The increasing number of citizen science projects around the world brings the need to evaluate the effectiveness of these projects and to show the applicability of the data they collect. This research describes the Wabash River Sampling Blitz, a volunteer water-quality monitoring program in Central Indiana developed by the Wabash River Enhancement Corporation (WREC). Results indicate that field test strips for nitrate+nitrite-N read by volunteers generally agree with lab-determined values. Orthophosphate results are less transferable owing to low observed concentrations, although the field
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Rebecca MuenichSara PeelLaura BowlingMegan HaasRonald TurcoJane FrankenbergerIndrajeet Chaubey
The success of citizen science in producing important and unique data is attracting interest from scientists and resource managers. Nonetheless, questions remain about the credibility of citizen science data. Citizen science programs desire to meet the same standards of credibility as academic science, but they usually work within a different context, for example, training and managing significant numbers of volunteers with limited resources. We surveyed the credibility-building strategies of 30 citizen science programs that monitor environmental aspects of the California coast. We identified
The field of citizen science is growing with breathtaking speed. Thousands of citizen science projects are now under way around the world, engaging millions of individuals in the process of scientific discovery. In the US, citizen science has been featured at the White House and the federal government has launched a website to showcase federally funded citizen science projects (citizenscience.gov). The largest research and innovation funding program in the European Union, Horizon 2020, is investing heavily in citizen science to tackle societal problems. The Australian government has published
The Orlando Science Center (OSC) in partnership with BASE Camp Children's Cancer Foundation and the University of Central Florida (UCF) will engage chronically ill children (cancer, sickle-cell, HIV/AIDS, etc.) and other Orlando area youth ages 10-18 who face the greatest educational disparities in NASA-themed Aeronautics, Space Exploration, and Space Science exhibits through a STEM engagement and educator professional development project entitled STEM Satellites: A Mobile Mathematics and Science Initiative for Orlando Metropolitan Area Children's Hospitals. OSC will partner with educational researchers, evaluators, and planetary scientists from the University of Central Florida to create three mobile exhibits for each of the three children's hospitals in the Orlando metropolitan area. Two additional sets of the three mobile carts will be used at OSC and UCF. The three mobile exhibits will be based on the planned NASA missions that the UCF planetary scientists are leading including a Mars-themed exhibit focusing on space exploration, an asteroid-themed exhibit, and an exhibit on microgravity. Each cart will include multiple STEM activities that incorporate NASA data and artifacts from prior NASA missions, UCF planetary science collections, and Kennedy Space Center. OSC will provide professional development and training to BASE Camp volunteers who will supervise the use of the mobile exhibits in the hospitals. These exhibits will provide authentic experiences that mirror current and planned NASA missions at a level that the children can understand. These hands-on and engaging exhibits will not only help motivate children to pursue STEM careers but will also help educate the general public about the exciting and important work that NASA carries out. Providing this level of engaging and authentic STEM activities through the mobile exhibits to this historically underrepresented population is unprecedented.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
JoAnn NewmanJosh ColwellBrandan LanmanMegan Nickels
The lack of diversity in the clinician-scientist workforce is a “very serious concern to the NIH” and to health care professions. Current efforts to broaden participation in STEM fields typically target high school and college-age students. Yet, history and national trends suggest that these efforts alone will not result in rapid or significant change because racial and ethnic disparities are already evident by this time. Children are forming career preferences as early as elementary school, a time when they have little exposure to science and STEM career options. The overall vision of this team is to meet the nation’s workforce goal of developing a diverse, clinician-scientist workforce while meeting the nation’s STEM goals. As a step toward this vision, the goal of This Is How We “Role” is to inspire elementary school students towards careers as clinician-scientists by increasing the number of K-4 students with authentic STEM experiences.
This goal will be attained through two specific aims. The focus of Aim 1 is to distribute and evaluate a K-4 afterschool program across the diverse geographic regions of the US, to support the development of a robust and diverse clinician-scientist workforce. Aim 2 is focused on developing the community resources (afterschool program curriculum, informational books and online certificate program) for promoting health science literacy and encouraging careers in biomedical and clinical research for K-4 students from underserved and underrepresented communities. Combined, these aims will enhance opportunities for young children from underserved communities to have authentic STEM experiences by providing culturally responsive, afterschool educational programs which will be delivered by university student and clinician-scientist role models who are diverse in gender, race, and ethnicity.
Books and an online certificate program about health issues impacting people and their animals (i.e. diabetes, tooth decay) will be developed and distributed to children unable to attend afterschool programs. Further, by engaging veterinary programs and students from across the US, along with practicing veterinarians, this program will examine whether the approaches and curriculum developed are effective across the diverse communities and geographic regions that span the country. Elementary school teachers will serve as consultants to ensure that educational materials are consistent with Next Generation Science Standards, and will assist in training university students and clinician-scientists to better communicate the societal impact of their work to the public.
The program will continue to use the successful model of engaging elementary school students in STEM activities by using examples of health conditions that impact both people and their animals. Ultimately, this project will educate, improve the health of, and attract a diverse pool of elementary school students, particularly those from underserved communities, to careers as clinician-scientists.
San Francisco Health Investigators (SF HI), developed and led by the Science & Health Education Partnership at UC San Francisco, will use a community-based participatory research model to provide authentic research experiences for high school students, the majority from backgrounds underrepresented in the sciences.
SF HI will:
1) Develop a community of high school Student Researchers who will conduct research into health issues in their communities, study how adolescents respond to health messages, create new health messages informed by this research, and study the broader impacts of the materials they develop.
2) Partner with educational researchers to research the effects of SF HI on the high school student participants and the impact of the materials on the broader community.
3) Disseminate those materials shown to have the greatest impact nationally.
4) Publish results on the public understanding and awareness of health issues in peer-reviewed journals and other forums to inform and advance the field of public health.
The SF HI model is designed to leverage students’ cultural and technological knowledge and their social capital in the role of Student Researchers as they study the awareness, knowledge and attitudes about current health issues in their communities. It will have a broad range of impacts. Over the course of the project, 100 urban public high school students will be immersed in research projects that have the potential to directly benefit the health of their communities. These Student Researchers will design health messages informed by their social, cultural, and community knowledge and by their research results. They will collectively survey more than 8,500 community members – their peers, neighbors, and attendees at public gatherings to assess the effectiveness of these materials. Student-developed materials will be distributed broadly via the web, high school and college wellness centers, the NIH SEPA community, and other networks – thus these materials have the potential to reach over 1.5 million adolescents and young adults over the life of the project.
Recruiting more research scientists from rural Appalachia is essential for reducing the critical public health disparities found in this region. As a designated medically underserved area, the people of Appalachia endure limited access to healthcare and accompanying public health education, and exhibit higher disease incidences and shorter lifespans than the conventional U.S. population (Pollard & Jacobsen, 2013). These health concerns, coupled with the fact that rural Appalachian adults are less likely to trust people from outside their communities, highlights the need for rural Appalachian youth to enter the biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research workforce. However, doing so requires not only the specific desire to pursue a science, technology, engineering, math, or medical science (STEMM) related degree, it also requires the more general desire to pursue post-secondary education at all. This is clearly not occurring in Tennessee’s rural Appalachian regions where nearly 75% of adults realize educational achievements only up to the high school level. Although a great deal of research and intervention has been done to increase students’ interest in STEMM disciplines, very little research has considered the unique barriers to higher education experienced by rural Appalachian youth. A critical gap in past interventions research is the failure to address these key pieces of the puzzle: combatting real and perceived barriers to higher education and STEMM pursuits in order to increase self-efficacy for, belief in the value of, and interest in pursuing an undergraduate degree. Such barriers are especially salient for rural Appalachian youth.
Our long-range goal is to increase the diversity of biomedical, clinical and behavioral research scientists by developing interventions that both reduce barriers to higher education and increase interest in pipeline STEMM majors among rural Appalachian high school students. Our objective in this application is to determine the extent to which a multifaceted intervention strategy combining interventions to address the barriers to and supports for higher education with interventions to increase interest in STEMM fields leads to increased intentions to pursue an undergraduate STEMM degree. Our hypothesis is that students who experience such interventions will show increases in important intrapersonal social-cognitive factors and in their intentions to pursue a postsecondary degree than students not exposed to such interventions. Based on the low numbers of students from this region who pursue post-secondary education and the research demonstrating the unique barriers faced by this and similar populations (Gibbons & Borders, 2010), we believe it is necessary to reduce perceived barriers to college-going in addition to helping students explore STEMM career options. In other words, it is not enough to simply offer immersive and hands-on research and exploratory career experiences to rural Appalachian youth; they need targeted interventions to help them understand college life, navigate financial planning for college, strategize ways to succeed in college, and interact with college-educated role models. Only this combination of general college-going and specific STEMM-field information can overcome the barriers faced by this population. Therefore, our specific aims are:
Specific Aim 1: Understand the role of barriers to and support for higher education in Appalachian high school students’ interest in pursuing STEMM-related undergraduate degrees. We will compare outcomes for students who participate in our interventions, designed to proactively reduce general college-going barriers while increasing support systems, to outcomes for students from closely matched schools who do not participate in these interventions to determine the extent to which such low-cost interventions, which can reach large numbers of students, are effective in increasing rural Appalachian youth’s intent to pursue STEMM-related undergraduate degrees.
Specific Aim 2: Develop sustainable interventions that decrease barriers to and increase support for higher education and that increase STEMM-related self-efficacy and interest. Throughout our project, we will integrate training for teachers and school counselors, nurture lasting community partnerships, and develop a website with comprehensive training modules to allow the schools to continue implementing the major features of the interventions long after funding ends.
This research is innovative because it is among the first to recognize the unique needs of this region by directly addressing barriers to and supports for higher education and integrating such barriers-focused interventions with more typical STEMM-focused interventions. Our model provides opportunities to assess college-going and STEMM-specific self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and barriers/supports, giving us a true understanding of how to best serve this group. Ultimately, this project will allow future researchers to understand the complex balance of services needed to increase the number of rural Appalachians entering the biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research science workforce.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. The United States is facing a crisis: not enough students are being trained in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to support and foster economic growth. In response, the State University of New York (SUNY) and the New York Academy of Sciences (The Academy) are collaborating to train SUNY graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to deliver mentoring and STEM content to underserved middle-school children in afterschool programs
In the name of God is the heading chosen by some researchers from a Middle Eastern country for their posters in an international conference on chemistry which has recently been held in Paris. This powerful message preceded the results of the researchers' work on the morphology, molecular structure, as well as the physical, chemical and mechanical properties of advanced polymeric materials. It was an unexpected statement, an unusual message, though certainly not an unprecedented one. It had nonetheless a striking effect in the context of a scientific conference attended by thousands of people
The question was raised in the 4th November copy of The New York Times when it entitled the editorial of Garry Wills (political and cultural historian), regarding the re-election of George W. Bush, "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out". Wills' theory, with which the directors of the newspaper palpably concur, is that Bush was re-elected because "many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution".
Many lives could have been saved on 26 December 2004, when the tsunami unleashed by an earthquake of magnitude 9.0 off the coast of the Indonesian island Sumatra struck a dozen coastal villages along the Indian Ocean. Those lives could have been saved if, on that day, science communication had not resulted in a complete failure to communicate scientific information adequately in many cases, in different places and at different levels. A long time passed between the violent shock and the devastation caused by the tsunami waves, in most cases, many hours.
The death of Pope John Paul II, the "Polish pope", in Rome and the subsequent election of Benedict XVI, the "German pope", have been two great events gaining world-wide media coverage and affecting the whole world. This was due to Karol Wojtyla's ability to reach everyone's heart thus once dubbed the "Great Communicator" and to the Vatican's spiritual, cultural, and political influence all over the world. The death of Pope John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI also concern science and science communication issues.