This report is the National Education Technology Plan (NETP) submitted by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to Congress. It presents five goals with recommendations for states, districts, the federal government, and other stakeholders. Each goal addresses one of the five essential components of learning powered by technology: Learning, Assessment, Teaching, Infrastructure, and Productivity. The plan also calls for "grand challenge" research and development initiatives to solve crucial long-term problems that the ED believes should be funded and coordinated at a national level.
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U.S. Department of EducationDaniel AtkinsJohn BennettJohn Seely BrownAneesh ChopraChris DedeBarry FishmanLouis GomezMargaret HoneyYasmin KafaiMaribeth LuftglassRoy PeaJim PellegrinoDavid RoseCandace ThilleBrenda Williams
Geosciences Careers for Kids and Parents is a Track 1 program by Jim Metzner Productions (JMP) that uses its current communication platforms - the Pulse of the Planet (PoP) radio programs and website and the Kids Science Challenge website - to involve upper elementary children and their parents/caregivers and other adults in learning about geosciences research and careers. JMP's award-winning PoP radio program, which reaches 1,000,000+ listeners weekly, profiles geoscientists and encourages parents to involve their children in the geosciences. The PoP companion pulseplanet.com website provides podcasts of past radio programs and additional resources for engaging learners in the geosciences. On JMP's Kidsciencechallenge.com website, children (8-13 years of age) will find "kid friendly" profiles and videos of geoscientists and their careers, rich resources and interactivity on the sciences and further career activities, presented as part of a project that has already actively engaged thousands of children in learning about and "doing" science. The Pulse of the Planet and Kids' Science Challenge websites receive an average of 9,600 page views daily. PBS television's The News Hour and the PBS education site will feature our video segments on geoscientists featured in PoP programs.
Realizing the power of CyberLearning to transform education will require vision, strategy, and an engaged, talented community. Activities are needed to energize the community, refine and sharpen the path forward, and provide a more active and ongoing forum for clarifying the big ideas and challenging questions. In response to this need, SRI International, together with the Lawrence Hall of Science and with key support from the National Geographic Society, will organize a set of activities to advance a shared vision of the future of learning, encompassing the systems, people, and technology dimensions mutually necessary for any scalable and lasting advances in education. The innovative format for these activities is inspired by the TED talks, Wikipedia, and social networking. As in TED, a small set of leading researchers will be selected to give very short, very high quality, stimulating talks. These CyberLearning Talks will be featured at a 1-day summit meeting in Washington, DC, streamed so that local cyberlearning research communities may participate at a distance, and posted on a website. As in Wikipedia, CyberLearning Pages will be created, each page featuring a synopsis of a big idea in CyberLearning and the relevant research challenges. The 1-day conference will be followed by a small 1-day workshop focusing on how to evaluate cyberlearning efforts, identify progress, and identify important new directions. Finally, to disseminate and stimulate conversation about both the video talks and Wikipedia entries, a presence for the community will be created on social networking sites. The target outcomes of the effort will be (i) a cyberlearning research community with participants from across the many current constituent communities, and fostered awareness and appreciation of the broad range of expertise and interests across that wider community; (ii) foundations for sustained discussion of big ideas, insights, and challenges to help this new community define a more engaged, crisper vision of its own future, (iii) a community resource that can become a site for interconnecting stakeholders in the CyberLearning community and supporting investigators in improving field-generated proposals, and (iv) an emerging sense of direction for CyberLearning among a wider audience of leaders. Such community building and awareness is expected to foster collaborations that will lead to innovative and research-grounded ways of using technology to transform education -- formal and informal and across a lifetime.
The Internet is a growing source of open educational resources (OERs) focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). These STEM OERs are not only shared openly and free for all to use, but often provide licenses that permit modification and reuse. Educators must have access to tools that pinpoint valuable resources while avoiding substandard ones. The authors discuss how multiple information sources, user communities, and online platforms might be coordinated to craft effective experiences in digital-rich learning environments.
The broad purpose of this project is to contribute to capacity-building efforts—to strengthen the evaluation of programs and learning experiences in informal science education (ISE). We focus on improving the quality of summative evaluations, which have been called upon to inform decision-making and practice, contribute knowledge to the field, and help make the case for the value of informal learning. We previously developed a framework that synthesizes key elements of a high-quality summative evaluation. The framework has three dimensions: (a) examine the underlying rationale of the program, exhibition, experience, or intervention being evaluated; (b) balance methodological rigor with sensitivity to the informal context; and (c) prioritize uses of the evaluation by addressing stakeholders’ needs. Evaluators may draw on all three dimensions to provide summary judgments on the value of what was evaluated. We extend our work in two ways: (1) Examine how the framework could be used as a guiding lens for planning or conducting future or current summative evaluations. We will work with partners in informal science institutions to support and document their evaluation activities along the dimensions of evaluation quality, with the intent of improving the framework and creating concrete exemplars of its application in practice. (2) Conceptualize alternative models for enhancing professional training in ISE evaluation. We will research current programs and practices for building technical evaluation capacity, looking for promising and innovative approaches that include apprenticeship or “hands-on” experiences. This 18-month project (January 2015 through June 2016) is funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
The goal of this engineering education project entitled EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN ENGINEERS (EWE) is to encourage more academically prepared high school girls to consider engineering as an attractive option for post-secondary education and subsequent careers in order to increase the number of women who make up the engineering workforce. Specific project objectives are to: 1) mobilize America's more than one million engineers to reach out to educators, school counselors, and high school girls with tested messages tailored to encourage participation in engineering education and careers; 2) help high school counselors and science, math, and technology teachers to better understand the nature of engineering, the academic background needed to pursue engineering, and the career paths available in engineering; 3) equip high school counselors and teachers to share this information with students, especially girls; and 4) reach out to girls directly with messages that accurately reflect the field of engineering and will inspire girls to choose engineering. The WGBH Educational Foundation has partnered with the American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES), American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and a coalition of more than 50 of the country's engineering associations, colleges, and universities to fundamentally shift the way the engineering and educational communities portray engineering. Based on a needs assessment performed in 2004, the EWE coalition embraces a communication strategy that focuses on the societal value and rewards of being an engineer, as opposed to the traditional emphasis on the process and challenges of becoming an engineer. This project represents a nationwide outreach effort that includes training opportunities for engineers; targeted Web-based and print resources for students, school counselors and teachers, and engineers; and a range of outreach and marketing activities.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Julie BenyoPatrick NataleF. Suzanne Jenniches
This collaborative project aims to establish a national computational resource to move the research community much closer to the realization of the goal of the Tree of Life initiative, namely, to reconstruct the evolutionary history of all organisms. This goal is the computational Grand Challenge of evolutionary biology. Current methods are limited to problems several orders of magnitude smaller, and they fail to provide sufficient accuracy at the high end of their range. The planned resource will be designed as an incubator to promote the development of new ideas for this enormously challenging computational task; it will create a forum for experimentalists, computational biologists, and computer scientists to share data, compare methods, and analyze results, thereby speeding up tool development while also sustaining current biological research projects. The resource will be composed of a large computational platform, a collection of interoperable high-performance software for phylogenetic analysis, and a large database of datasets, both real and simulated, and their analyses; it will be accessible through any Web browser by developers, researchers, and educators. The software, freely available in source form, will be usable on scales varying from laptops to high-performance, Grid-enabled, compute engines such as this project's platform, and will be packaged to be compatible with current popular tools. In order to build this resource, this collaborative project will support research programs in phyloinformatics (databases to store multilevel data with detailed annotations and to support complex, tree-oriented queries), in optimization algorithms, Bayesian inference, and symbolic manipulation for phylogeny reconstruction, and in simulation of branching evolution at the genomic level, all within the context of a virtual collaborative center. Biology, and phylogeny in particular, have been almost completely redefined by modern information technology, both in terms of data acquisition and in terms of analysis. Phylogeneticists have formulated specific models and questions that can now be addressed using recent advances in database technology and optimization algorithms. The time is thus exactly right for a close collaboration of biologists and computer scientists to address the IT issues in phylogenetics, many of which call for novel approaches, due to a combination of combinatorial difficulty and overall scale. The project research team includes computer scientists working in databases, algorithm design, algorithm engineering, and high-performance computing, evolutionary biologists and systematists, bioinformaticians, and biostatisticians, with a history of successful collaboration and a record of fundamental contributions, to provide the required breadth and depth. This project will bring together researchers from many areas and foster new types of collaborations and new styles of research in computational biology; moreover, the interaction of algorithms, databases, modeling, and biology will give new impetus and new directions in each area. It will help create the computational infrastructure that the research community will use over the next decades, as more whole genomes are sequenced and enough data are collected to attempt the inference of the Tree of Life. The project will help evolutionary biologists understand the mechanisms of evolution, the relationships among evolution, structure, and function of biomolecules, and a host of other research problems in biology, eventually leading to major progress in ecology, pharmaceutics, forensics, and security. The project will publicize evolution, genomics, and bioinformatics through informal education programs at museum partners of the collaborating institutions. It also will motivate high-school students and college undergraduates to pursue careers in bioinformatics. The project provides an extraordinary opportunity to train students, both undergraduate and graduate, as well as postdoctoral researchers, in one of the most exciting interdisciplinary areas in science. The collaborating institutions serve a large number of underrepresented groups and are committed to increasing their participation in research.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Tandy WarnowDavid HillisLauren MeyersDaniel MirankerWarren Hunt, Jr.
In this paper we contrast the possibilities of the World Wide Web to transform communities of educational researchers with actual patterns of use of The Museum Learning Collaborative Web site. We highlight patterns of user interaction that have emerged and discuss the problems and opportunities of creating shared research resources in emerging fields such as museum learning research. Our findings have direct implications for three stakeholders: program funders, ourselves as project researchers, and the larger museum research community.
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Kevin CrowleyGaea LeinhardtChien-fu Chang
Most environmental learning takes place outside of the formal education system, but our understanding of how this learning actually occurs is in its infancy. By surfing the internet, watching nature documentaries, and visiting parks, forests, marine sanctuaries, and zoos, people make active choices to learn about various aspects of their environment every day. Free-Choice Learning and the Environment explores the theoretical foundations of free-choice environmental education, the practical implications for applying theory to the education of learners of all ages, and the policy implications
John Falk and Lynn Dierking tackle the challenge of helping museums become better at the learning process for visitors. As they put it, "[d]igital media, well designed and wisely used, are important tools that can enhance visitor interaction and learning in museums, ensuring that these environments inspire and provoke curiosity and further understanding among visitors with varying backgrounds, interests, and knowledge levels."
Goodman Research Group, Inc. (GRG) conducted a summative evaluation of the second season of NOVA scienceNOW, the PBS series that explores cutting-edge scientific and technological innovation in real time. (GRG also served as the external evaluator for NOVA scienceNOW during Season One). In addition to the television series, WGBH-TV developed a companion website, a series of high school classroom activities, and a Science Cafe outreach initiative, designed to discuss, in non-academic environments, the latest developments in science. The Season Two evaluation included: 1) a viewer study
Goodman Research Group, Inc. (GRG) conducted a summative evaluation of the first season of NOVA scienceNOW, the PBS series that explores cutting-edge scientific and technological innovation in real time. The evaluation included two primary components: 1) an evaluation of the television series, and 2) an evaluation of the outreach, which consisted of a companion website and a series of Science Cafes hosted around the country. GRG's evaluation was designed to assess the project's effectiveness in meeting its overall goal of engaging a variety of audiences more deeply with scientific research in