Newton, New Jersey Matthews, North Carolina

Evanston, Illinois

Newton, New Jersey Matthews, North Carolina

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Mission 3

Company History 3

MindRap 4

MindRap Programs 5

Partners 8

Board of Directors 9

Advisory Team 10

Management Team 11

Publications 12

Presentations 12

Letters of Recommendations 13

Appendix 16

Contact Information 18

TIZ MEDIA FOUNDATION

OUR MISSION

To increase students’ confidence, interest, and achievement in math and science by designing innovative and engaging programs that integrate math and science with technology, music, writing, and art.

COMPANY HISTORY

The seeds for Tiz Media Foundation were planted in the 1980’s when a group of Bell Laboratory scientists opened a science center in Plainfield, NJ. That center, housed in an abandoned rundown candy store, was a grassroots effort that opened up the world of science to a group of urban youth. Award-winning physicist Dr. James E. West was part of that group of scientists, and his daughter Melanie served as a tutor at the center.

This center inspired in Dr. West and his daughter the vision for a program that would cultivate in urban students, an enthusiasm for learning math and science. It would be a program where students would be exposed to science and math role models who looked like them, using a culture to which they were connected. TIz Media Foundation is the result of their vision.

Tiz Media Foundation is a minority-led, 501.C.3 nonprofit organization. It is based in Evanston, Illinois with satellite offices in New Jersey and North Carolina. Founded in 2001, Tiz Media encourages students to achieve in math and science through MindRap, an interdisciplinary program that combines math or science with technology, music, writing, and art in a way that is both interesting and intellectually challenging to students.

As part of the learning process, students work together to translate the science or math content they learn in the program into visual graphics and a hip-hop song. Students’ songs and graphics are then converted into a multimedia module that is used to teach the science or math concepts to other students. Results from the program suggest that students are learning more because concepts that otherwise might seem foreign to them are made more contextually relevant when presented in the medium of hip-hop.

MINDRAP

A basic MindRap program includes the following activities:

The program begins by describing to students what they will be doing and explaining what they are expected to accomplish. They are then organized into teams. After a lesson on the social and emotional skills that one needs to work successfully in teams, students begin their multi-disciplinary journey by participating in engaging and interactive science or math lessons delivered by certified teachers.

The lessons are followed by presentations by a series of MindRap consultants. These presentations described below are based on, and designed to extend, the math or science lessons.

· A professional storyteller introduces students to the origins of storytelling and then helps them to transfer the science or math content learned into a concrete story line. The storyteller then supports and guides students as they use what was learned in the lesson to write their own story. Next, students work together to turn their story into a hip-hop song that includes a chorus which highlights the most important concepts to remember.

· The session is then handed over to a professional musician. The musician guides students in exploring the fundamentals of rhythm, composition, and song structure. This is followed by students participating in a beat session that leads to the selection of a beat for their hip-hop rap.

§ Next, students are introduced to a spoken word artist who explains the fundamentals of poetry and demonstrates the power of performance. The artist supports students as they practice delivering their music using poetic and vocal mediums.

§ The next presenter, a graphic artist, introduces students to the history of graffiti art and helps them turn concepts learned in the science or math lesson into supportive art for the multimedia module.

· The final presenter is a recording engineer who works with students on recording techniques. The engineer and students work together to edit and mix the beat selected earlier into a song format, after which students practice and then record their rap.

MINDRAP PROGRAMS

Since 2001, Tiz Media Foundation has conducted a number of MindRap programs. A description of some of those programs appears below.

North Lawndale Charter School Chicago, Illinois.

An in-school MindRap program with thirty high school students was conducted at North Lawndale Charter School. This program was funded by a donor, active in the school. The science taught in the program was titled, “The Brain – Emotions and Learning.” The lessons were designed to provide students with an overview of the brain; show how negative emotions can impede learning; provide an understanding of the terms amygdale, limbic system, frontal cortex and thalamus; and introduce a strategy for controlling negative emotions.

Results: An analysis of pre and post assessments on the content covered in the lessons showed that on the pre-test students answered 29% of the questions correctly. On the post-test, students answered 70% of the questions correctly. This represented an overall gain of 41%.

So that everyone would have a strategy they could use when faced with a negative situation, the science lesson included a strategy called the Six-Second Pause. This strategy asks the user to pause for six seconds and think about something other than the negative situation they are in. The purpose of the strategy is to provide time for a person to stop and think before acting on their negative impulses. When asked on the pre-test what they did when faced with a negative situation, 37% of the students said that they did not have a strategy for dealing with such situations. When asked on the post-test to describe what they did, 68% of students named and accurately described the Six Second Pause Strategy.

In an attempt to find out if what was taught was actually used by students, the post test asked students to tell how many times after learning the strategy they’d become upset, angry, or irritated. 74% of students said they’d had these feelings at least one or more times. Of this group of students, 79% said that when they had these feelings, they’d used the Six Second Pause Strategy. This provided encouraging evidence that a sizeable number of the students were not only aware of their negative feelings, but also spent time using what they’d learned in the program to control them.

Another benefit of the program was that the number of students who felt they were Very Good in science increased, and the number of students who felt they were Not Very Good in science decreased. These results suggest that the program was effective in helping this group of under-achieving students develop positive feelings about the study of science.

The administrators at North Lawndale felt the program was such a success that they decided to use the multimedia module created during the program in the upcoming school year, as part of a class designed to help their freshmen students control their emotions. This module can be viewed at http://www.mindrap.org/amygdala/mrnlcp.html.

Evanston High School Evanston, Illinois

A six-week summer math enrichment program was conducted at Evanston High School. This program was funded through Title1Funds. A major goal of the program was to pre-teach the geometry vocabulary that students would encounter in the coming school year. Students worked to develop a story, then selected a beat that they turned into a rap about a basketball player who improves his game by learning geometry.

As part of the program, students were engaged in a variety of interactive activities that included podcasting and computer game programming. Students also participated in several interactive presentations by guest speakers who helped them understand how geometry is connected to the real world.

The pre and post assessments administered to students were designed to measure students’ ability to identify shapes and structures, to match geometry terms to their definitions, to identify geometry notations, and to answer fraction word problems.

Results: Students were told that some of the shapes and structures had more than one name. On the pre-test, none of the students used more than one name to identify a shape. On the post-test, 70% of the students were able to give more than one name to a shape.

On the pre-test, no student was able to correctly match more than two of the geometry terms to their definitions. On the post-test, 85% of the students were able to correctly match all of the geometry terms to their definitions. Of the six geometry notations, students identified an average of three more notations on the post test than they did on the pre-test.

The pretests showed that all of the students had a moderate to good understanding of fractions before they began the program. The post-tests showed the same. Students had more difficulty answering word problems that involved fractions. Still, on average, students correctly answered one more question on the post-test than they did on the pre-test.

The most accurate representation of what students learned is reflected in the mathematically accurate products – the G Ball Rap that students wrote and recorded, and the G-Ball Game that students conceived ideas for during the program. The rap song that students created can be found in the appendix of this booklet.

Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Tiz Media worked with the Northwestern Institute on Complex Science (NICO) at Northwestern University to sponsor Speech and the Cell Phone, a five-week summer science program for high school students and college science majors. This program, conducted on the Northwestern campus and funded through a Motorola Foundation Innovation Grant, used the MindRap program to teach students how speech waves travel through the cell phone and to help student develop a positive attitude about learning science.

The first two weeks involved only the NICO students. During this time the undergraduate students were paired as research interns with Northwestern speech researchers, allowing them to become mini-experts on different aspects of speech science. During the third week, the undergraduate students joined the MindRap program serving as mentors to the high school students.

Results: A t-test was used to determine the difference in means between the pre- and post-tests. Results from the test confirm that students’ self-assessed changes in attitude and understanding of the importance of science was statistically significant at a p<10 level. On the pre-test, 62.5% of the students said they were Kind of Interested in Science and 37.5% said they were Very Interested. On the post-test, 50% said they were Kind of Interested and 50% said they were Very Interested.

The pre and post program assessments included 18 multiple-choice questions and 9 vocabulary items that required students to match a word with its meaning. Students showed a gain of +2.5 on the multiple-choice questions and a gain of +1.2 on the vocabulary matching items. A t-test confirmed that the difference was statistically significant at a p<10 level.

Students created and presented a rap about what they learned about sound waves and how sound travels through the cell phone. Not only was this an enjoyable exercise for students, it required them to actually apply what was learned in the program. Students’ rap can be viewed at http://www.mindrap.org/mrscp.html

During this project, a one-hour documentary was filmed that followed the l5 day program from beginning to end. A DVD of this documentary can be obtained by contacting Laurie@TizMedia.

The Pacific Institute for Mathematical Science Vancouver, Canada

One of Tiz Media’s most unusual programs was conducted at the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences. This was an abbreviated MindRap session on the ozone layer. The chorus was created by Tiz Media staff, but the students who attended the conference created the verses in a brief one hour MindRap session.

Results: The Canadian students were not familiar with hip-hop, but enthusiastically embraced the process of creating a rap about the ozone layer.

PARTNERS

Tiz Media has used its MindRap program to partner with other organizations. Two of those partnerships are described below.

Young People’s Project Chicago, Illinois

Tiz Media worked with the Young People’s Project (YPP) under a five year NSF grant, “Building Demand for Math Literacy.” YPP which is part of Dr. Robert Moses’ Algebra Project is a math literacy program that recruits, trains, and deploys high school and college math literacy workers to mentor middle and elementary students in math. Tiz Media worked directly with the YPP staff and student mentors to create an interactive multimedia module that includes a story and several games.

Over the course of 4 years, an interactive multimedia application was developed through an iterative process based on testing results, direct observation of the outreach children who used the prototype, and results from a formal evaluation conducted by the Illinois Institute of Technology. The modules are currently being used in the YPP math literacy workshops as a supplement to their curricular activities. The modules can be viewed at http://www.typp.org/flagwaycampaign

African-American Distributed Multiple Learning Styles System (AADMLSS) Auburn University, Auburn Alabama Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona

AADMLSS is a research experiment run by Dr. Juan Gilbert of Auburn University and Dr. Stafford Hood of Arizona State University. Together, they built an intelligent platform that contains math and science lessons presented to students by avatars. The platform learns the learning style of each student, adjusts itself accordingly and represents an adaptive, electronic, speech-enabled algebra learning system that uses culture to influence learning. Tiz Media used its MindRap process to create City Stroll for the program. City Stroll consists of seven modules that involve the solving of simple algebraic equations through stories, animation, and music. Tiz Media was also involved in the technical setup, testing, and recording of results from a focus group of teachers and students who participated in a pilot of the program.

A brief study conducted in an inner city school in Chicago showed that the design of the modules were well received among the target audience. In the study, participants were surveyed about the City Stroll environment and engagement. On a 1-5 Likert scale, with 5 being the highest, students’ engagement ranked 4.26. Participants enjoyed the rap lyrics and thought they were understandable. “This kept our attention because it had music with it. Songs stick in your head,” was a comment offered by one of the students.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS