The Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) is a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded resource center, working in cooperation with the NSF Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program to build and advance the informal STEM education field. CAISE continues the work it began in 2007--serving professional audiences in informal STEM learning, which includes those working in science centers and museums, zoos and aquariums, parks, botanical gardens and nature centers, events and festivals, libraries, making and tinkering spaces, media (TV, radio, film, social), cyberlearning and gaming, and youth, community, and out-of-school time programs.
What We Do:
CAISE seeks to characterize, highlight, and connect quality, evidence-based informal STEM learning work supported by a diversity of federal, local, and private funders by providing access to over 8,000 (and growing) resources that include project descriptions, research literature, evaluation reports and other documentation on the InformalScience.org website. In addition, CAISE convenes inquiry groups, workshops and principal investigator meetings designed to facilitate discussion and identify the needs and opportunities for informal STEM learning.
In this award, CAISE is also tasked with advancing and better integrating the professional fields of informal STEM learning and science communication by (1) broadening participation in these fields, (2) deepening links between research and practice, and (3) building capacity in evaluation and measurement. These activities are being undertaken by cross-sector task forces of established and emerging who will be responsible for conducting field-level analyses, engaging stakeholders, and creating roadmaps for future efforts. CAISE is also building on existing communication channels for dissemination to the larger field, and through the InformalScience.org website. An External Review Board and Inverness Research are providing oversight of CAISE's program activities and evaluation of the center.
Who We Are:
CAISE operates as a network of core staff housed at the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) in Washington, D.C. and co-principal investigators and other collaborators at academic institutions and informal STEM education (ISE) organizations across the U.S. Other key collaborators are the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Center for Public Engagement with Science, the National Informal STEM Education Network, and Arizona State University.
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering and DO-IT IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology) at the University of Washington propose to create the AccessComputing Alliance for the purpose of increasing the participation of people with disabilities in computing careers. Alliance partners Gallaudet University, Microsoft, the NSF Regional Alliances for Persons with Disabilities in STEM (hosted by the University of Southern Maine, New Mexico State University, and UW), and SIGACCESS of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and collaborators represent stakeholders from education, industry, government, and professional organizations nationwide.
Alliance activities apply proven practices to support persons with disabilities within computing programs. To increase the number of students with disabilities who successfully pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees, the alliance will run college transition and bridge, tutoring, internship, and e-mentoring programs. To increase the capacity of postsecondary computing departments to fully include students with disabilities in coursers and programs, the alliance will form communities of practice, run capacity-building institutes, and develop systemic change indicators for computing departments. To create a nationwide resource to help students with disabilities pursue computing careers and computing educators and employers, professional organizations and other stakeholders to develop more inclusive programs and share effective practices, the alliance will create and maintain a searchable AccessComputing Knowledge Base of FAQs, case studies, and effective/promising practices.
These activities will build on existing alliances and resources in a comprehensive, integrated effort. They will create nationwide collaborations among individuals with disabilities, computing professionals, employers, disability providers, and professional organizations to explore the issues that contribute to the underrepresentation of persons with disabilities and to develop, apply and assess interventions. In addition, they will support local and regional efforts to recruit and retain students with disabilities into computing and assist them in institutionalizing and replicating their programs. The alliance will work with other Alliances and organizations that serve women and underrepresented minorities to make their programs accessible to students with disabilities. Finally they will collect and publish research and implementation data to enhance scientific and technological understanding of issues related to the inclusion of people with disabilities in computing.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Richard LadnerLibby CohenSheryl BurgstahlerWilliam McCarthy
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The 2nd annual conference of the ad hoc group Science Communication was dedicated to research on risk and uncertainty as important challenges for the present practice of science communication. The review firstly offers a short portrait of the ad hoc group Science Communicaiton as a newly established network of communication scholars and secondly reconstructs the course of the highliy spirited debate during the conference in Jena.
The cultural phenomenon of ‘science festivals’ is ever expanding throughout the world, as universities, city and regional governments, and science engagement professionals alike embrace the concept of a focused ‘celebration’ of science. In the past however science festivals have been criticized for neglecting underrepresented audiences. This special issue explores the extent to which current science festivals have managed to engage with diverse publics, and identifies the key challenges facing the future of science festivals, most notably the need for deeper research into the impacts of
U.S. strength in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines has formed the basis of innovations, technologies, and industries that have spurred the nation’s economic growth throughout the last 150 years. Universities are essential to the creation and transfer of new knowledge that drives innovation. This knowledge moves out of the university and into broader society in several ways – through highly skilled graduates (i.e. human capital); academic publications; and the creation of new products, industries, and companies via the commercialization of scientific
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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
On November 2-3, 2015, the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), hosted the 2015 NSF Maker Summit, in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Planned in response to a Call to Action issued by the White House after the June 2014 White House Maker Faire, the summit was attended by more than 50 individuals representing five different segments of the Maker community. Its goals were to forge connections across the Maker Movement, envision the future of Making for engineering and education communities, and identify how Makerspaces can be
Public opinions toward emergent technologies may be highly dependent on the manner in which people are introduced to these technologies for the very first time. In this light, understanding how such first introductions are related to adolescents’ information seeking behaviors and their developing opinions may be particularly interesting because this target public can be considered to be not only future users of the technology but also future decision makers of its development. The present paper presents a case study of the introduction of ecogenomics among 246 adolescents who were asked to
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Mark BosRoy KloetCees KoolstraJaap Willems
The America After 3PM survey is the nation’s most comprehensive household survey of how children spend the hours after school and asks parents and guardians of school-age children in the United States about availability and access to after-school programs. The 2014 survey, which followed prior surveys conducted in 2004 and 2009, reveals that over the past decade, the number of children in after-school programs has grown from 6.5 million to more than 10 million. Parents of an additional 19.4 million children would enroll their children in a program if one were available to them.
STEM Pathways is a collaboration between five Minnesota informal STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education organizations—The Bakken Museum, Bell Museum of Natural History, Minnesota Zoo, STARBASE Minnesota, and The Works Museum—working with Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) and advised by the Minnesota Department of Education. STEM Pathways (logo shown in Figure 1) aims to provide a deliberate and connected series of meaningful in-school and out-of-school STEM learning experiences to strengthen outcomes for students, build the foundation for a local ecosystem of STEM
The science education community is buzzing about STEM learning ecosystems, ecologies of learning, and ecological perspectives on learning. You may not know it, but if your teaching involves building on young people’s prior knowledge or making connections between the science curriculum and science in the broader world, your work may already reflect aspects of ecological learning theories. At the heart of an ecological perspective on learning is the need to make connections across formal, informal, and everyday learning. So, what are STEM learning ecologies all about, and how can science
Connected Science Learning is a journal around which all science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) educators can gather. The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) have partnered on this National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded project to leverage our extensive combined reach across the formal and informal STEM educator communities. NSTA represents about 50,000 K–12 science educators, while ASTC member science centers and museums are in communities across the globe, reaching 100 million visitors per year, many of whom are
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Grant funds for this project support research into the needs and preferences of the audiences to assemble content and test two pilot issues of a peer-reviewed journal supporting innovative
advances that work at the intersection of formal and informal science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education.