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
Many urgent environmental challenges, from soil degradation and water pollution to global climate change, have deep roots in how complex systems impact human well-being, and how humans relate to nature and to each other. Learning In and From the Environment through Multiple Ways of Knowing (LIFEways) is based on the premise that Indigenous stewardship has sustained communities on these lands since time immemorial. This project is collaboratively led by the Indigenous Education Institute and Oregon State University’s STEM Research Center, in partnership with Native Pathways and the Reimagine Research Group, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, World Forestry Center, and a national park network in the Pacific Northwest. The aim of this partnership is to deepen the informal learning field’s understanding of how Indigenous ways of knowing are currently or can be included in outdoor learning environments such as parks, nature preserves, and tribal lands. The project will share practices that center Indigenous worldviews to build awareness of their value and enhance STEM learning in outdoor settings. These approaches engage Native community members in continuing their traditional knowledge and practices, and help non-Native audiences learn from the dynamic interrelationships of the environment in authentic, respectful ways.
Conventional outdoor education is mostly grounded in Western concepts of “conservation” and “preservation” that position humans as acting separately from nature. This Research in Service to Practice project will identify “wise practices” that honor Indigenous ways of knowing, and investigate current capacities, barriers and opportunities for amplifying Indigenous voices in outdoor education. A team of Native and non-Native researchers and practitioners will draw upon Indigenous and Western research paradigms. Methods include Talk Story dialogues, a landscape study using national surveys, case studies, and a Circle of Relations to interpret and disseminate research findings. LIFEways will also document partnership processes to continue to build on the Collaboration with Integrity framework between tribal and non-tribal organizations (Maryboy and Begay, 2012). Findings from the LIFEways project will be shared broadly through a series of webinars, local and national meetings, conferences, and publications.
This project is designed to support collaboration between informal STEM learning (ISL) researchers, designers, and educators with sound researchers and acoustic ecologists to jointly explore the role of auditory experiences—soundscapes—on learning. In informal STEM learning spaces, where conversation advances STEM learning and is a vital part of the experience of exploring STEM phenomena with family and friends, attention to the impacts of soundscapes can have an important bearing on learning. Understanding how soundscapes may facilitate, spark, distract from, or even overwhelm thinking and conversation will provide ISL educators and designers evidence to inform their practice. The project is structured to reflect the complexity of ISL audiences and experiences; thus, partners include the North Park Village Nature Center located in in a diverse immigrant neighborhood in Chicago; Wild Indigo, a Great Lakes Audubon program primarily serving African American visitors in Midwest cities; an after-school/summer camp provider, STEAMing Ahead New Mexico, serving families in the rural southwest corner of New Mexico, and four sites in Ohio, MetroParks, Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and the Center of Science and Industry.
Investigators will conduct large-scale exploratory research to answer an understudied research question: How do environmental sounds impact STEM learning in informal learning spaces? Researchers and practitioners will characterize and describe the soundscapes throughout the different outdoor and indoor exhibit/learning spaces. Researchers will observe 800 visitors, tracking attraction, attention, dwell time, and shared learning. In addition to observations, researchers will join another 150 visitors for think-aloud interviews, where researchers will walk alongside visitors and capture pertinent notes while visitors describe their experience in real time. Correlational and cluster analyses using machine learning algorithms will be used to identify patterns across different sounds, soundscapes, responses, and reflections of research participants. In particular, the analyses will identify characteristics of sounds that correlate with increased attention and shared learning. Throughout the project, a team of evaluators will monitor progress and support continuous improvement, including guidance for developing culturally responsive research metrics co-defined with project partners. Evaluators will also document the extent to which the project impacts capacity building, and influences planning and design considerations for project partners. This exploratory study is the initial in a larger research agenda, laying the groundwork for future experimental study designs that test causal claims about the relationships between specific soundscapes and visitor learning. Results of this study will be disseminated widely to informal learning researchers and practitioners through workshops, presentations, journal articles, facilitated conversations, and a short film that aligns with the focus and findings of the research.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Martha MersonJustin MeyerDaniel Shanahan
The McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum will create a mobile cart with hands-on, immersive experiences and educational materials to expand programming to the open-air plaza in front of the museum. To educate visitors about the Chicago River ecosystem, the museum will develop and deliver three live science experiences utilizing the mobile outdoor cart, which will include a 3-D model of a watershed. Additionally, the museum will contract with photographers and a graphic designer to generate content for educational displays and curriculum. By creating a mobile cart with hands-on, immersive experiences and educational materials, the Bridgehouse Museum will reach more diverse audiences on the plaza, which extends onto the Chicago Riverwalk.
The Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden will leverage its partnership with NASA Kennedy Space Center to design, equip, and operate an inclusive and interactive scientific research workspace. The new makerspace will provide visitors of all ages an opportunity to contribute to identifying solutions to food production issues. Preparation of the Growing Beyond Earth Innovation Studio will involve equipping the space with state-of-the-art tools and materials for designing and monitoring growing experiments, installing plant growing equipment, and furnishing the space to maximize experimentation, collaboration, and learning. The garden will invite K-12 students, families and casual visitors to collaborate on plant science experiments, allowing them to address questions relevant to current NASA research on food production aboard spacecraft, and within habitats on the surface of Mars.
Milwaukee has established itself as a leader in water management and technology, hosting a widely recognized cluster of industrial, governmental, nonprofit, and academic activity focused on freshwater. At the same time, Milwaukee faces a wide range of challenges with freshwater, some unique to the region and others common to cities throughout the country. These challenges include vulnerability to flooding and combined sewer overflows after heavy rainfall, biological and pharmaceutical contamination in surface water, lead in drinking water infrastructure, and inequity in access to beaches and other recreational water amenities. Like other cities, Milwaukee grapples with the challenges global climate change imposes on urban water systems, including changing patterns of precipitation and drought.
These problems are further complicated by Milwaukee's acute racial and economic residential segregation. With a population of approximately 595,000, embedded within a metropolitan area of over 1.5 million, Milwaukee remains one of the country's most segregated cities. There is increasing urgency to engage the public--and especially those who are most vulnerable to environmental impacts--more deeply in the stewardship of urban water and in the task of creating sustainable urban futures. The primary goal of this four-year project is to foster community-engaged learning and environmental stewardship by developing a framework that integrates art with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) experiences along with geography, water management, and social science. Synergies between STEM learning and the arts suggest that collaborations among artists, scientists, and communities can open ways to bring informal learning about the science of sustainability to communities.
WaterMarks provides an artist generated conceptual framework developed by Mary Miss / City as Living Laboratory (CALL) to help people better understand their relationship to the water systems and infrastructure that support their lives. Project activities include artist/scientist/community member-led Walks, which are designed to engage intergenerational participants both from the neighborhoods and from across the city, in considering the conditions, characteristics, histories, and ecosystems of neighborhoods. Walks are expanded upon in Workshops with residents, local scientists/experts, and other stakeholders, and include exploring current water-related environmental challenges and proposing solutions. The Workshops draw on diverse perspectives, including lived experience, scientific knowledge, and policy expertise. Art projects created by local artists amplify community engagement with the topics, including programming for teens and young adults. Free Wi-Fi will be integrated into various Marker sites around the city providing access to online, self-guided learning opportunities exploring the water systems and issues facing surrounding neighborhoods. Current programming focuses primarily on Milwaukee's predominantly African American near North Side and the predominantly Latinx/Hispanic near South Side. Many neighborhoods in these sections are vulnerable to such problems as frequent flooding, lead contamination in drinking water, inequities in safety and maintenance of green space, and less access to Lake Michigan, the city's primary natural resource and recreational amenity.
The WaterMarks project advances informal STEM learning in at least two ways. First, while the WaterMarks project is designed to fit Milwaukee, the project includes the development of an Adaptable Model Guide. The Guide is designed so that other cities can modify and employ its inclusive structure, programming, and process of collaboration among artists, scientists, partner organizations, and residents to promote citywide civic engagement in urban sustainability through the combination of informal STEM learning and public art. The Guide will be developed by a Community-University Working Group (CULab) hosted by UW-Milwaukee's Center for Community-Based Learning, Leadership, and Research and made up of diverse community and campus-wide stakeholders. In addition to overseeing the Guide’s creation, CULab will conceptualize onboarding and mentorship strategies for new participants as well as a framework for the program’s expansion and sustainability.
Second, through evaluation and research, the project will build a theoretical model for the relationships among science learning, engagement with the arts, and the distinctive contexts of different neighborhoods within an urban social-ecological system. The evaluation team, COSI’s Center for Research and Evaluation, and led by Co-PI Donnelly Hayde, aims to conduct formative, summative, and process evaluation of the Watermarks project, with the additional goal of producing evaluative research findings that can contribute to the broader field of informal learning. Evaluation foci include: How does the implementation of WaterMarks support positive outcomes for the project’s communities and the development of an adaptable model for city-scale informal science learning about urban environments? 2. To what extent do the type and degree of outcome-related change experienced by participating community residents vary across and/or between project sites? What factors, if any, appear to be linked to these changes? 3. To what extent and in what ways do the activities of the WaterMarks projects appear to have in situ effects related to the experience of place at project sites?
The project’s research team led by PI Ryan Holifield and Co-PI Woonsup Choi, will investigate how visual artistic activities introduced by the programming team as part of the Walks (and potentially other engagement activities) interact with personal, sociocultural, and physical contexts to produce distinctive experiences and outcomes of informal science learning about urban water systems. The aim of the research will be to synthesize the results from the different WaterMarks sites into an analysis generalizable beyond specific neighborhoods and applicable to other cities. The project's research questions include: 1. How does participation in Walks focused on visual artistic activities affect outcomes and experiences of informal STEM learning about urban water systems? 2. How do outcomes and experiences of informal STEM learning vary across different urban water topics, participants from different demographic groups, and contrasting sociocultural and biophysical contexts?
This Innovations in Development project is led by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), in collaboration with City as Living Laboratory (CALL) and the COSI Center for Research and Evaluation.
This is a poster created for the 2019 annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Below is the accepted abstract of the poster:
The Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network spans 28 sites across North America and beyond. Here we share work from two LTER sites in the northeastern US—the Harvard Forest, MA and the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, NH—where boundary organizations have been developing a framework for embedding effective public engagement and knowledge co-production into these long-term studies. Here we share this framework and how it has been developed and applied in
In 2006, the U.S. Botanic Garden (USBG) decided to conduct an institution-wide study of their visitors—why they come to the Botanic Garden, how they utilize the space, their level of satisfaction with the experience, and overall effectiveness of the USBG’s exhibitions and interpretation—in order to provide input to a strategic planning process that will align its living collections with its educational mission. To date, the only existing data characterizing USBG visitors was gathered in the early 1990s. Since then, the USBG has undergone a major transformation, including complete renovation of
Informal learning institutions (ILIs) create opportunities to increase public understanding of science and promote increased inclusion of groups underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers but are not equally distributed across the United States. We explore geographic gaps in the ILI landscape and identify three groups of underserved counties based on the interaction between population density and poverty percentage. Among ILIs, National Park Service lands, biological field stations, and marine laboratories occur in areas with the fewest sites for informal
Final External Evaluation Report for Informal STEM Learning at Biological Field Stations, an NSF AISL Exploratory Pathways project, which studied the pedagogical and andragogical characteristics of informal educational outreach activities at field stations. This report summarizes the project team’s major research activities and the contextual factors that supported that work.
Appendix includes interview protocol.
Few would argue that the national parks provide significant value to both the nation and the world. The question remains though, What is that value and how to measure it? Increasingly, a key indicator of this value is the learning that parks support. However, as we will discuss, even defining what is meant by educational value is challenging, let alone coming up with a park-specific set of metrics to measure this dimension of value of national parks.
Identifying private gardens in the U.K. as key sites of environmental engagement, we look at how a longer-term online citizen science programme facilitated the development of new and personal attachments of nature. These were visible through new or renewed interest in wildlife-friendly gardening practices and attitudinal shifts in a large proportion of its participants. Qualitative and quantitative data, collected via interviews, focus groups, surveys and logging of user behaviours, revealed that cultivating a fascination with species identification was key to both ‘helping nature’ and wider
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Nirwan SharmaSam GreavesAdvaith SiddharthanHelen AndersonAnnie RobinsonLaura Colucci-GrayAgung Toto WibowoHelen BostockAndrew SalisburyStuart RobertsDavid SlawsonRené van der Wal