This is a handout from the Science Learning Plus (SL+) Forum held on InformalScience.org from July 6-17, 2015. It lists and describes resources about research and practice collaborations.
This worksheet helps you think through ways you might use the Building Informal Science Education (BISE) project’s resources to plan your own evaluation or learn about evaluation practices in the informal learning field.
Today, there exists a greater need to connect people to nature. Stemming from exploratory work into useful nature exhibit practices, the Wildlife Conservation Society aims to develop a new family exhibit–Safari Adventure–along with related programs and institutional practices, to better connect the families in our urban community to nature. This Logic Model outlines the impacts, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts for future development of this project, based on our exploratory investigation that included benchmarking trips, advisor and local educator workshops, community focus groups
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Wildlife Conservation SocietyLee Patrick
Supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Safari Adventure Advisory Committee Workshop was held on March 11, 2013 at the Bronx Zoo, with the following experts and educators in the fields of children and nature education, hands-on and place-based learning, and digital learning: Professor Louise Chawla, educator David T. Sobel, Urban Assembly high school principal Mark Ossenheimer, researcher Ingrid Erickson, and noted author and environmentalist Richard Louv. Through this workshop, we obtained scholarly input for the purpose of assessing the conceptual
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Wildlife Conservation SocietyLee Patrick
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This presentation was given as a preconference workshop at the 6th Annual International Science of Team Science Conference in 2015. It presents tools and resources for implementing effective practices in team science, and introduces tools and resources to help bolster collaboration.
The National Research Council’s Committee on Successful Out-of-School STEM Learning has been tasked with writing a consensus report on the value of and evidence for out-of-school STEM learning programs. As part of its charge, the committee has posed the following questions to be addressed in this paper: What evidence is there for the impact of museum- (and other designed setting) managed programs on STEM learning and interest? What is known about the impact and value of such programs on school-age children’s understanding of STEM concepts and practices as well as their interest and engagement
Educational assessment systems are frequently challenged by divergent stakeholder needs. A major insight from experts who work on school assessment systems is the need to clearly articulate and evaluate assessment choices in relation to these distinct goals. The out-of-school STEM ecosystem faces similar challenges. This background paper presents ideas for new assessment methodologies that include biographical and narrative approaches, measures of sustained learning, and social network representations to complement more traditional approaches that capture average effects of a particular
Fusion Science Theater (FST) uses elements of playwriting to make informal science education more engaging as well as educational. FST shows incorporate an overarching scientific question that is asked and then answered by a series of participatory exercises and demonstrations. The shows also use “embedded assessment” of learning, which asks children to “vote their prediction” both before and after these activities. The FST National Training and Dissemination Program had three major goals: (1) To develop and implement a Performance Training Program to train professional audiences to perform
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Madison Area Technical CollegeJoanne Cantor
More and more young people are learning about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in a wide variety of afterschool, summer, and informal programs. At the same time, there has been increasing awareness of the value of such programs in sparking, sustaining, and extending interest in and understanding of STEM. To help policy makers, funders and education leaders in both school and out-of-school settings make informed decisions about how to best leverage the educational and learning resources in their community, this report identifies features of productive STEM programs in
Using a kind of dynamic film, Latour analyzes three recent moments in the history of science and technology, involving John Whittaker of the Pasteur Institute, Watson and Crick and Tom West of Data General. Text in Portuguese.
The Dimensions of Success (DoS) observation tool defines and provides rubrics (with levels 1-4) for 12 dimensions that were developed to measure STEM program quality in out-of-school time. This technical report summarizes the development of the instrument and findings from our initial study that included 284 observations in the field across 58 STEM programs in two geographic regions (New England and the Midwest). Data were collected by 46 trained observers who observed in pairs. This report is the initial step in developing a validity argument for the instrument.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Ashima Mathur ShahCaroline WylieDrew Gitomer
The Dimensions of Success observation tool, or DoS, pinpoints twelve indicators of STEM program quality in out-of-school time. It was developed and studied with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) by the Program in Education, Afterschool and Resiliency (PEAR), along with partners at Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Project Liftoff. In 2014, a technical report was released, describing the tool and its psychometric properties (http://www.pearweb.org/research/pdfs/DoSTechReport_092314_final.pdf). The DoS observation tool focuses on understanding the quality of a STEM activity in an out-of-school time learning environment and includes an explanation of each dimension and its key indicators, as well as a 4-level rubric with descriptions of increasing quality. Today, over 700 people have been trained to use the DoS tool, and over 12 state networks have adopted DoS to measure the quality of their afterschool STEM programming.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Program in Education, AfterschoolDr. Ashima ShahDrew Gitomer