As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants. The goal of this pilot and feasibility study is to increase participation in informal STEM learning in rural Idaho through Stories of Fire, a program based on personal narratives of wildland fire. Idaho is a rural state, with an average population of just 19 people per square mile, the fourth lowest population density in the United States. The state is experiencing increasingly severe wildfire, and effective responses to such environmental change require a better understanding of the underlying science. Contextualizing science learning, making connections between everyday lives and a sense of place can engage learners and bring about a better understanding of wildfire. This project will bring together a science communicator, a narratologist, a fire ecologist, and a specialist on emotions and public lands. They will work collaboratively with informal educators based in rural areas of Idaho underrepresented in STEM fields. Rural areas are rich in knowledge based on years of cumulative observations, cultural beliefs, and practices shared through community networks. This project builds on these rural assets while addressing the challenges rural populations face. The project addresses broadening participation in STEM through narrative practices that encourage more diverse ways of knowing, being, and representing science.
This research study will explore: 1) what mechanisms of narrative (storytelling) most effectively integrate individuals? personal experiences and accurate STEM content in fire science communication, and 2) what audience-centered approaches best facilitate narrative approaches to informal STEM learning. This project engages four levels of participants over four phases of research and programming: 1) The research team will interview and analyze the narratives of 40 Frontliners (e.g., wildland firefighters and evacuees) from the inland Northwest region with first-hand experience with wildfire. 2) They will conduct a narrative workshop to train 20 informal STEM Educators from across the state on audience-centered approaches that facilitate participant storytelling about fire. 3) Educators will pilot their own narrative-based informal science learning programs with program participants in their rural home communities across the state, 4) A professional podcaster will create two podcasts modeled on our research findings for public audiences reached through media.
This Pilots and Feasibility Studies award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Teresa CohnLeda KobziarJennifer LadinoErin James
The Apsáalooke (Crow Indian) Nation in Montana, as well as other Indigenous communities across the United States, disproportionally experience negative consequences from water-related environmental hazards, such as contaminated water. In this project, fifth- and sixth-grade Apsáalooke youth will act as change agents through investigating water issues in their communities and presenting findings to their communities. They will conduct this water-related research in the context of an informal summer program designed to integrate Indigenous and Western perspectives on science. For example, youth will learn the cultural significance of water sites while also practicing methods for collecting and analyzing data relative to those sites, guided by Apsáalooke elders and science professionals. During the summer program, Indigenous high school students and tribal college students will mentor the youth. To develop this program, the project team will conduct interviews with elders and Apsáalooke community members in scientific fields to determine the desired features of a program that integrates Indigenous and Western science. They will use the findings from these interviews to develop a multimedia toolkit, which includes a set of comprehensive materials that will enable other researchers and informal educators to implement similar programs. This toolkit will include information about water science and water quality, lesson plans and related resources for the summer program, professional development materials to prepare the high school youth to act as mentors, handouts for family members to facilitate at-home engagement with their children, and more. The project team will research how the implementation of the toolkit influences the participants' water-related knowledge and attitudes toward science. The toolkit, and the associated empirical findings, will be disseminated widely through local, regional, and national professional networks that serve American Indians.
Montana State University, in partnership with Little Big Horn College, will implement and research an informal summer program for Apsáalooke youth in the fifth and sixth grades, as well as a mentorship program for Indigenous high school students and tribal college students. The older students will participate in a four-week internship program in which they learn about conducting water research and facilitating science activities that foreground Apsáalooke perspectives and cultural practices. The high school and tribal college students will partner with Apsáalooke elders and science professionals to facilitate and implement a two-week summer program for the fifth- and sixth-grade youth. This program will use the toolkit materials that were previously developed in consultation with elders and other community stakeholders. Regression analyses of validated pre- and post-surveys, as well as inductive analyses of interviews with stakeholders, will be used to study how the mentoring program affects the high school and tribal college students' attitudes toward science and career interests, and how the summer program affects the fifth- and sixth-graders' water-related knowledge. The research team will also study how youth participation in the program affects their family and community members' water-related knowledge. This project will result in a multimedia toolkit, freely available to the public and widely disseminated through professional networks, which specifies how other informal educators and researchers can implement similar mentorship programs and summer programs for Indigenous youth. Ultimately, this project will broaden participation through resulting in empirically-tested materials that advance practice in informal education for Indigenous youth and their communities. This project is funded by the Advanced Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program. As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the AISL program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.
This Innovations in Development award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
This AISL Pilots and Feasibility project will study the data science learning that takes place as members of the public explore and analyze open civic data related to their everyday lives. Government services, such as education, transportation, and non-emergency municipal requests, are becoming increasingly digital. Generally, program workshops and events may be able to support participants in using such data to answer their own questions, such as: "How do City agencies respond to noise in my neighborhood?" and "How do waste and recycling services in my neighborhood compare with others?" This project seeks to understanding how such programs are designed and facilitated to support diverse communities in accessing and meaningfully analyzing data will promote innovation and knowledge building in informal data science education. The team will begin by summarizing best practices in data science education from a variety of fields. Next they will explore the design and impacts of two programs in New York City, a leader in publicly available Open Data initiatives. This phase will explore activities and facilitation approaches, participants' objectives and data literacy skills practice, and begin to identify potential barriers to entry and levels of participation. Finally, the team will build capacity for other similar organizations to explore and understand their impacts on community members' engagement with civic data. This pilot study will establish preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of these programs, and in turn, inform future research into the identifying and amplifying best practices to support public engagement with data.
This research team will begin by synthesizing data science learning best practices based on varied literatures and surveys with academic and practitioner experts.
Synthesis results will be applied as a lens to gather preliminary evidence regarding the impacts of two programs on participants' data science practices and understanding of the nature of data in the context of civics. The programs include one offered by the Mayor's Office of Data Analytics (MODA), which is the NYC agency with overall responsibility for the City's Open Data programs, and BetaNYC, a leading nonprofit organization working to improve lives through civic design, technology, and engagement with government open data. The research design triangulates ethnographic observations and artifacts, pre and post adapted surveys, and interviews with participants and facilitators. Researchers will identify programmatic metrics and adapts existing measures to assess various outcomes related to public engagement with data, including: question formulation, data set selection and manipulation, the use of data to make inferences, and understanding variability, sampling and context. These metrics will be shared through an initial assessment framework for data science learning in the context of community engagement with civic open data. Researchers will also begin to identify barriers to broader participation through literature synthesis, interviews with participants and facilitators, and conversations with other organizations in our networks, such as NYC Community Boards. Findings will determine the suitability of the programs under study and inform future research to identify and amplify best practices in supporting public engagement with data.
This project is funded by the NSF Advancing Informal STEM Learning program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.
This Pilots and Feasibility Studies award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants. The goal of this RAPID project is to better understand how an informal science education organization and its STEM resources can partner with community groups and their expertise to support people's ability to understand, process, and work toward dismantling systemic racism. The project will draw from exhibition and programming resources that have been developed and refined over almost two decades of engagement with the topics of STEM, race, and racism in a science museum context. Examples of STEM programming include data and data visualization, how biology and environment shape behavior and perception, and the use of technology to communicate. This project will build on previously developed relationships in three regions to design and facilitate virtual STEM-informed activities and conversations about race in each regional site. These activities and training will support participants to better understand, process, and work toward dismantling systemic racism.
This RAPID project is timely given the Covid-19 pandemic and the increased awareness of the ongoing impact of systemic racism. The project will address the following questions:
What kinds of virtual STEM-informed activities allow for community members to explore, understand, or act upon the impacts of systemic racism? What are key features of those activities, from the perspective of participants? What are promising changes that community members report as a result of these activities? How are science-based resources perceived, and how do participants perceive they are learning STEM?
What supports allow the regional project group members and museum staff to collaborate successfully, and what obstacles slow that work down?
How do local collaboratives define long-term success of their work, and how can they track their progress over time? The project team and the regional project group members bring a range of experience in community engagement, science education programming, and informal science learning research.
The project will develop this new knowledge for the informal science education field and other local stakeholders through qualitative and participatory research and virtual STEM-informed activities that are responsive to the changing needs of community members. The project will begin in August 2020 as the ability to understand the research questions requires immediate collection of data. Because of the essential nature of this type of research for the informal STEM learning field, the team plans to analyze data and start initial dissemination by the fall of 2020 with additional data collection, analysis, and dissemination continuing as the project progresses.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
While museums strive to be as inclusive and welcoming as possible to all visitors, data from many institutions shows that audiences are still disproportionately white, well-educated, and more affluent than the average local population. One contributing factor to the lack of progress is that staff often create programs that work to create inclusivity from their own perspective, rather than grounding the work in a broader vision of the museum experience. This project will allow for a deeper exploration of how visitors, particularly those from groups that visit less frequently, experience a museum visit, and how their sense of belonging is supported or eroded during their visit. The team believes this sense is built up or taken away through specific moments of engagement or alienation and will explore these moments that matter through the work. Through intensive work at one museum, and additional work at three other museums, the project will look for themes and insights that can help all museums to create more positive moments that matter for all audiences. Specifically, the project will result in a) insights for museums in supporting a visitor-based sense of belonging, b) shared methods for working with visitors that could be applied by other researchers to explore specifics in a particular setting, and c) grounding work to develop survey questions for use across the field. This award is funded by the Advanced Informal STEM Learning program which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments.
Building on existing work around exclusion and inclusion in everyday science learning, this project aims to formally define what a sense of belonging means in the science and natural history museum context as a construct for understanding inclusivity. The research team hypothesizes that the majority of experiences in an entire museum visit have a relatively neutral effect on visitor sense of belonging; however, at times, visitors may experience positive or negative moments, and these moments that matter may influence a visitor's STEM engagement, interest, and/or identity. This exploratory work will help to develop and ground the construct of sense of belonging within the museum visitor's experiences, to identify visitor moments that matter using an equity approach that intentionally centers the experiences of visitors from underrepresented groups, and to form the basis for future research that would support the development of a fieldwide measure of sense of belonging. The research study will focus on defining the construct of sense of belonging so it 1) aligns with the research literature and 2) is grounded in the experiences of science/natural history museum visitors. Photovoice data collection method and interviews will be used with visitors ages six and above to identify moments that matter for them during a visit to a science/natural history museum. This project will create new understanding of this construct for not only science/natural history museums and the larger informal science education (ISE) field, but fill a gap in the overall literature around the construct of sense of belonging. The project will also provide new learnings for the ISE field on how to adapt and use the photovoice method to study complex constructs, such as sense of belonging, in science/natural history museums.
This Pilots and Feasibility Studies award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
This Pilot and Feasibility project will investigate: a) the kinds of learning outcomes that occur in an informal STEM project utilizing a Critical Environmental Justice-informed Participatory Action Research framework, co-created between researchers and homeless communities, and b) the challenges and opportunities that arise in evaluating such collaborative projects. To address these questions, a team of university and community researchers will work with two self-organized homeless communities, in Portland, OR and Baltimore, MD, to systematically examine air quality at their sites and further develop a multimedia environmental justice toolkit. The toolkit is aimed at equipping homeless communities with STEM-based information and approaches to learn about and address various environmental hazards. Homeless people are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of air and soil pollution, rodents, extreme weather, floods, fires, and other hazards. This collaboration will study STEM learning outcomes related to the broader historical socio-political context in which people are living. The project also anticipates finding ways to adapt evaluation processes to better suit the needs of marginalized groups participating in informal STEM projects.
Guided by this integrated framework, the team will undertake participant observation, interviews, focus groups, and document analysis to assess learning. It also anticipates gaining insights into how evaluation processes may be adapted to better suit the needs of marginalized groups participating in informal STEM learning. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
DATE:
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Chris HawnMelanie MaloneErin GoodlingDillon MahmoudiAnthony Levenda
Complex political decisions increasingly require scientific knowledge and expertise. But the exchange between actors from the political and the scientific systems is confronted by challenges. Science policy interfaces are needed in order to overcome the barriers to communication. This article analyses and discusses the importance of foundations as science policy interfaces. To this end, we will first present the salient features and functions of foundations as organisations in the framework of theoretical considerations and discuss their fundamental suitability as mediators of scientific
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proceeds on the assumption that scientific consensus is a tool for successful climate communication. While ‘speaking with one voice’ has contributed to the Panel's success in putting climate change on the public and political agenda, the consensus policy is also contested, as our literature analysis (n=106) demonstrates. The arguments identified thereby inform a survey of climate scientists (n=138), who are the ones responsible for realising the policy. The data indicate moderate support for the consensus policy but significantly more in
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We explore and discuss the diverse motives that drive science communication, pointing out that political motives are the major driving force behind most science communication programmes including so-called public engagement with science with the result that educational and promotional objectives are blurred and science communication activities are rarely evaluated meaningfully. Since this conflation of motives of science communication and the gap between political rhetoric and science communication practice could threaten the credibility of science, we argue for the restoration of a crucial
This report summarizes a Delphi study completed with 22 facilitators of climate adaptation workshops in the United States in 2020. The purpose of a Delphi study is to find areas of consensus around valued (or "best") practices in a particular field. In this case, the report focuses on valued practices for facilitating place-based climate adaptation workshops to maximize social learning and collective action outcomes associated with climate adaptation.