Blogger in draft: Blogger Dashboard

FUTURISTIC SCENARIO
Step 1: Identify Implications:
Strengths: Providing technological and theoretical science support for elementary and middle-school teachers as well as for their students has been well received and carries many implications for the academic achievement of underrepresented minority students in science. Usually these students do not have the opportunity to be exposed to “hands-on” science activities since early age due to many deficiencies in the educational system. Providing this exposure free of charge will bring uncountable opportunities for these children and their teachers.
Weaknesses: The lack of funding is the main drawback of the program. These days the competition for the few dollars in grants is fearsome. On the other hand, this program can be carried out with very few resources.
Opportunity: The exposure that the program gets every opportunity a classroom is visited provides an extraordinary occasion to get better known by the community. This in turn can translate into grant resources in the future. In addition, utilizing resources such as former students for volunteering could bring about chances for these students to practice what they learned when they took my class and to provide exposure to them to the community members they will be serving when they graduate from the nursing program.
Threats: There are very few threats to the development and sustainment of the outreach program. The support is very necessary and unless teachers are not very interested in it, then I can see a threat for the program not to keep developing in the future.
Step 2: Develop Options
There are several options which I have thought of when the time comes. For example; rent a location where teacher and students can visit for the day and perform their experiments. In addition, a possible option is to use a laboratory at a college to have the teacher and students visit and perform their experiments so to expose them to real higher education science laboratories.
Step 3: Monitor Trends
It is difficult to monitor the trends of success in these types of programs due to the number of years it takes to see if it has made any impact in the student. However, there is no drawback or negative impact foreseeing in these type of program. I have monitored the impact of the program for three years so far and the children are in their way to middle-school. It would be very interesting to research the impact of the program in these children’s high school, years where they have the free will to choose to take a science class for themselves because they are interested in it.
A possible scenario to better monitor the impact of this program on the interest, achievement, and performance in science of these children would be to survey them each year to see these abilities have change with time after they took part of the program.