attitudes toward any specific field of mathematics, but more of a general sense of math. Our youth participants are in grades 3-8, so we keep it pretty general. Unfortunately, we do not yet have a large enough sample size to rely on our survey data to make claims around outcomes, but we hope to increase those numbers! Anecdotally, from chatting with and interviewing youth (we have only done limited qualitative analysis so far), our kids are making connections between school math, out-of-school math, and using math in their everyday lives, and they do seem to be gaining math understanding, especially around fractions, decimals, and percentages, as well as measurement (distances and angles). But again, we are just beginning data analysis, so I cannot speak to your question directly.
Andrew Jackson
Hello Christina,
I had in mind the distances between the bases, the distance from the picture's mound to home plate and the fact the infield is called a diamond or rhombus.
Christina Baze
Postdoctoral Research Associate I
Andrew, our activities include a lot of geometry ideas, including the distance between bases and from the pitcher's mound to home, the right angles seen in the infield "diamond", and how little league and MLB distances differ. We certainly discuss these things! But I cannot speak to our participants' appreciation for geometry as a result of these activities.
Wendy Smith
Research Professor
Thanks for sharing your engaging project. What kind of professional development (if any) did you do with those who have been leading the baseball lessons? Is there a set of "baseball knowledge for teaching" in addition to mathematical knowledge for teaching that those leading lessons need to know? Do you think others could adapt your project idea to other sports that are locally popular (such as basketball or soccer)?
Christina Baze
Postdoctoral Research Associate I
Thank you for your questions, Wendy. So far in our project, we have been working with facilitators who have some familiarity with baseball but are not experts. In the fall, we did 12 hours of in-person (socially distanced and masked) professional development, including baseball knowledge (along with pedagogy, math, and growth mindset training), and we provide on-demand resources for our facilitators to access at any time to find information about baseball. We also include relevant baseball background information in the facilitator guides for each lesson. With our project expanding, we will alter our professional development based on the knowledge and expertise of new facilitators. For example, a facilitator who is or has been a baseball or softball coach would of course need much less support with the baseball knowledge but might need more support with math or pedagogy.
Our curriculum was adapted from the Science of Baseball curriculum, a part of Science of Sport (https://sciencesport.org/), which has curricula centered within the context of several different sports. Similar curricula could be adapted to integrate growth mindset principles in the context of any of these sports in the same way. We have found that our youth are often more familiar with soccer in particular, though it has been up to facilitators at this point to make connections to other sports.
Janet Stramel
Thank you for sharing this awesome project!
Erin Turner
Professor
Thank you for sharing your feedback Janet. Glad you enjoyed our project video.
Jamie Bell
Thank you for sharing this innovative project. Are you learning anything interesting about how your outcomes may advance knowledge on how different out-of-school program structures with similar sports-focused STEM programming can similarly (or differentially) support youth learning?
Erin Turner
Professor
Thanks for the fantastic question. We are still in the early stages, but part of our research and design work includes the development and iterative testing/refinement of professional learning materials for facilitators in informal learning spaces. These materials will include resources for in person facilitator training sessions, as well as a diverse set of on demand resources to support facilitators in a range of different informal learning settings in implementing the program. So fat, we have only tested the program (and associated facilitator learning materials) at an after school boys and girls club. But this summer, we will implement in a summer camp setting. Our hope is to learn from each implementation and to refine the materials accordingly so that they are as flexible as possible and can be used effectively in a range of informal learning spaces.