In fall 2019, the Bell Museum received funding via a NASA TEAM II grant to create Mars: The Ultimate Voyage, a full-dome planetarium show and accompanying hands-on activities that focus on the interdisciplinary roles that will be needed to send humans to Mars. This report from Catalyst Consulting Group presents the findings from the summative evaluation completed in March–May 2023.
Described by Wohlwend, Peppler, Keune and Thompson (2017) as “a range of activities that blend design and technology, including textile crafts, robotics, electronics, digital fabrication, mechanical repair or creation, tinkering with everyday appliances, digital storytelling, arts and crafts—in short, fabricating with new technologies to create almost anything” (p. 445), making can open new possibilities for applied, interdisciplinary learning in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Martin, 2015), in ways that decenter and democratize access to ideas, and promote the construction
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jill CastekMichelle Schira HagermanRebecca Woodland
Libraries can provide unique opportunities for rural youth and communities. Phase III of the STAR Library Network will be a collaboration with 12 rural school districts in largely Latinx communities to address the challenges faced by rural youth, particularly English Language Learners. The project will use a coordinated and tested strategy to establish three learning pathways in public libraries: science learning spaces with exhibits, library programs, and science kits. These resources will provide learners with art-rich STEM learning opportunities.
Partners
Project partners include the Space Science Institute, the American Library Association (ALA), the Institute for Learning Innovation, and Twin Cities Public Television. The project will rely significantly on expertise from the Latinx community.
Project Plan
Building on an established librarian training model, the project will introduce library staff to the STEAM content and guide them in developing their own STEAM Learning Pathways. The project will draw on existing professional infrastructure from the ALA and the Institute for Learning Innovation’s established community of practice. SciGirls digital media, hands-on activities, family resources, and a training network will expand the depth and reach of the project.
The Research
The research team will study the efficacy of each pathway, alone and in tandem, on participant’s interest development and persistence. The research will use a mixed-methods design-based approach that involves questionnaires, interviews, and case studies. The results should yield a model for nationwide application and contribute insights for the formal education sector.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.
While the term 'failure' brings to mind negative associations, there is a current focus on failure as a driver of innovation and development in many professional fields. It is also emerging from prior research that for STEM professionals and educators, failure plays an important role in designing and making to increase learning, persistence and other noncognitive skills such as self-efficacy and independence. By investigating how youth and educators attend to moments of failure, how they interpret what this means, and how they respond, we will be better able to understand the dynamics of each part of the experience. The research team will be working with youth from urban, suburban and rural settings, students from Title I schools or who qualify for free/reduced-price lunches, those from racial and ethnic minority groups, as well as students who are learning English as a second language. These youth are from groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM and in making, and research indicates they are more likely to experience negative outcomes when they experience failure.
The intellectual merit of this project centers on establishing a baseline understanding of how failure in making is triggered and experienced by youth, what role educators play in the process, and what can be done to increase persistence and learning, rather than failure being an end-state. The research team will investigate these issues through the use of qualitative and quantitative research methods. In particular, the team will design and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions on increasing the abilities of youth and educators in noticing and responding to failures and increasing positive (e.g., resilience) outcomes. Research sites are selected because they will allow collection of data on youth from a wide range of backgrounds. The research team will also work to test and revise their hypothesized model of the influence of factors on persistence through failures in making. This project is a part of NSF's Maker Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) portfolio (NSF 15-086), a collaborative investment of Directorates for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), Education and Human Resources (EHR) and Engineering (ENG).
Chemistry is an important and widely relevant field of science. However, when compared with other STEM content areas, chemistry is under-represented in U.S. science museums and other informal educational environments. This project will build, and build knowledge about, innovative approaches to delivering informal science learning activities in chemistry. The project will not only increase public interest and understanding of chemistry but also increase public perception of chemistry's relevance and increase the public's self-efficacy with respect to chemistry. This project outcomes will include a guide for practitioners along with activity materials that will be packaged into a kit, distributed, and replicated for use by informal science educators, chemists, and chemistry students at 250 sites across the U.S. The project team will reach out to organizations that serve diverse audiences and diverse geographic locations, including organizations in rural and inner-city areas. The kits will provide guidance on engaging girls, people with various abilities, Spanish speakers, and other diverse audiences, and include materials in Spanish. Written guides, training videos, and training slides will be included to support training in science communication in general, as well as chemistry in particular. This project is supported by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds research and innovative resources for use in a variety of settings, as a part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments.
This project will take an innovative approach to develop informal educational activities and materials about chemistry. Rather than starting with content goals, the project will start with a theoretical framework drawn from research about affecting attitudes about science related to interest, relevance, and self-efficacy. A design-based research approach (DBR) will be used to apply that framework to the development of hands-on educational activities about chemistry, while also testing and modifying the framework itself. (DBR blends empirical educational research with the theory-driven design of learning environments.) Existing or new educational activities that appear to embody key characteristics defined in the framework will be tested with public audiences for their impact on visitors. Researchers and educators will determine how different characteristics of the educational activities defined in the framework affect the outcomes. The activities will be modified and tested iteratively until the investigators achieve close alignment between framework and impacts.. The project team will continue the design-based research approach both to examine groups of activities in which synergies can have impacts beyond single interactions as well as to examine varied ways of training facilitators who can also significantly affect outcomes. In this way, the project will generate knowledge about how kits of hands-on informal learning activities can stimulate attitudes of interest, relevance, and self-efficacy with respect to the neglected field of chemistry. The project teams will broadly disseminate project outcomes within the educational research, science and informal Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education communities. While this project will focus on chemistry, the strategies it will develop and test through a design-based research process will provide valuable insight into effective approaches for informal STEM education more broadly.
This briefing paper reports findings from the Youth Access & Equity in Informal Science Learning (ISL) project,
a UK-US researcher-practitioner partnership funded by the Science Learning+ scheme. Our project focuses on young people aged 11-14 primarily from under-served and non-dominant communities and includes researchers and practitioners from a range of ISL settings: designed spaces (e.g. museums, zoos), community-based (e.g. after school clubs) and everyday science spaces (e.g. science media).
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. The Lost Ladybug Project (LLP) is a Cornell University citizen science project that connects science to education by using ladybugs to teach non-scientists concepts of biodiversity, invasive species, and conservation.