Cultivating STEM excellence in an all-girls Catholic high school

Key points:

• The students’ commitment to their STEM education inspires educators
• 3 free STEAM education resources to nurture student curiosity
• How to use PBL with makerspaces across your curriculum
• For more news on STEM education, visit eSN’s STEM & STEAM hub

Although Mercy Academy is one of four all-girl Catholic high schools in Louisville, Kentucky, we’re the only one that is STEM certified. In fact, Mercy was the first all-girls school in the country to earn a STEM certification. The interest in our program has been intense; the school’s 500+ students come from 95 grade schools across several counties and even the neighboring state of Indiana.

We became STEM certified in 2016 because we wanted independent verification of our program’s quality. After examining several certifying agency options, we chose Cognia, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization that provides accreditation, certification, and improvement services worldwide.

The nonprofit already served as our accrediting agency. However, rather than convenience, we were looking for certification that aligned with our performance-based courses of study. Mercy’s curriculum requires at least 75 percent of a course’s assessment points to be for performance tasks addressing real-world problems.

For example, our engineering design class has an occupational therapy unit in which two  graduates who became therapists come in to explain to the students what the job entails. The engineering students’ performance task for that unit is designing a toy that will help pediatric patients perform a particular movement or learn a skill. Then the two occupational therapists try out those toy prototypes with actual patients.

Developing STEM learning partnerships

Our focus on performance tasks is bolstered by a diverse community of STEM education partnerships. As of this writing, Mercy Academy has amassed 32 partners.

Some examples include:

• A local branch of General Electric Appliances (GE Appliances), located across the street from us, has involved Mercy students in its SWiFT (Students With Futures in Technology) job shadowing and hands-on experiences program since that program’s inception in 2009. In addition, the company takes the Engineering and Design class of science teacher Dr. Eric Wong on a tour of its assembly lines and hands-on activities in its training facility and metrology lab. GE Appliances has also developed curriculum for that class and helped us develop our new recommendations of course pathways for STEM careers. The company has rolled out a new second semester co-op course for Mercy’s senior students. Those students will gain work experience by working the second shift at GE Appliance Park on Mondays and Fridays.

• Mammoth Cave National Park, located 90 minutes from Louisville, allows our Underwater Research Team to operate submersible drones on its premises. Additionally, CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology), a nonprofit research and development organization, is planning to film our team’s work in the park’s renowned caves as part of the CAST national drone curriculum.

• NASA’s “Growing Beyond Earth” research program works with physics and engineering teacher Laura Swessel’s Mercy Environmental Ambassadors student club. The students compare the growth of plants in their classrooms to the growth of plants on the International Space Station and send the data to NASA.

• Texas A&M University’s “What’s in our air?” research and air quality curriculum also selected Mercy Environmental Ambassadors student club as partners. The students received air quality measurement tools and reported their findings to the university researcher. She was so impressed that she gave them a more sophisticated, real-time monitor with Wi-Fi connectivity. 

Making cross-curricular connections

One unexpected benefit of collecting data for certification review is that it has increased our ability to spot opportunities for cross-curricular instruction. For example, Victoria Hawkins, Mercy’s assistant STEM coordinator and science teacher, noted that algebra is frequently used in chemistry class. She now employs the practice of explicitly connecting the two subjects by saying things like, “Remember when you learned how to do systems of equations? That’s how we solve for the percent abundance of an isotope.”

Our pre-calculus class does a lot of crossover work with our chemistry classes, especially at the AP chemistry level. In fact, students recently told Hawkins about “doing science in math class,” referring to a nuclear decay and radioactivity assignment they’d completed for pre-calculus. Similarly, pre-calculus students do a forensics activity in which they use Newton’s law to figure out how long a body has been cooling.

For especially math-heavy lessons, Hawkins asks a math interventionist from our resource center to sit in on her class. The interventionist’s presence mentally prepares the students to do math. Also, the interventionist assists any student struggling with dimensional analysis, geometry, or whatever math the lesson requires.

Honing STEM acumen

Mercy’s test scores are consistently ahead of state and national averages. Additionally, since 2018, our science department has administered a common assessment that measures students’ growth in a single school year as well as across their entire time at Mercy. The assessment data is organized by graduating class cohorts for the intention of tracking essential skills from the beginning of a group’s freshman year through the end of their senior year. Students’ growth is measured in four areas aligning with the ACT college readiness standards for science:

• Evaluating scientific questions
• Formulating hypotheses
• Analyzing evidence
• Justifying conclusions

We’re happy to report that our students show definite growth in those areas throughout their time at Mercy. For example, the class of 2022 had an average overall baseline score of 1.67 out of 4 (measured in the fall semester of their freshman year). By the spring of their senior year, they had an average score of 3.05 out of 4, an increase of 138 percent that demonstrates their growth in proficiency while enrolled in our science courses.

The class of 2023 also demonstrated impressive growth. Their measured scientific skills began with an average baseline score of 1.92 out of 4. By graduation, those students had achieved an average score of 3.09 out of 4, an increase of 117 percent over the course of four years.

Implementing initiatives like STEM education and performance-based learning is like planting seeds in the soil. You can have the best seed but if the soil–or culture–is not cultivated, there will be no growth. This work is about commitment to beliefs and values rather than compliance with a mandate. And our students’ commitment to our STEM program inspires us just as much as we aim to inspire them.