UWM brings science (and zebrafish!) to Wisconsin high schools

Zebrafish navigate their way through a maze at Hamilton High School in Milwaukee. Meanwhile at Seymour Community High School, just west of Green Bay, others are exposed to pollutants. Even more can be found in high schools in Pardeeville, Waukesha and Racine.

The fish started their journey at UW-Milwaukee, making their way to 31 high schools across the state this academic year. Their mission: provide high school science students with an authentic research environment to examine the effects of environmental agents like nicotine and ethanol on animal development and health. The creator of that mission: UWM Distinguished Professor of Chemistry David Petering. Petering’s goal is to help high school students hit the ground running in college – and have them head straight to research labs.

“We’re living in a century that is saturated in science and technology,” Petering said. “If you don’t have a citizenry that tunes in and really thinks about science, we’re in bad shape.”

Petering started the precollege education program 20 years ago at UWM. It evolved into the WI Inquiry-based Scientist-Teacher Education Partnership, or WInSTEP. Over the past two decades, Petering has received $3 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Science Education Partnership Award Program.

“By UWM giving us this opportunity, it has broadened opportunities for people all over my school and all over the state,” said Emma Ellis, a senior at Seymour Community High School.

“It really expanded upon the idea that kids can be some really great researchers.”

Petering and the team of UWM scientists develop the high school curriculum with Craig Berg, a professor in the School of Education. They spend a week every summer training high school teachers to implement the program and, with project coordinator Renee Hesselbach, are available throughout the year to visit classrooms, answer questions and troubleshoot topics ranging from spawning fish to reviewing scientific papers that students write about their research. The culminating event is a research conference and poster competition held at UWM each spring that draws hundreds of students and teachers from around the state.

“One thing that we’ve been really impressed with, with UW-Milwaukee is the amount of support that they’ve given us as teachers,” said Cassie Cobb, a science teacher at Seymour Community High School. “We just had this fabulous experience in our classroom, but without everyone at UWM that would’ve never happened. To me, it means everything.”

The 2016 WInSTEP Student Research Conference is April 19.

 

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