Inspiring Young STEM Students at Wolf Ridge Learning Center

Fall of 2024 marks the second year that Murray Middle School students in Saint Paul, Minnesota have joined a team of University of Minnesota undergraduates and professors at Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center, an environmental K-12 learning center, to explore the study of science. 

Connecting the University with its community, the program has a two-fold purpose. One is to encourage younger students to enter the study of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) after high school. The other purpose is to increase diverse representation in STEM fields.

The Grand Challenge: A Bigger Picture

Professor Cheryl Olman of the Department of Psychology is one of the instructors of the undergraduate course GCC 3026 - Stepping Into the Gap, which includes the Wolf Ridge trip in its curriculum. Olman says her vision for the class, along with facilitating more representation of young students in STEM, was to inspire her undergraduate students to create change.

She explains, “One thing I would like this class to do is empower undergraduates who take this class to become agents for change,” she says, “and to spend more of our effort on what we can do here in this system to address the inequities we've seen.”

Sometimes schools, especially those that face funding challenges, are not able to provide all the resources needed to maximize students' academic and personal growth. That’s when partnerships like this one are important. Advocating for these K-12 students by filling some of these resource gaps can empower the community and increase public involvement in positive changes.

“As a college student, I think we can get lost in our own little world with our own little problems and forget the impacts we could be making … by advocating for those not being heard,” says one undergraduate student who took the class.

At Wolf Ridge, the undergraduates mentor the younger students and are diverse representations of success and passion in scientific fields.

“I think this is pretty universal: representation matters. Research in psychology impacts how we see people, how we help people when they need help, and how we define a healthy organization,” says Olman. “If you don’t have diverse minds thinking about those problems, you don’t come up with the diverse solutions you need.”

Professor Olman also says that diverse perspectives from faculty teaching the class have been key to its success. “I learned so much about identity development from Keisha Varma, who created this course with me. And then Bhaskar Upadhyay, who was there the first time we went to Wolf Ridge, helped me steer the focus away from “right answers” and toward discovery. This past year, Clay Carter brought the course to a whole new level; it was exciting to learn so much about plant science from him,” she says.

Hands-on Mentorship at Wolf Ridge 

Connecting with nature is a way for middle schoolers to build science capital.

Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center is located on the North Shore in Finland, Minnesota, and focuses on the interaction of students with wildlife and the environment. Undergraduates and middle schoolers begin their weekend-long trip with a stop at the Great Lakes Aquarium in Duluth for Lake Superior ecology classes. 

This past fall, students stopped at Gooseberry Falls State Park to help with the restoration of vegetation. Once the two groups arrived at Wolf Ridge, they went on a night hike, attended classes led by naturalists, and did group activities intended to promote communication and trust-building. 

All activities are held outdoors, no matter the weather. This year, in one of the classes the students did stream sampling, where they learned how to assess the health of a stream from a wide range of perspectives. 

Building Youth ‘Science Capital’

After the Wolf Ridge weekend, relationships have been built, and students are ready to settle into working on their own science projects. Undergraduate mentors guided middle schoolers in studying the effects of sidewalk salt on plant growth. They also assisted students in setting up plant chambers to observe mushroom growth and explored how air quality impacts the visibility of the Northern Lights, a nighttime light display caused by particles from solar storms colliding with the Earth’s atmosphere.

Olman says the hope of the course is to build the middle schoolers’ “science capital”—the science-related knowledge and experiences students have, the attitudes toward science they develop, and the people they know who engage in science.“Part of [gaining] that [science capital] is getting attention and positive feedback from the people you care about when you do science. Middle school is all about social and emotional development, and it’s also when interest in science plummets,” says Olman. 

Olman says she hopes the class will inspire students to mix the social scenes of middle school and the academic scenes of science to “keep that identity alive and positive.” The program’s mission, in part, is also to provide students with these three building blocks of science capital and hopefully encourage them to enter STEM fields.

“If youth build science capital, then this investment grows over time and increases the likelihood that a student stays interested in science later in life,” Olman says.

This story was written by Emma Ritter, an undergraduate student in CLA.