This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
The project's activities include regular forums of journalists and social scientists (Slack & Zoom), experimentation with different ways of presenting stats in news graphics and text, focus groups and experiments with audiences, and resources to support journalists beyond our team.
Numeracy is not a luxury: numbers constantly factor into our daily lives. Yet adults in the United States have lower numeracy than adults in most other developed nations. While formal statistical training is effective, few adults receive it – and schools are a major contributor to the inequity we see among U.S. adults. That leaves news well-poised as a source of informal learning, given that news is a domain where adults regularly encounter quantitative content. Our transdisciplinary team of journalists and social scientists propose a research agenda for thinking about math and the news. We
The news arguably serves to inform the quantitative reasoning (QR) of news audiences. Before one can contemplate how well the news serves this function, we first need to determine how much QR typical news stories require from readers. This paper assesses the amount of quantitative content present in a wide array of media sources, and the types of QR required for audiences to make sense of the information presented. We build a corpus of 230 US news reports across four topic areas (health, science, economy, and politics) in February 2020. After classifying reports for QR required at both the
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting. Youth Radio (YR) Media is a national network of journalists, designers, developers and artists ages 14-24 who create media and technology that address key social issues — including, since 2019, A.I. through an ethics and equity lens. Participants are primarily youth of color and those contending with economic and other barriers to full participation in STEM.
On October 1, 2015, Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) was awarded a 3‑year grant of 2.7 million dollars from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund the project Hacking Your Mind (award number 1515520). A major public and social media project, Hacking Your Mind (HYM) planned to engage Americans with the new discoveries being made in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences and the remarkable insights these discoveries offer into how individuals make numerous daily decisions and judgments, as well as the broader impact of this highly personal phenomenon on nearly every aspect of
Science permeates nearly every facet of human life and civilization. However, in an age of media oversaturation, it has been increasingly easier for pseudoscientific information to be disseminated among the masses, especially by those with a political agenda. In his book, ‘Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science’, author Dave Levitan creates a guidebook for spotting and debunking unscientific ideas in the political sphere, a vital tool in the Information Age.
This project will produce a four-part mini-series on African American Language (AAL) designed for television broadcast as well as for formal and informal public educational distribution. This mini-series addresses the social, cultural, and educational issues related to the most prominent, the most controversial, and the most misunderstood dialect in the history of American English--African American Language. Dialect prejudice, linguistic profiling, and language-based discrimination continue to be "so commonly accepted, so widely perceived as appropriate, that it must be seen as the last back door to discrimination. And the door is still wide open" (Lippi-Green 2012:73). By presenting the history, development, diversity, and symbolic role of language in the lives of African Americans, this documentary series helps to counteract the persistent misinformation and misinterpretation circulated about the language of African Americans. The series builds on the popular public reception to the one-hour documentary, Talking Black in America: The Story of African American Language, and includes the following episodes: 1) the historical and contemporary development of African American Language; 2) the diversity of language use among African Americans based on region, age, status, education, and style; 3) the use of language in expressive performance, including preaching, comedy, music, hip hop, spoken word, and other expressive genres; and 4) the role of language differences in educational achievement. A website accompanying the series will include a variety of educational resources, including streaming, discursive chapters with integrated vignettes from the episodes, additional commentary and background, activities, and discussion questions for each episode, with further online materials for education. The documentary and accompanying activities constitute an important milestone in the effort to educate the public about language diversity in American society.
No dialect in the history of American English has been more prominent, more controversial, and more misunderstood than African American Language, and dialect prejudice, linguistic profiling, and language discrimination still intensely affect speakers of this variety. By presenting the history, development, diversity, and symbolic role of language in the lives of African Americans, this documentary series will help to counteract the persistent misinformation circulated about African American Language. This series and the accompanying online materials offer an important milestone in the effort to educate the public about language diversity that can help to reduce linguistic discrimination in American society.
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.
From October 2015 to July 2016, Smart Start Evaluation & Research conducted a formative evaluation of a full-length film festival cut of the film The Anthropologist in order to provide feedback that improves decision-making capacity for the film’s final edit, production design, and distribution strategies in line with the project’s goals (see p. 5).
SmartStart conducted focus group interviews with participants to 1) measure their initial impressions of the film and its content, and 2) provide feedback on content, edits, target audience, website, and ideas for distribution. SmartStart then
The Anthropologist examines climate change like no other film before. The fate of the planet is considered from the perspective of American teenager Katie Crate. Over the course of five years, she travels alongside her mother Susie, an anthropologist studying the impact of climate change on indigenous communities. Their journey parallels that of renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead, who for decades sought to understand how global change affects remote cultures.
From January 2012 to May 2012, SmartStart Educational Consulting Services conducted a front-end evaluation of the documentary
In a brief text written in 1990, Gilles Deleuze took his friend Michel Foucault’s work as a starting point and spoke of new forces at work in society. The great systems masterfully described by Foucault as being related to “discipline” (family, factory, psychiatric hospital, prison, school), were all going through a crisis. On the other hand, the reforms advocated by ministers throughout the world (labour, welfare, education and health reforms) were nothing but ways to protract their anguish. Deleuze named “control society” the emerging configuration.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Hacking the Mind (working title) is an upcoming public television special exploring the science behind human decision-making.