RISES (Re-energize and Invigorate Student Engagement through Science) is a coordinated suite of resources including 42 interactive English and Spanish STEM videos produced by Children's Museum Houston in coordination with the science curriculum department at Houston ISD. The videos are aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, and each come with a bilingual Activity Guide and Parent Prompt sheet, which includes guiding questions and other extension activities.
This project will use a complex systems approach to hazard reduction across multiple scales of risk by developing a new generation of socio-technical digital twin that integrates models of physical infrastructure systems and virtual networks of communication with social games to engage community awareness and commitment to collective action.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kenichi SogaLouise ComfortStephen CollierMichael GollnerJ. Keith Gilless
This project will apply a mixed-methods approach to assess how sociotechnical networks can be leveraged to increase knowledge and awareness of environmental and industrial hazards and to build community adaptive capacity equitably among diverse residents of the Coastal Bend Region of Texas.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Michelle HummelKarabi BezboruahKathryn MastenYonghe LiuOswald Jenewein
This special issue of the Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies (LJCS) highlights the consolidation of the “citizen science” movement, which stems from different forms of direct participation of citizens in scientific projects. This issue also features contributions to the debate on the “open science” movement.
This guidebook will help you plan your action project. The initial brainstorm pages will help you consider where to start, and the Action Project Framework will navigate you through steps to get to your destination: the completion of your project!
This project focuses on environmental health literacy and will explore the extent to which diverse rural and urban youth in an out-of-school STEM enrichment program exhibit gains in environmental health literacy while engaged in learning and teaching others about community resilience in the face of changing climates. Science centers and museums provide unique opportunities for youth to learn about resilience, because they bring community members together to examine the ways that current science influences local decisions. In this project, teams of participating youth will progress through four learning modules that explore the impacts of changing climates on local communities, the local vulnerabilities and risks associated with those changes, possible mitigation and adaptation strategies, and building capacities for communities to become climate resilient. After completion of these modules, participating youth will conduct a resilience-focused action project. Participants will be encouraged to engage peers, families, friends, and other community stakeholders in the design and implementation of their projects, and they will gain experience in accessing local climate and weather data, and in sharing their findings through relevant web portals. Participants will also use various sensors and web-based tools to collect their own data.
This study is guided by three research questions: 1) To what extent do youth develop knowledge, skills, and self- efficacy for developing community resilience (taken together, environmental health literacy in the context of resilience) through participation in museum-led, resilience-focused programming? 2) What program features and settings foster these science learning outcomes? And 3) How does environmental health literacy differ among rural and urban youth, and what do any differences imply for project replication? Over a two- year period, the project will proceed in six stages: a) Materials Development during the first year, b) Recruitment and selection of youth participants, c) Summer institute (six days), d) Workshops and field experiences during the school year following the summer institute, e) Locally relevant action projects, and f) End- of-program summit (one day). In pursuing answers to the research questions, a variety of data sources will be used, including transcripts from youth focus groups and educator interviews, brief researcher reflections of each focus group and interview, and a survey of resilience- related knowledge. Quantitative data sources will include a demographic survey and responses to a self-efficacy instrument for adolescents. The project will directly engage 32 youth, together with one parent or guardian per youth. The study will explore the experiences of rural and urban youth of high school age engaged in interactive, parallel programming to enable the project team to compare and contrast changes in environmental health literacy between rural and urban participants. It is anticipated that this research will advance knowledge of how engagement of diverse youth in informal learning environments influences understanding of resilience and development of environmental health literacy, and it will provide insights into the role of partnerships between research universities and informal science centers in focusing on community resilience.
With the ongoing need for water conservation, the American Southwest has worked to increase harvested rainwater efforts to meet municipal needs. Concomitantly, environmental pollution is prevalent, leading to concerns regarding the quality of harvested rainwater. Project Harvest, a co-created community science project, was initiated with communities that neighbor sources of pollution. To better understand how a participant’s socio-demographic factors affect home characteristics and rainwater harvesting infrastructure, pinpoint gardening practices, and determine participant perception of
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Arthur MosesJean McLainAminata KilungoRobert RootLeif AbrellSanlyn BuxnerFlor SandovalTheresa FoleyMiriam JonesMonica Ramirez-Andreotta
The Ka Makaiwa: Strengthening Digital Access for Native Hawaiian Futures project will develop an approach to producing online exhibits and related programming for the Bishop Museum. The project will address barriers to physical access to collections expected to continue beyond the pandemic by expanding access to information by developing a high-quality, thoughtfully designed, and user-friendly online exhibit platform. The museum will capture photographs, video footage, and other content from the (Re)Generations: Challenging Scientific Racism in Hawaii exhibition, which explores racism and bias in scientific research while celebrating Native Hawaiian voices and collaborative endeavors. The project team will test a beta version internally and conduct a thorough internal review before launching the online exhibit publicly.
This summary brief captures highlights from the evaluation report for the first year of the NSF-funded WaterMarks project (also available on this page). The purpose of this document is to communicate key updates from evaluation in a less technical way with the many different audiences who have an interest in keeping up with WaterMarks.
This is the evaluation report for the first year of the NSF-funded WaterMarks project. It reflects an initial summary of available evidence about the intended outcomes of program activities to date, as well as commentary on how the project is using (or could use) this information moving forward. This report contains descriptions of embedded measures (i.e. anonymized drawings and reflections captured on a thematic postcard) included in community walks and analyses of secondary data (i.e., interviews conducted by other members of hte project team), as well as reflections emerging from the
The poster shares work conducted as part of the Modeling Zoos and Aquariums as Inclusive Communities of Science for Autistic Individuals (MoZAICS) project and specifically sharing details of the MoZAICS access and inclusion framework (e.g., definitions, structure/levels of the framework).