What Teachers and Districts Most Need from Research and Researchers: In this presentation from a workshop on research and practice at the NARST annual conference, Dan Gallagher of Seattle Public Schools and Tana Peterman of University of Washington discuss examples of what practitioners need from the education research community.
The Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre (doing business as the Learning World Institute), in collaboration with informal science education venues, universities, and corporations in Chicago, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., is organizing a set of three professional conferences and a web site to encourage stronger national and local communities of practice around the application of arts-based learning (ABL) to informal science education. Arts-based learning is the instrumental use of artistic skills, processes, and experiences to foster learning in non-artistic disciplines. The goal is to apply ABL to informal science education in ways that can foster the acquisition of STEM skills that are important in today's workforce. The set of conferences, with a total attendance of 750, will focus on an understanding of current and potential ABL applications to workforce skill development, opportunities to practice ABL directly, and creation of a research agenda on the impact of ABL on science education. The web site (funded through other sources) will help conference attendees prepare for the workshops, provide opportunities for networking, aggregate resources, and host the research agenda.
The Conference on Public Participation in Scientific Research 2012 was held on 4 and 5 August in association with the Ecological Society of America’s 97th Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon. The conference took important steps toward formalizing the field of public participation in scientific research (PPSR); facilitated communication, collaboration, and innovation, and identified points of strength and concern for the field. Additional information about and results from the conference can be found at citizenscience.org.
The conference, Indigenous Worldviews in Informal Science Education, is designed to advance research on the integration of Native and Western science in relation to informal science learning. The goals of the conference are to integrate and synthesize research and theory, formulate a research agenda, and share the results with the STEM education community. The conference is organized around six strands: Collaboration, Policy, Holistic Education, Next Generation Youth, and Evaluation. A six-week preconference online discussion of conference issues leads into the two-day conference, held at Imiloa Astronomy Center in Hilo, Hawaii. The meeting brings together sixty participants including educators, research scientists, learning researchers, policymakers, and Native youth. The conference includes keynotes, workshops and synthesis discussion groups, which will be synthesized and presented at a policy outcome meeting held in Washington, DC that follows the conference. Conference results will be further disseminated at relevant conferences, in publications, and through online discussions. A full evaluation process will inform the detailed planning of the conference and will evaluate the effectiveness of the conference, based on responses from conference participants.
The National Academy of Sciences is proposing a three-day Sackler Colloquium on the Science of Science Communication to be held in September 2013. This conference, which will build upon the themes of the colloquium held in 2012, will bring together communication researchers, scientists, and science communication practitioners to foster interdisciplinary discussion and promote the understanding and use of research in confronting science communication challenges of national import. Prominent communication researchers will cover subjects such as "Belief and Attitude Formation about Science Topics," "Communicating Uncertainty," "Influences of Social Networks", and "Narratives in Science Communication" during the first two days of the conference. Concurrent workshops on four topics of national interest will comprise Day Three. The meeting will be held at the National Academy of Sciences, and will be webcast live as well as archived. The proceedings of Days 1 and 2 will be published in a special issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition, written summaries of the research results and communication recommendations from the workshop on Day 3 will be distributed free on the National Academies website to highlight the importance of the role of research in effective science communication. Goals of the colloquium are to generate an appreciation of the power of social science research to guide more effective communication of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) to help identify the gaps in communication research, and to promote sustained STEM communication programs. The colloquium will highlight the importance of the role of research in effective science communication, and strengthen understanding, appreciation, and collaboration between disciplines. It will also further strengthen the bridge between communication research and practice with the goal of improving the science of science communication.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Barbara Kline Pope
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The 2012 National Science Foundation (NSF) Informal Science Education (ISE) Principal Investigator (PI) Meeting convened 241 PIs, March 14-16, 2012. This Program Guide includes the agenda, location map, and a list of CAISE Partners and Advisors. The agenda includes descriptions of Nascent to Burgeoning Communities of Interest discussions along themes related to STEM Media, Organizational Networks, Professional Development in ISE, Sustainability Science and Education in ISE, Art and Science Education, Public Engagement with Science, Future of Natural History Learning, Designing, Making, Playing
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TEAM MEMBERS:
CAISE
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This paper offers a simple view of the institutionalization process and describes case studies of three institutions (High Desert Museum, Chicago Academy of Sciences, and Chicago Children's Museum). It is a summary of remarks from the 1994 Visitor Studies Conference in Raleigh, NC.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
D. PerryK. RonningJ. SiskaS. WeaverErica ReedVisitor Studies Association
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.
This four year project led by The American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) will continue fostering interactions among projects funded by the Graduate STEM Fellows in K-12 Education (GK-12)through a series of meetings that include one annual meeting and two special focus meetings every year. The annual meeting will be broad and will target all different GK-12 participants (PIs, Fellows, Teachers, Project Coordinators, Evaluators and Faculty Members). The special focus meetings will target a specific GK-12 group or will explore a theme or issue of special interest to the GK-12 program or GK-12 projects. AAAS also will update the current website and revise and expand its content to provide a resource to the GK-12 community. Some of the additions to the website will be: an e-newsletter, alumni directory, evaluation instruments, ready access to STEM activities and statistical data on projects.
With the Role of Media in Supporting Informal Science Learning project, the Institute for Learning Innovation (ILI) and Grunwald Associates sought to establish a “national learning initiative” to explore the intersection of media and informal science learning. To do so, ILI proposed an initial conference followed by the development of a website and online community. The National Science Foundation funded this project, with additional funding provided by the National Parks Service. Held in March 2009, the 1.5 day conference was designed to be a “first step” in the development of a conversation
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Elizabeth Bandy, Ph.D.Institute for Learning Innovation
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This guide provides effective practices for anyone — university faculty member, K–12 teacher, or administrator — who wants to create a project that partners science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate students (Fellows) with K–12 teachers on a sustained basis. These recommendations come from the community of faculty members, graduate students, K–12 teachers, program managers, and evaluators who participated in the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate STEM Fellows in K–12 Education (GK–12) Program from its start in 1999 through 2012. The guide was written to
The University of Massachusetts Lowell conducted 1.5-day conference in the fall of 2011, titled "Learning on the Go: Using Out-of-Home Media to Communicate Climate Science." The conference, held at the Lowell Inn and Conference Center, brought together approximately 125 professionals and students in climate science, communications, out-of-home media, social science, informal and formal science education, and educational psychology with the goal of exploring opportunities for applying out-of-home media to communicating science to the public, with a particular emphasis on climate change science. "Out-of-home media" is defined as any type of communication that reaches individuals while they are out of the home, including mobile media, billboards, mass transit placards, posters, etc. The intent was to consider how informal science education and its impacts on learning can be expanded via the adaptation of such media to the goals of ISE. Conference proceedings and podcasts of keynote sessions will be made available on a conference Web site. Conference evaluation will be conducted by Arbor Consulting Partners.