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| Washington High School, on the west side
of town in South Bend, IN, remains one of the most ethnically
diverse public schools in this county of the state. The enrollment
demographics show that the student population is approximately
48% African-American, 30% White, 16% Hispanics, 5% Multiracial,
0.4% Native American, and 0.2% are Asian. The students at this
school perform well below the average (over 30% in the 2009/2010
testing year) on the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational
Progress (ISTEP) with an overall high school graduation rate of
70-80%. The families of these students also rank well below the
national average in earnings.
The
Nuclear Science Laboratory at Notre Dame and the Joint
Institute of Nuclear Astrophysics has adopted this high school
in an effort to ultimately
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| increase the representation
of these underrepresented groups in the sciences and to offer
this group of students opportunities that they may not have otherwise
realized. A crucial step to getting students to major in any of
the STEM fields is to insure that they have the appropriate background
in high school. We have started a science program for the 9th
graders exposing them to hands-on science experiments, the latest
discoveries, and encourage them to take math and science classes
in their four years of high school as a gateway to a promising
university/college career.
One hundred and fifty 9th grade students from Washington
High School were invited to spend a full day at Notre Dame’s Jordan
Hall of Science, perhaps one of the most innovative science and
teaching facilities of any university in the nation. The program
included a welcome and information on what is needed for success
in College applications, a lecture/movie combination to discuss
the "Physics of Angels and Demons," a morning of a variety of
hands-on activities situated in various laboratories of the Jordan
Hall of Science Complex including looking at parasites in the
heart of a sheep to understanding nuclear reactions by collisions
of different energies of magnetic balls to produce new atoms.
The day ended with a lecture in the digital visualization theatre
by Dr. Phil Sakimoto, formerly of NASA, for a "trip through the
universe."
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Ten Ph.D. students from the Nuclear Science Laboratory
and ten Ph.D. students from other departments in the College of
Science at Notre Dame (Biology, Chemistry, and Physics) participated
in setting up the demonstrations. We did a survey of the students
we invited before their visit to Notre Dame and then again at
the end of Science Day specifically to evaluate their feelings
about science on a scale of 0-100. There was an increase of 30%
in liking/considering studying science before and after the visit.
This work was supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant No. PHY07-58100 and through the Joint
Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics under Grant No. PHY08-22648. |
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