This is an overview of audience research and evaluation pertaining to the exhibition "Living With Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond". The process of investigating the perceptions of audiences and visitors was mostly designed to inform the interpretive planning process. Then, after the exhibit opened to the public in late October 2010, the intent was to describe and assess the experiences of visitors. Ten audience/visitor studies were conducted over a seven-year period, five of which were designed to inform the planning process and five of which were conducted after the exhibition opened to
The research presented in this report was the tenth and final study in a multi-phase evaluation plan for “Living With Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond,” an exhibition created by the Louisiana State Museum and installed at the Presbytere building. The exhibition opened in October 2010; a remedial evaluation was conducted in November 2010; the summative evaluation was conducted in the spring and summer of 2011; preparations for this longitudinal study began in the fall of 2011, the telephone interviews were conducted in the spring of 2013. Results from this analysis indicate that “Living With
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Louisiana State MuseumJeff HaywardJolene Hart
The purpose of this Summative Evaluation was to assess visitors’ use and perceptions of ‘Living with Hurricanes: Katrina & Beyond’ at the Louisiana State Museum (LSM) as an informal science experience. The exhibition is distinctive in that it is presented in a museum which has been primarily focused on history. The overall experience, affective impact and learning were evaluated for visitors leaving the exhibition. More specific questions of science learning were evaluated in mini-studies in Room 3. This report also examines the degree to which emotion affects informal learning in the museum
In the past 15 years, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as an ideal technology for delivering child-computer interaction that is adapted to children’s psychomotor and cognitive skills development. The rapid evolution of these tangible technologies has meant that there has been little or no time to build a foundation for the design of games and learning applications that could offer pleasant and useful experiences to children. Our research group specializes in multimodal and natural human-computer interaction and conducts child-focused research that highlights children’s real needs
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Javier MarcoSandra BaldassarriEva CerezoDiana Yifan XuJanet Read
STEMtastic: NASA in Our Community is a two-year project designed to educate and inspire teachers, students and life-long learners to embrace NASA STEM content. The project will increase awareness of NASA activities, while educating and inspiring students to train for careers that are critical to future economic growth of the country in general, and NASA’s future missions in particular. The Virginia Air & Space Center (VASC) will partner with the Virginia Space Grant Consortium and Analytical Mechanics Associates, Inc. to accomplish this project. VASC will deliver NASA STEM content through (1) STEMtastic Teacher Institutes and Education Modules: (a) a series of two five-day professional development institutes for educators which will result in the (b) development and dissemination of new education modules for grades 4-9; and (2) STEMtastic Exhibits and Demonstrations: new interactive exhibits to used for live demonstrations at VASC; those demonstrations will also be delivered to traditionally underserved schools in the region. All classroom and teaching materials—educator institutes, education modules, exhibit software and demonstration modules—will be developed using NASA content and shared with other institutions to promote the expansion of knowledge about best practices in providing STEM education in both formal and informal education settings. STEMevals, a robust evaluation plan, will be implemented to assess success in each project area. Adjustments will be made along the pipeline to increase effectiveness in reaching the target audience. The project has the potential to reach countless educators, students and museum visitors throughout the U.S."
Pipeline for Remote Sensing Education and Application (PRSEA), will increase awareness, knowledge and understanding of remote sensing technologies and associated disciplines, and their relevance to NASA, through a combination of activities that build a “pipeline” to STEM and remote sensing careers, for a continuum of audiences from third grade through adulthood. This program will be led by Pacific Science Center. The first objective is to engage 50 teens from groups underrepresented in STEM fields in a four-year career ladder program; participants will increase knowledge and understanding of remote sensing as well as educational pathways that lead to careers in remote sensing fields at NASA and other relevant organizations. The second objective is to serve 2,000 children in grades 3-5, in a remote sensing-based out-of school time outreach program that will increase the participant’s content knowledge of remote sensing concepts and applications and awareness and interest in remote sensing disciplines. PRSEA’s third objective is to engage 180 youth, grades 6-8, in remote sensing-themed summer intensive programs through which youth will increase knowledge of remote sensing concepts and applications and increase awareness and interest in educational and career pathways associated with remote sensing and NASA’s role in this field. The final objective is to engage 10,000 visitors of all ages with a remote sensing-themed Discovery Cart on Pacific Science Center’s exhibit floor. By engaging in cart activities, we anticipate visitors will increase their level of awareness and interest in the topic of remote sensing and NASA’s role in contributing to this field.
NASA STEM Educational Project for the Goddard Greenbelt and Wallops Visitor Center and the Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Facility Education Resource Center is a project designed to provide high value STEM education activities. The Goddard Office of Education is fortunate to have three facilities (Greenbelt, WFF and IV&V) that coordinate to produce high impact, sustainable results using NASA’s unique capabilities for their education customers which include visitors, K-16 students, educators and science centers, museums and planetariums. The Greenbelt project elements will take our current Visitor Center in the direction of the Science Education and Exploration Center (SEEC). This project includes utilizing the GeoDome portable planetarium with underserved populations, expanding STEM engagement programs held at the Visitor Center and growing the network of museum partners that implement programs through an experiential workshop held in September 2012. This project also includes support for a summer experience for students and educators for the SEEC held July 2012. The WFF elements of the project include developing educational exhibits and information on NASA’s WFF missions and launches. A presentation on the LADEE orbital moon mission is being developed for the Science on a Sphere. Content is being developed for a kiosk with hands-on exhibits for students that inspire them in STEM fields and based on NASA’s Suborbital and Orbital missions at Wallops Flight Facility. The IV&V elements leverage past NASA and Visitor Center investments, content, and programs. Using the IR camera enables sharing science and engineering information about missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope to a broader audience. IV&V is using the Space Weather kit to train educators and students on space weather forecasting. Having IV&V as a partner allows us to target rural underserved populations with our programs.
This article describes Youth as Resources, a nationwide initiative involves youth and adults as equal partners in projects that improve community life. Some examples of the projects include the Rural Renewable Energy Alliance, which engages teenagers to install solar heating in low income homes, and the Haydenville Preservation Committee, which implemented neighborhood cleanup and landscaping projects in rural Ohio.
The Community STEM Outreach Project at the Saint Louis Science Center (SLSC) received funding from the United States Office of Naval Research (ONR) from October 2010 through September 2013. Klein Consulting, with support from Tisdal Consulting, conducted the evaluation of the three-year project. The original proposal from the SLSC to ONR laid the foundation for the Community STEM Outreach Project by describing the institution and its youth program, the Youth Exploring Science (YES) Program. Plans were underway to reach out to existing and new national partners to document and disseminate a
This award continues funding of a Center to conduct research and education on the interactions of nanomaterials with living systems and with the abiotic environment. The goals of this Center are to develop a predictive understanding of biological and ecological toxicology for nanomaterials, and of their transport and transformation in the environment. This Center engages a highly interdisciplinary, multi-institutional team in an integrated research program to determine how the physical and chemical properties of nanomaterials determine their environmental impacts from the cellular scale to that of entire ecosystems. The research approach promises to be transformative to the science of ecotoxicology by combining high throughput screening assays with computational and physiological modeling to predict impacts at higher levels of biological organization. The Center will unite the fields of engineering, chemistry, physics, materials science, cell biology, ecology, toxicology, computer modeling, and risk assessment to establish the foundations of a new scientific discipline: environmental nanotoxicology. Research on nanomaterials and development of nanotechnology is expanding rapidly and producing discoveries that promise to benefit the nation?s economy, and improve our ability to live sustainably on earth. There is now a critical need to reduce uncertainty about the possible negative consequences of nanomaterials in the environment, while at the same time providing guidelines for their safe design to prevent environmental and toxicological hazards. This Center addresses this societal need by developing a scientific framework of risk prediction that is paradigm-shifting in its potential to keep pace with the commercial expansion of nanotechnology. Another impact of the Center will be development of human resources for the academic community, industry and government by training the next generation of nano-scale scientists, engineers, and regulators to anticipate and mitigate potential future environmental hazards of nanotechnology. Partnerships with other centers will act as powerful portals for the dissemination and integration of research findings to the scientific, educational, and industrial communities, both nationally and internationally. This Center will contribute to a network of nanotechnology centers that serve the national needs and expand representation and access to this research and knowledge network through programs directed at California colleges serving underrepresented groups. Outreach activities, including a journalist-scientist communication program, will serve to inform both experts and the public at large about the safety issues surrounding nanotechnology and how to safely produce, use, and dispose of nanomaterials.
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Andre NelYoram CohenHilary GodwinArturo KellerPatricia Holden
This research project will analyze and communicate important societal issues having to do with the disposal of nuclear waste. Unlike the vast majority of scholarly inquiries, which culminate in journal articles or a book, this inquiry will result in a feature length documentary about the scientific, political, and ethical issues adjacent to the problem of the socially responsible disposal of nuclear waste. Though the reach of the film will extend beyond any particular site, the focal point of the study is the only fully-licensed, operating geological repository for nuclear waste in the world: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant twenty-six miles east of Carlsbad, New Mexico. The project will track the contentious history of current and planned clean-up operations involving the Pilot Plant. It will depict a disputed, sometimes successful and sometimes failed, trading zone for very different (often antagonistic) stakeholders from experts, to townspeople, politicians, miners, activists, industrial engineers, and futurists. Trading-zone studies, a methodological approach within the research area known as Science and Technology Studies (STS), interrogate subcultures confronting one another and developing coordinated local action where global agreement is often absent. In this trading-zone study, the investigator is ethically, visually, and methodologically committed to depicting that collision as all sides struggle to shape an contested nuclear future. The use of film as a medium for presenting the results of the trading-zone study is innovative and potentially transformative; it could open a way for STS to investigate in a visual way the making of science and technology policy. This project will reach a broad audience by partnering with outreach organizations, Film Sprout and Working Films, to bring the film to its core audience: policy makers, environmentalists, along with groups and citizens traditionally not positioned to participate in science policy. Target locales and groups include science museums such as the Bradbury Science Museum (Los Alamos), the Atomic Testing Museum (Las Vegas), The Museum of Science and Industry (Albuquerque), nuclear facilities, towns surrounding them, and environmental groups.
The National Federation of the Blind (NFB), with six science centers across the U.S., will develop, implement, and evaluate the National Center for Blind Youth in Science (NCBYS), a three-year full-scale development project to increase informal learning opportunities for blind youth in STEM. Through partnerships and companion research, the NCBYS will lead to greater capacity to engage the blind in informal STEM learning. The NCBYS confronts a critical area of need in STEM education, and a priority for the AISL program: the underrepresentation of people with disabilities in STEM. Educators are often unaware of methods to deliver STEM concepts to blind students, and students do not have the experience with which to advocate for accommodations. Many parents of blind students are ill-equipped to provide support or request accessible STEM adaptations. The NCBYS will expose blind youth to non-visual methods that facilitate their involvement in STEM; introduce science centers to additional non-visual methods that facilitate the involvement of the blind in their exhibits; educate parents as to their students' ability to be independent both inside and outside the STEM classroom; provide preservice teachers of blind students with hands-on experience with blind students in STEM; and conduct research to inform a field that is lacking in published material. The NCBYS will a) conduct six regional, two-day science programs for a total of 180 blind youth, one day taking place at a local science center; b) conduct concurrent onsite parent training sessions; c) incorporate preservice teachers of blind students in hands-on activities; and d) perform separate, week-long, advanced-study residential programs for 60 blind high school juniors and seniors focused on the design process and preparation for post-secondary STEM education. The NCBYS will advance knowledge and understanding in informal settings, particularly as they pertain to the underrepresented disability demographic; but it is also expected that benefits realized from the program will translate to formal arenas. The proposed team represents the varied fields that the project seeks to inform, and holds expertise in blindness education, STEM education, museum education, parent outreach, teacher training, disability research, and project management. The initiative is a unique opportunity for science centers and the disability population to collaborate for mutual benefit, with lasting implications in informal STEM delivery, parent engagement, and teacher training. It is also an innovative approach to inspiring problem-solving skills in blind high school students through the design process. A panel of experts in various STEM fields will inform content development. NCBYS advances the discovery and understanding of STEM learning for blind students by integrating significant research alongside interactive programs. The audience includes students and those responsible for delivering STEM content and educational services to blind students. For students, the program will demonstrate their ability to interface with science center activities. Students will also gain mentoring experience through activities paired with younger blind students. Parents and teachers of blind students, as well as science center personnel, will gain understanding in the experiences of the blind in STEM, and steps to facilitate their complete involvement. Older students will pursue design inquiries into STEM at a more advanced level, processes that would be explored in post-secondary pursuits. By engaging these groups, the NCBYS will build infrastructure in the informal and formal arenas. Society benefits from the inclusion of new scientific minds, resulting in a diverse workforce. The possibility for advanced study and eventual employment for blind students also reduces the possibility that they would be dependent upon society for daily care in the future. The results of the proposed project will be disseminated and published broadly through Web sites; e-mail lists; social media; student-developed e-portfolios of the design program; an audio-described video; and presentations at workshops for STEM educators, teachers of blind students, blind consumer groups, researchers in disability education, and museum personnel.