Impact

Program Statistics

We incorporated on January 29, 2007. Since then:

We have trained 209 volunteering professional engineers, undergraduate and graduate students. 54% of our volunteers return to teach with us again.
Our volunteering instructors have conducted 132 multi-session courses (17,391 student-hours and 1560 parent-hours of instruction). 36 of these courses were Family Science Courses.
Our courses have reached more than 4100 under-served children and their parents in Los Angeles, East Palo Alto and Salinas.

Click on the graph below to see what we have been upto in 2009.

Click here for a sketch of all our activities and projects from 2008.

Research

Robyn Hightower, a market researcher has volunteered her time and expertise to help us understand what obstacles parents face to participating in our Family Science Courses, how we can address these issues to increase participation from families that are new to us and to identify and address their needs.

Fall 2008

We administered a parent survey to ~400 parents at 7 LAUSD schools at Back to School Night. Here are some results from Robyn's analysis of the data.

Parent Demographics By School

Parent Demographics

Parent Attitudes By School

Spring 2009

Robyn developed and conducted a teacher survey to identify which schools would provide the support needed to sustain a long-term Iridescent Family Science Program. You can view the survey here and some of the findings in the report below.

Parent and Teacher Interest in Iridescent

Fall 2009

We sampled 943 parents from 14 partner schools in South Los Angeles. The goal of the survey was to inform decisions on whether Iridescent should develop an online Parent Social Networking Site, what features to incorporate on that site and what resources to develop that would help parents engage their children in science after the courses. The survey also had some questions determining interest in co-investing and the Parent Leadership Program.

Parents' Needs Assessment Survey

Urban School Needs Map Project: Data-driven resource allocation

Our goal is to streamline our effort and resource allocation methods to ensure cost-efficient, long-term impact.

We are partnering with an information visualization research group, Density Design and Dr. Marco Fattore (Dept. of Statistics, Bicocca University) to use a combination of existing data (zip code income, education and crime and school API and crime) and gathered survey data (measuring teacher and parent commitment) to determine which schools would be suitable long-term Iridescent partners. This data is represented in an interactive Urban School Needs Map that will help not only Iridescent, but other urban education providers and funders as well to allocate resources more efficiently. All data is taken from the CA department of education, Los Angeles School Police Departmentand Los Angeles Unified School District.

Visualization tool - Dust

A PROTOTYPE OF THE TOOL (CALLED "DUST") CAN BE ACCESSED HERE.

Video describing how to use the tool

The video below shows how you can manipulate the various variables to compare different school characteristics and identify suitable school partners.

Slides describing how to use the tool

Below is a slideshow of screenshots (PDF version can be accessed here) that identify various outlying schools (low and high performers based on Academic Performance Index "API", Teacher to student ratios, crime, student demographics, school type etc.) and their geographic locations.

You can also see some of Iridescent's partner schools:Synergy Charter Academy, 32nd St, Norwood El, Manual Arts, Foshay Learning Center, KIPP, Shenandoah St. El, Palms, Trinity St. El and Audubon Middle School and how they perform in comparison to other schools.

The legend for the map can be accessed here.

Access and improve the actual data

If you are interested in finding out more about a particular school, you can use the table below to access data on parent and teacher demographics.

This list is editable as well as interactive. If you find any incorrect, out-of-date or missing information, you can update it:

Click on a school's name to view its details.
Filter or sort the information by clicking any of the column headings. You can apply multiple filters by first filtering one column – such as API – and then filtering another column.
Resize a column by clicking-and-dragging the edge of the column heading. Alternatively, you can use the scrollbar at the bottom of the table to view obscured columns.
Click the page number at the bottom of the list to jump to another page.
Click any cell to update its data.
Click the “add row” button to add a name missing from the table.

This information is syndicated and is available on a number of websites. Any changes made here will automatically update the list wherever it is displayed across the web.

We also use this poverty map from United Way to determine whether we were operating in the high poverty areas.

Measuring K-12 Student Learning

The following responses are from a Family Science Course (funded by AAUW) that was conducted only for girls and their parents by women engineers. The students were asked whether they would like to become an engineer or a scientist and this is what they said :)