This project will develop standardized, exportable and comparable assessment instruments and models for Women In Engineering (WIE) programs nationwide, thus allowing them to assess their program's activities and ultimately provide data for making well-informed evaluations.
To accomplish this goal, the principal investigators at the University of Missouri and Penn State University will work over a three-year period with their institutions' WIE programs and three cooperating programs at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Georgia Tech, and University of Texas at Austin. With these five programs that collectively represent a variety of private and public, years of experience for WIE directors and student body characteristics, the investigators will pilot, revise, implement, conduct preliminary data analysis and disseminate easy-to-access, reliable and valid assessment instruments. The principles of formative evaluation will be applied to all instruments and products. All institutions will use the same set of instruments, thus allowing them to have access to powerful benchmarking data in addition to the data from each of their respective institutions.
A prior project, the Women's Experience in College Engineering Project (WECE) sought to characterize the factors that influence women students' experiences and decisions by studying college environments, events and support programs that affect women's satisfaction with their engineering major, and their decisions to persist or leave these majors. In contrast to WECE's macro-level and student focus, this proposal's target audience is WIE directors, with a focus on WIE programs, not students.
Women in Engineering programs around the United States are a crucial part of our country's response to the need for more women in engineering professions. There are about 50 WIE programs nationwide. Half have expressed interest in this effort. WIE directors will benefit by having ready-made assessment tools that will allow them to collect data on programs, evaluate these programs, and make decisions on how to revise programs and / or redistribute limited resources to maximize overall program effectiveness. Data from these instruments will also provide substantiated evidence for administrators, advisory boards and potential funding agencies. Finally, because these instruments will be available nationwide, programs will have the opportunity to take advantage of powerful benchmarking data for their decision-making processes.
This project provides the next logical step in the national movement to recruit and retain women in engineering.
The goal of this Planning Grant is to use program theory as a tool in two informal science education communities and compare the processes and models that result. Program theory is built on the principle that learning and social behavioral change is the result of the cumulative effect of multiple programs, rather than a single experience. The participating communities are the Tucson Association of Museums (TAM) and the Terrific Resources for Environmental Education (TREE) organization in Columbus, Ohio. Each organization will work collaboratively using cross-group program theory and logic modeling to initiate a discussion on program planning and an intra-group evaluation. It is anticipated that this project will result in collaborations between the Tucson and Ohio informal science education communities and the creation of a plan for evaluation of the processes involved with this work.
The Informal Science Education Program of the National Science foundation will provide $320,000 in partial support of "Research in Learning in Museums Project." This will be the NSF contribution to a four federal agency effort to collaboratively support a major research project on learning in museums. As the result of an RFP developed by representatives of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the National Science Foundation (NSF), an award was made to the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. It was agreed by the four agencies that the IMLS would be the coordinating agency of this award since they represent all museum regardless of subject, content, or type of audience.
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Rebecca Danvers
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Under the direction of Kevin Crowley, the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh will investigate gender bias in parental explanations in informal learning settings. This project, Responding to the Gender Gap in Informal Science Education, will build on previous research at children's museums where the conversations of 338 families with children eight years and younger at sixteen different interactive exhibits were recorded and analyzed. They found that parents were almost three times more likely to use explanations when interacting with boys than girls. In this project they will conduct additional research to isolate the causes and outcomes associated with gender bias in these parental explanations and then they will develop, evaluate, and disseminate a range of low-cost methods to modify science exhibits to support parental explanation to both girls and boys. The latter will take the form of an Explanation Toolbox (XBox) which will be a set of resources to help museums construct and evaluate their own modifications to support non-biased parental explanations, with special attention paid to including explanations for the young girls, in addition to the usual conversations about manipulating the exhibits and about the visual, auditory, and tactile information produced by the exhibit. Results of the research and the toolbox will be broadly disseminated via the World Wide Web and published research reports.
The Exploratorium will conduct a controlled, two-year research project, titled "Finding Significance," to study how different exhibit presentation techniques affect visitors' abilities to make meaning -- or find significance -- and how such techniques impact learning. The techniques will be applied to a varied sample of five exhibits commonly found in science and children's museums. The exhibit design techniques include a) sharing scientist and exhibit developer stories, b) sharing visitor stories, and c) modeling inquiry. Although each technique shows promise at eliciting personal significance, they have yet to be rigorously tested and applied to the same set of exhibits to compare relative strengths and weaknesses. Five baseline exhibits, plus four variations of each, will be tested on groups of visitors, including adults, children and mixed groups of both.
Parent Partners in School Science (PPSS) is a partnership project between The Franklin Institute and the Philadelphia School District. This is a three and one-half year program which will provide a pivotal role for the informal science learning center to be a facilitator in parental support of K-4 school instruction in science. The PPSS program will involve teachers, families and children in grades K-2 the first year, grades 1-3 the next, and finally grades 2-4 in the third year. The incorporation of the national science standards and working with Home and School Associations (HSA) in the area schools, the program will impact over 3600 children, 5400 parents and 45 educators participating over the life of the project. There are several goals and elements in the program. This will certainly demonstrate how an informal science center supports learning and it is also hoped to become a model for effective parent-teacher and parent-child collaboration to support learning. There will be Exploration Cards developed, which are at-home schince challenges for families, Discovery Days that are museum-based days of science inquiry using the yearly theme, Parent/Teacher Workshops at the museum, and finally a Science Celebration which is a showcase of participants' year-long achievements via an exhibit to be displayed at The Franklin Institute for a month, then traveling the exhibit to participating schools. The project's structure, disseminination acitivites and products are designed for national application and as a model for use in both formal and informal education communities. It is hoped the program will offer new opportunities for science center methology and pratice to provide direct support for the school agenda in science.
National Musical Arts is requesting a planning grant of $50,000 to conduct initial planning and research toward the development of a traveling exhibition and related educational programming on the subject of biomusic -- the musical sounds produced by living things. The work will be performed by the BioMusic project, a program of National Musical Arts, in collaboration with the Association of Science Technology Centers and a national team of informal science educators. The goal of the project is to develop a 2,500 square-foot traveling exhibit and related programs targeted to md-sized science centers, zoos and aquaria across the country. During the proposed one-year planning phase, the Biomusic Project and ASTC will work with an interdisciplinary team of scientists, musicians, exhibit developers and educators to understand the current state of biomusic research; to identify concepts and phenomena that could make strong visitor experiences; and to develop initial plans for the exhibit and programs. The result of the work of the planning phase will include a Biomusic Groundwork Report, a Biomusic Program presented at the annual ASTC Conference and a detailed Exhibition Prospectus.
This CAREER grant interweaves research and teaching focused on understanding how social groups construct meaning during scientific conversations across different learning contexts, such as classrooms, museums and the home. This work will be translated into formal educational settings and used to inform teaching practices within pre-service University and in-service school district settings. The research and educational emphasis will be on creating conceptual links between social learning in diverse settings and the creation of corridors of opportunity between formal and informal learning institutions. To date there has been little research with families from cultural and linguistic minority populations, such as Latino families, at informal learning settings and virtually none that integrates formal and informal learning, or impacts teaching. The five-year project will: 1. Conduct Study 1, aimed at making fundamental cross-cultural comparisons of family conversational meaning making at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and linking this work with family interviews, reflective conversations and visits to family homes; 2. Review the theoretical framework and conduct Study 2, which will incorporate lessons learned from Study 1, and linking this research to formal classrooms; and 3. Use the findings (at each stage) to inform teaching practice with UCSC undergraduate (Science majors) and graduate (Science credential, MA and Ph.D.) students, and, in collaboration with teacher research groups for new and experienced teacher in schools that serve predominantly Latino students. This research plan provides an opportunity for viewing several inter-connected mechanisms, including family interactions and conversations, compelling science content, naturalistic learning in museum settings, and, finally, analyzing these factors in order to inform teaching practices that promote bilingual minority students to the rank of scientists.
The Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh has designed a research project to examine the process of and outcomes of informal (out of school) web-based learning. "Conceptualizing and Assessing Web-based Informal Science Education" will be a three-year research study to document and analyze how the informal learner, both as an individual and in a social group, uses and learns from web-based activities. The PIs will also develop a framework and tools for evaluating informal web-based learning environments and guidelines for effective web-based learning activities. This research will use web sites developed by museums and that are complementary to exhibits in those museums. These sites are being selected because according to the PIs, "museums and other nonprofit developers are already going beyond traditional content to create true virtual informal learning environments." The outcomes of this research will include a better understanding of the cognitive and social processes that occur as learners engage in web-based activities; a framework and tools for evaluating informal web-based learning activities; and a web-based annotated bibliography relevant to this research.
The goal of this project is to make a fundamental contribution towards a nationally shared understanding of the role and impact of a science center in facilitating enhanced public understanding, attitudes and behaviors toward science by means of informal learning activities. To accomplish this, this research project will investigate the following questions: 1) What are the specific long-term changes in science understanding, attitudes and behaviors that result from visiting a science center exhibition? 2) What are the factors that contribute to these long-term changes? 3) What is the relationship between science center visits and subsequent reinforcing educational experiences? This study will build on previous work conducted by ILI at the California Science Center aimed at understanding how a science center impacts its community. These studies are known collectively as the Los Angeles Science Education Research Project (LASER). A sample of participants in one of the LASER studies has expressed their willingness to participate in subsequent interviews. These interviews will be designed to capture both small and large changes in science understanding, attitudes, behaviors and other informal learning experiences subsequent to the visit to the science center.
Serrell and Associates requests an 18-month grant to conduct research that seeks a valid and reliable way for museum professionals to judge the excellence of science exhibitions in museums from a visitor-experience point of view. This is a novel and untested idea for practitioners of exhibition development in science museums. The need for this research arises from a lack of agreed-upon standards of excellence (or even competence) for science museum exhibitions. Museums that receive funding from the National Science Foundation are called upon to document the effectiveness and merit of their exhibit projects, yet they have few shared, standardized methods to help them do so. This grant would allow Serrell and Associates to conduct a series of meetings with local (Chicago) museum professionals and a national advisory panel to facilitate the development and testing of an audience-based, peer-reviewed criteria for recognizing excellence through empirical definition and exemplars. The research question for this project is: If different museum officials used the same set of standards to visit, review and judge the same group of exhibitions, would their ratings agree on the degree of excellence for each of the exhibitions? The proposed research methods will be informed by the science education research of John R. Frederiksen (University of California at Berkeley and the Educational Testing Service, California) who has developed techniques and criteria for performance evaluation of science teaching. His scoring methods incorporate direct and positive ways in which assessment can be used to improve science teaching. There are very clear parallels between Frederiksen's assessment techniques for science educators and the goals of this project for science museum exhibit developers. These include, but are not limited to: practitioner-developed and practitioner-trained criteria; criteria based upon a combination of ground-up and top-down theories; content-free, intention-free criteria; and criteria that benefit the process, the product and measurement of the impacts. The long-term goal of this research is to improve the quality of visitors' experiences in science museum exhibitions.
The Exploratorium will develop exhibit designs that encourage visitors to become more cognitively engaged with exhibits -- to use exhibits as tools for self-directed exploration, rather than as authoritative demonstrations. To do this, the staff is drawing on new work in the fields of education, visitor research, human factors engineering, computer interface design and interactive exhibit development at other museums. The Exploratorium proposes to conduct evaluative research and exhibit development that maximizes possibilities for visitor-authored questions, activity and discovery, or active, prolonged engagement (APE). The project team plans to create 15 new exhibits and renovate an additional 15 exhibits in the physical sciences. The team will strategically position the exhibits to support active, prolonged engagement throughout the collection. Although the project focuses on physical science -- the most fundamental part of the Exploratorium exhibit collection -- the results will apply to exhibits in nearly all science disciplines.