Produced by Thirteen/WNET New York and Nelvana International, the Award-winning series CYBERCHASE is the only mathematics series for children on American television. Designed for kids ages 8 to 12 and packed with mystery, humor, and action, each episode delivers positive messages about math by teaching concepts in a fun way that kids can understand. To assess the impact of Cyberchase on children's mathematical problem solving, MediaKidz Research & Consulting conducted summative research using an experimental/control, pretest/posttest design. Participants were 108 third- and fourth-grade
FETCH, a children's television series produced by WGBH since 2005, is a competition-based game/reality show for 6-10 year-old children that includes both animation and live action footage. Goodman Research Group, Inc. (GRG), a research firm specializing in the evaluation of educational programs, materials, and services, served as the external evaluator for the FETCH series in Season Two. GRG's evaluation focused on the science and engineering challenges presented in the show, and assessed the influence of the series on children's understanding of science and engineering concepts and processes
The findings from this evaluation indicate that compared to the typical children's Web site, parents consider the PEEP Web site to be more educational and easier for children to navigate on their own. Children were very engaged by the Interactive Games, and demonstrated proficiency with regard to comprehension and site navigation. Further, parents rated the Anywhere Science Activities very positively, particularly noting that the activities gave parents excellent ideas for how to turn everyday situations into science explorations with their children.
This external evaluation of the PEEP Explorer's Guide found the Guide effective in meeting its goals. Teachers who used the Guide were extremely satisfied with its content, materials, and usability. They reported the Guide was highly appealing to children, and they used materials from the Guide to forge home-school connections. Teachers found the Guide made useful links between science, literacy, and language. Pre-post comparisons demonstrated that, while teachers were engaged in similar instructional practices before and after using the Guide, the Guide alleviated the challenges of teaching
In this Summative Evaluation, Goodman Research Group, Inc. found that PEEP effectively models science inquiry skills, including predicting, observing, and problem solving. Children who were exposed to PEEP interacted with materials in ways that were significantly more grounded in science inquiry than children who were not. By a margin of 71% to 22%, for example, children who watched PEEP were more likely to initiate a question to be explored. Children exposed to PEEP were also more likely to use problem-solving strategies (76% compared to 34%) and more likely to solve the problems they
In June of 2007, American Institutes for Research (AIR) conducted two focus groups to support WGBH in gathering feedback from children aged 7-10 on the FETCH! television program. The main objective of the focus groups were to: 1) gain insight into children' previous perceptions of scientists and whether or not such perceptions related to the demographic composition of the groups or informed their perception of scientists and scientific careers, and 2) determine how FETCH! supports or challenges these perceptions and how the seres might be enhanced to inspire children to consider careers in
In MIT’s NSF-funded Terrascope Youth Radio (TYR) program, urban youth, many from groups historically underrepresented in the sciences, worked as paid interns who received training in radio production, reporting and writing stories with scientific content and audio storytelling to create environmentally oriented audio pieces that were engaging and relevant to their own and their peers’ lives. Teen interns participated between July 2008 and Autumn 2012. TYR’s goals were to improve a broad audience of teens’ engagement with, knowledge of, and attitudes about science, technology, engineering, and
The 2010 Cyberchase Summer Challenge Outreach initiative was designed to allow local public television stations to develop community-appropriate outreach plans as part of a unique summer launch of a new season of shows for a PBS children's television program. The Cyberchase Summer Challenge was a national initiative; eight stations were selected for a pilot study of best practices related to summer programming. Grantee stations were provided modest funding and material support. RMC's evaluation focused on understanding how public television stations and their outreach partners can build
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Alice ApleyWendy GrahamElizabeth GoldmanThirteen/WNET New York
The Sharing the Universe (STU) project was funded by NSF in 2007 to develop and make available resources and supports to deepen and broaden the education and public outreach (EPO) of amateur astronomy clubs who are members of the Night Sky Network. To achieve this goal, the project funded a development group: the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and a research group: Institute for Learning Innovation. These two groups were to work as partners, both to study the barriers and challenges that existed for amateur astronomy clubs to educational outreach, and to apply what was learned from those
In this report, noted scholar James Paul Gee discusses the evolution of digital media and learning (DMAL) from its infancy as an ""academic area"" into a more organized field or coherent discipline. Distinguishing among academic areas, fields, disciplinary specializations, and thematic disciplines, Gee describes other academic areas that have fallen into these categories or developed into established disciplines. He argues that DMAL will not evolve until a real coherence develops through collaboration and the accumulation of shared knowledge. Gee offers a concrete proposal of one way scholars
Throughout the spring, the CSM and The Media Consortium (TMC) drew together dozens of leading public interest media makers, funders and researchers in Chicago, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Boston for a series of Impact Summits. These convenings—which asked attendees to describe how they measure reach, relevance, engagement, inclusion and influence in their work—informed a new analysis co-published by CSM and TMC: Investing In Impact: Media Summits Reveal Pressing Needs, Tools for Evaluating Public Interest Media. In Investing in Impact, we outline the major
The website informalscience.org hosts an archived evaluation reports, most of them from NSF-funded projects. Although NSF strongly suggests that projects upload their summative evaluation reports, not all projects comply. Of the 300+ evaluation reports upload by users to the site, 72 report on NSF-funded ISE media projects. To what extent can the ongoing evaluation of ISE projects help to build a more general case for ISE media?