This Science Learning+ project will develop research-and-practice activities to explore how an integrated art, STEM, and society (what we refer to as STEAM) approach can expand science engagement and learning of youth aged 15-19, from low-income and non-dominant cultural communities. The project will review current knowledge, practice, and trends related to underrepresented youth, STEAM, and science engagement. The review will be used to develop: (1) A cross-setting research framework for investigating the relationship between informal STEAM learning experiences and young people's developing engagement with science. (2) Design principles for out-of-school STEAM programs that have proven effective in cultivating youth engagement with science and making relevant cross-setting connections. (3) Practitioner-friendly program evaluation tools that integrate findings from current research and practice related to cross-setting science learning of young adults especially non-dominant youth as it relates to STEAM learning experiences.
From intimate science cafes to massive science festivals, the public science events sector encompasses an enormous diversity of activity involving a wide range of practitioners and target audiences. As unique as each instance of an event can be, public science events are all live, in-person programs designed to engage the public with science in a social context. This activity is already taking place on a grand scale in both the US and UK, and initial evaluations of some of these event forms have begun to demonstrate distinct beneficial impacts. Despite some significant leaps forward, there are several issues that this Science Learning+ project seeks to address: (1) insufficient connectivity and communications between many event organizers; (2) little overall tracking of event activity; (3) few comparative evaluations across different event forms; and (4) lack of shared terminology, key facts, and a coherent narrative for the role live events play in the science learning ecosystem. A landscape study, organized into a single document and simple website, is the main deliverable. This will summarize existing activity and findings related to events, and provide an overview of potentially fruitful areas for future investigation.
This report presents the findings from a front-end evaluation for an exhibition about tuna, which is currently under development at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Visitors were intercepted on the second floor of the Aquarium and invited to view tuna in the big tank from the lower level of the Aquarium and to review, and ultimately select, one of six prototype interpretive panels, all of which were about different aspects of tuna. The evaluation goals for this study were to determine: • what visitors overall reactions are when they view the tuna in the big tank from the lower level of the aquarium
This is a poster from the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. It describes KC Empower, a project that explores after school science for children with disabilities.
This design case explores the affordances of gigapixel image technology for science communication and learning in museum settings through the iterative development of an explorable image viewer to engage visitors in an archaeological exhibit. We reflect on the series of user studies, prototype iterations, and design decisions taken to optimize navigation, annotation and exploration in this zoomable user interface. We highlight a set of design precedents, interaction frameworks, and content structuring approaches, while detailing the development of a media rich digital annotation strategy to
This evaluation of Mysteries of Çatalhöyük was commissioned by the Science Museum of Minnesota to provide objective feedback about the character of visitors’ experiences in this exhibition. The process of investigating visitors’ experiences included assessing and analyzing the extent of their use of the exhibition, awareness and perception of the interpretive messages presented, reactions to selected exhibit features, satisfaction with the experience, and characteristics of the audience who chose to see it; of these topics, the analysis of interpretive messages was considered to have primary
The CSMC-OMSI Partnership for Public Engagement (COPPE) project was developed to establish a strong and long-lasting partnership between the Center for Sustainable Materials Chemistry (CSMC) and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). Through participation in this project, COPPE researchers and OMSI educators sought a deeper understanding of each other's profession while simultaneously developing a suite of Informal Science Education (ISE) outreach programs that engage the public in new and enduring ways. These new ISE platforms were developed to enhance public awareness in the areas
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Oregon Museum of Science and IndustryAnne Sinkey
President Obama announced in April 2013 that the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) would launch a STEM AmeriCorps initiative to build student interest in STEM. A RFA is currently being prepared to be released in the late fall of 2013. This project will engage in quick response research to identify an evaluation and research agenda that can begin to inform the program launch. Thus, the timeframe for informing the initial stages of STEM AmeriCorps is relatively short, and the creation of an evaluation and research agenda is very timely. The products from the RAPID proposal are: (1) a review of the evaluation and research literature on the use of volunteers and/or mentors to build students' interest in STEM; (2) to convene a workshop to identify evaluation and research priorities to guide the initiative; and (3) a summary evaluation agenda that identifies promising directions along with the strength of evidence around key issues.
This working white paper begins the process of establishing a research agenda for how to use adult volunteers most effectively to engage K-12 students in STEM subjects. It does so by describing a comprehensive review of the literature, searching for articles and papers about programs designed to increase student interest, engagement, participation and academic achievement/attainment in STEM subjects.
The purposes of the STUDIO 3D evaluation were to collect information about the impact upon student learning as a result of participating in the STUDIO 3D Project, as well as to elicit information for program improvement. Areas of inquiry include recruiting and retention, impact on project participants, tracking student impacts, and the project as a whole.
This report presents the findings of the summative evaluation of the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Big Back Yard (BBY), with a specific focus on Earthscapes Miniature Golf. Mary McEathron, Amy Grack, and Stacey Grimes, graduate students in the Evaluation Studies program at the University of Minnesota, carried out the evaluation during the summer of 2004. The purposes of the evaluation were to understand visitors’ experiences in the Big Back Yard and the quality of awareness or understanding acquired as a result of that experience. The evaluation was conducted to answer the following evaluation
The formative evaluation of Season 2 of Design Squad was performed in two parts. Part 1 included a field test conducted by American Institutes for Research in spring 2008. Part 2, conducted by Veridian inSight, included follow-up interviews with teachers whose classrooms participated in the field test. The teacher interviews were conducted in fall of 2008. This document is the Design Squad, Season 2 final evaluation report. It contains the following sections: Section 1: Highlights from the teacher interviews conducted in fall of 2008 by Veridian inSight. Section 2: Findings from the field test
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Veridian inSight, LLCAmerican Institutes for Research