Project Exploration studied

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Project Exploration has served 1,000-plus students since 1999, when UChicago paleontologist Paul Sereno and alumna Gabrielle Lyon, AB’94, AM’94, founded the non-profit science education organization focusing on minority youth and girls. Judkins’ smoothly delivered, humor-laced comments provided vivid accompaniment to a 10-year retrospective study of its work that Project Exploration released at the May 12 gathering.

Project Exploration commissioned the study, Lyon says, because the organization wanted to move evaluations of its program from anecdotes to data. Further, “We wanted to understand what mattered to students because we wanted to shape our vision for the future.”

Under the Microscope

The study, funded by the Noyce Foundation and conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, focused on two goals: “First, to describe PE’s influence on its past participants or its alumni; and two, to explain the organizational practices and strategies that support science learning and traditionally under-represented youths in science,” says Juna Snow, a research and evaluation specialist at Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science.

The results validated Project Exploration’s personalized, out-of-school time approach to science education for urban teenagers. Among the findings, collected via an 88-question, web-based survey and follow-up telephone interviews with some of the respondents:
• 95 percent of Project Exploration alumni have graduated high school or are on track to graduate, which is nearly double the overall rate for students in Chicago Public Schools.
• 60 percent of the alumni are enrolled in a four-year college, pursuing degrees in fields related to science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM).
• 60 percent of the alumni who graduated from college graduated with a STEM-related degree.

“Ninety-three percent of the respondents agreed that they received new perspectives about their options in education, for work, for their life, during their time in Project Exploration,” Snow says.