The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded funding to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) and Portland State University (PSU) in Portland, Oregon to support a “Connecting Researchers and Public Audiences” (CRPA) project titled ResearchLink: Spotlight on Solar Technologies. The primary goals of CRPA projects are to communicate to the public about specific NSF research projects. This ResearchLink project promoted public awareness of two NSF-funded projects led by Dr. Carl Wamser at PSU, Integrating Green Roofs and Photovoltaic Arrays for Energy Management and Optimization of
The ethnography presented by van Eijck and Roth focuses on the activities of people involved in a government funded internship program in conservation and restoration, which was offered by a 'multidisciplinary research center' through a local First Nation adult education center. The internship was designed, in partnership with a local non-profit conservation society (OceanHealth), to appeal to First Nation men and women considering career change, returning to school, or re-entering the work place. The primary aim of the internship was to 'provide authentic science for diverse student
Learning environment studies acknowledge that learning takes place within the social realm and that social conditions contribute to the quality of both learning and experience. This can be said to be especially true for environmental learning programs. To access information about students' perceptions of their learning environment, a robust instrument for describing and measuring student perceptions of environmental education in place-based educational settings was developed and validated. Focus groups with environmental educators were formed to explore (from teachers' perspective) the factors
This report summarizes the evaluation results from the NSF funded Eight-Legged Encounters family event that uses arachnids as a hook to draw public interests towards science. The event involves informative and hands-on activities that bridge the gap between academia and the public, extending knowledge about arachnids to children and their parents. The Bureau of Sociological Research (BOSR) at UNL was contracted to evaluate Eight-Legged Encounters. The data collection for this report involves five events and three audiences: adults, children, and the volunteers of the event. Two events were
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University of Nebraska LincolnEileen Hebets
The Ross Sea Project was a Broader Impact projects for an NSF sponsored research mission to the Ross Sea in Antarctica. The project, which began in the summer of 2010 and ended in May 2011, consisted of several components: (1) A multidisciplinary teacher-education team that included educators, scientists, Web 2.0 technology experts and storytellers, and a photographer/writer blogging team; (2) Twenty-five middle-school and high-school earth science teachers, mostly from New Jersey but also New York and California; (3) Weeklong summer teacher institute at Liberty Science Center (LSC) where teachers and scientists met, and teachers learned about questions to be investigated and technologies to be used during the mission, and how to do the science to be conducted in Antarctica; (4) COSEE NOW interactive community website where teachers, LSC staff and other COSEE NOW members shared lesson plans or activities and discussed issues related to implementing the mission-based science in their classrooms; (5) Technological support and consultations for teachers, plus online practice sessions on the use of Web 2.0 technologies (webinars, blogs, digital storytelling, etc.); (6)Daily shipboard blog from the Ross Sea created by Chris Linder and Hugh Powell (a professional photographer/writer team) and posted on the COSEE NOW website to keep teachers and students up-to-date in real-time on science experiments, discoveries and frustrations, as well as shipboard life; (7) Live webinar calls from the Ross Sea, facilitated by Rutgers and LSC staff, where students posed questions and interacted directly with shipboard researchers and staff; and (8) A follow-up gathering of teachers and scientists near the end of the school year to debrief on the mission and preliminary findings. What resulted from this project was not only the professional development of teachers, which extended into the classroom and to students, but also the development of a relationship that teachers and students felt they had with the scientists and the science. Via personal and virtual interactions, teachers and students connected to scientists personally, while engaged in the science process in the classroom and in the field.
Native Americans exert sovereignty over vast amounts of United States land and water resources, yet are underrepresented in the disciplines that train our nation's future land and water resource managers. Native American resource managers must walk in two worlds, accommodating both traditional and modern methods that may come into conflict. Building on an existing, NSF-funded Manoomin Science Camp, the Walking Two Worlds (W2W) project will employ a systems view of resource management in considering a broad range of resource management issues affecting the region (including its lakes and wetlands, fisheries, forestry, wildlife, and air quality), with the goal of engaging the entire community in environmental and resource management issues of immediate relevance to the community. W2W will incorporate both Western science concerning the physical, chemical, and biological worlds, and traditional environmental knowledge, culture, language, and the judgment of elders. This holistic approach will not only facilitate effective resource management for the community, it will also serve as a 'hook' for engaging students and the community in STEM. A partnership of the Fond du Lac Band (of Lake Superior Chippewa) and the University of Minnesota (UMN) planned collaboratively with the community, W2W will focus on community-inspired, participatory science research projects related to resource management and environmental science. W2W will be facilitated by local teachers, with former participants as mentors, researchers and resource manages as mentors, and UMN faculty as lecturers. W2W recognizes the critical importance of strong STEM education for natural resource management. Using a mixed-methods approach to external evaluation, the project will build knowledge on the contributions of the W2W holistic, systemic approach and theme of community resource management. This will provide the foundation for a future development project that builds a community of place-based learning and community-inspired research projects.
This project will bring STEM content knowledge to visitors to Cuyahoga Valley National Park via mobile device applications. Visitors will be able to use their mobile phones to access details about Park features (such as where they are in the park, what they are looking at, and where are related features), supporting just-in-time STEM learning. Cuyahoga Valley National Park receives around 2.5 million visitors every year and experiences multitudes of inquiries. Until this project, visitors were subjected to less than optimum signage for information and background about a given feature that may or may not be of interest to them. In this project, knowledge building information will be selected by the visitors and delivered to them with convenience and speed. The data base supporting this effort will provide the visitor with identification and the history of park features as well as more in depth knowledge building information while they are in the park and after the leave, providing a more holistic experience than is currently available. The investigators will build the system in parts, testing the feasibility at each stage and evaluating affective and cognitive outcomes of each portion. Research questions that will be addressed in the course of this project include: (1) What outcomes associated with use of this GPS-base system could inform future development and implementation? and (2) What contributions do these GPS-based mobile learning applications have on informal science learning as understood within the Six Strands of Informal Science Learning? It is expected knowledge generated in this project will stimulate additional programing for increasing efficacy and use in other widely ranging venues. If successful, it is easy to imagine how this STEM knowledge-building application could be extended for use in other venues across the country.
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Richard FerdigRuoming JinPatrick LorchAnnette Kratcoski
The Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies Program funds efforts that support envisioning the future of learning technologies and advancing what we know about how people learn in technology-rich environments. Development and Implementation (DIP) Projects build on proof-of-concept work that shows the possibilities of the proposed new type of learning technology, and PI teams build and refine a minimally-viable example of their proposed innovation that allows them to understand how such technology should be designed and used in the future and that allows them to answer questions about how people learn, how to foster or assess learning, and/or how to design for learning. This project team aims to explore how to foster learning in socially-networked communities, particularly learning that results in behavior change. Understanding how to foster such learning could have a wide variety of societal impacts, e.g., better fostering science, engineering, mathematical, or design thinking in school or college or on the job, fostering healthy behaviors, helping teens develop pro-social behaviors, and helping people learn to make environmentally-friendly choices as they live their lives. In previous work, this team has developed YardMap, an infrastructure for citizen science that brings together retired adults who are interested in planting and managing their yards in environmentally-friendly ways. YardMap enables social interactions and shared creation of virtual worlds in which participants can try out different ways of managing their yards and see what the downstream effects will be. They also track and display their changing practices and actual yards in ways that are visible to others. YardMap is used by many thousands of participants. In this project, the team is taking YardMap to the next level, using what is known about how people learn and come to change their behaviors to design and refine ways to more directly support individuals in critiquing and improving their behaviors and designs for the common good. What can be learned from the new YardMap will be useful in other fields that focus on helping people change their behaviors in productive ways. The PIs seek to explore how people learn and how to foster learning in socially-networked citizen science communities. Their research addresses how learning happens, how to foster learning, how to design to increase social activity, and how increased interaction with others elevates interest, generates knowledge, and leads to behavior change. Their technological innovation, an infrastructure for citizen science that fosters behavior change, builds on YardMap, an existing infrastructure for citizen science around environmental issues that allows collective data collection and analysis and supports interactive graphing and mapping. Participants design and refine ways of managing their yards in ways that take into account environmental concerns. YardMap enables social interaction and co-creation of a set of virtual worlds for trying out new ideas; learners who are part of the community interact with others in the community, create and refine virtual worlds together, interact with things in the virtual world, manipulate those worlds and collect and analyze data about outcomes, and discuss visual objects that represent real things and practices. As well, individuals track and display their changing practices and actual yards in ways that are visible to others. YardMap can be thought of as a maker movement community focused on yard maintenance; like other maker communities, it encourages participants to create, share and discuss new inventions and practices in a social-networked community setting. Using both what is known about learning in communities and what is known about social drivers of interaction, the team is is extending YardMap to focus on fostering learning and investigating the relationships between learning and behavior change and the influences each has on the other. Much will be learned about how to use social interactions in positive ways to help individuals become more comfortable with behaviors they need to or should take on for health, civic, or educational reasons. What is learned and the technological infrastructure that is created will be directly applicable to other situations where individual behavior changes are needed for change to happen in a social system (e.g., environmental action, changing the culture of an organization, changing norms in a community, perhaps even creating learning communities in formal on-line courses).
The Rutgers Film Bureau in collaboration with the scientists of the LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) project at Palmer will produce a multi-platform documentary project, Antarctic Quest: Racing to Understand a Changing Ocean. This Connecting Researchers to Public Audiences proposal will focus on the scientists who are studying ocean physics, chemistry, biology, and ecology in the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP), which is the fastest winter warming location on earth. The aim of the project is to promote scientific knowledge about the world's oceans and climate change, inspire interest in scientific careers, as well as train a cadre of next generation film students in the craft of science documentary filmmaking. The project will articulate the research of the Palmer LTER's quest to understand the impact of climate change on the marine ecosystems of the WAP, while involving university students in the filmmaking process. Deliverables include an hour television documentary intended for PBS television broadcast, an online "Antarctic Quest community" created through interactive and interconnected social media, three five-minute educational videos produced for the PBS Learning Media website, and a Digital Media Library to assist Earth science educators. The production team will employ a diverse group of twenty film students from Rutgers University to be involved in the many phases and components of the project. The project is designed to advance the public's environmental literacy. The project will raise awareness of the changes being observed in the world's oceans by illustrating how small changes in the physical conditions in the WAP can have profound impact on marine ecosystems and potentially the entire ocean system. The project will also highlight the significance of innovative new technologies that are revolutionizing research methods as well document the importance of scientific collaboration to understand a complex interdisciplinary problem and the challenges of working in extreme environments. The summative evaluation of the project will assess the effectiveness of the project in meeting its educational goals. By communicating significant scientific research to the public while training a cohort of next generation of science documentary filmmakers, the project will also contribute to capacity-building in the Informal Science Education field.
This project will research factors influencing the implementation of programs designed to increase diverse participation in informal science. The goal is to provide the informal science education field with information and tools that will help them design effective programs that more effectively engage a broad range of diverse audiences. The project has two major components. First, the project will research the implementation of a citizen science project, Celebrate Urban Birds (CUB), in major U.S. cities. Citizen science projects involve public volunteers in gathering scientifically valid data as part of ongoing research. Second, building on results of the research, the project will launch a website and learning community (called a Community of Practice or CoP) supporting informal science educators that are involved in designing and implementing informal science programs with an emphasis on engaging diverse participants. The project will be lead by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO), a leader in designing and researching citizen science projects, in collaboration with the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) and five science center members of ASTC, where the CUB program will be implemented and researched. The objective of the research is to better understand contextual factors and how they impact implementation even when accepted practices are followed. Such research is key not only to revealing accepted practices but also to understanding how projects are implemented in the face of concrete operational, cultural, economic, and demographic variables. The research will use a comparative case study approach, which is designed for studies requiring holistic, in-depth investigation. The development of the website and the CoP will be guided by a Network Improvement Strategy, a research-based approach to designing educational CoPs. The development of the CoP will involve the project stakeholders including the informal science organization practitioners, community organization representatives, CUB staff, ASTC staff, advisors and consultants. This strategy will allow the project team and pilot sites to leverage their diverse experiences and skill sets to improve practice; provide space for researchers and practitioners to work together as partners; and develop a nuanced set of strategies that can be implemented across a variety of organizational contexts.
The Citizen Science Embedded Assessment project will explore the use of embedded assessment to measure participant science inquiry skill development within the context of citizen science projects. Citizen science (CS) projects partner volunteers with scientists to participate directly in research endeavors. Embedded assessments (EAs) assess participant skills and performance that are directly integrated and are indistinguishable from day-to-day activities. As such, EAs allow learners to demonstrate their science competencies through tasks that are integrated seamlessly into the learning experience itself. The CS field has a growing inventory of self-assessment tools, however, the evaluation of citizen science (and other informal science projects) using such subjective assessments can be remarkably improved when these are used in combination with objective measures of knowledge, skills or other resources participants gain through their participation. Science skills, such as data collection and analysis, are particularly important for CS projects because of their focus on the scientific process and their need for rigorous data collection. Despite the focus on skill gains, CS projects rarely measure such improvements. Embedded assessments (EAs) offer a critical method for understanding the impacts of these participatory learning environments. The project will develop and field test EAs on citizen science topics with an environmental science focus. It will also design training to support their use by individual projects. The project has three primary research foci: (1) identifying common and unique science inquiry skills targeted by CS projects, and how skills are currently being measured to document project impact; (2) identifying the opportunities and challenges present in developing and administering EA tools customized for CS projects to assess science inquiry skills; and (3) assessing whether EA tools created for a CS project can provide project leaders with a better understanding of their project's impact on participant science inquiry skills. The project will address these questions with a needs assessment of research and evaluation studies within the CS community and case studies to develop and test EAs customized for three identified and interested CS projects.
As popular visitor destinations, zoos play a vital role in enhancing understanding of animal biology, conservation, and biodiversity. But what do visitors already understand? This study examined visitors’ knowledge of animal biology and their understanding of how human activity may affect biodiversity. The findings led to a modification of a model that illustrates visitors’ levels of understanding of animal biology and the conservation of biodiversity.