In late 2012, COMPASS received NSF grant number 1255633, “A Workshop to Explore Building Systemic Communication Capacity for Next Generation Scientists.” Known in shorthand and on twitter as #GradSciComm, the work comprises three major components, culminating in this report: (1) To assess the current landscape of science communication workshops, courses, and trainings available to graduate students in the STEM disciplines; (2) To convene a workshop of science communication trainers, scholars, science society leaders, funders, administrators, and graduate students; and (3) To provide concrete
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Liz NeeleyErica GoldmanBrooke SmithNancy BaronSarah Sunu
Science communications proficiency is an important skill for STEM graduate students but is not a typical part of STEM graduate education nationally. At the institutions that do offer such science communications training, instructional approaches are highly variable, reflecting an absence of standards and evaluation metrics. The workshop will 1) inventory science communications training for STEM graduate students nationally, (2) identify high effective practices in science communications training with attention to curriculum, approaches, and evaluation, and (3) define a roadmap that gives concrete recommendations to university administrators and funding agencies for national implementation and scale-up of science communications training. The workshop will involve IGERT PIs, science communications trainers, science communications researchers, and individuals from national agencies and organizations with a high interest in STEM graduate student communications training. Products of the workshop will include a white paper to NSF that identifies best practices for science communications training and specifies a roadmap for national scale-up of effective practices; publications in the peer-reviewed literature and other media; and briefings of officials at organizations with capacity to foster changes in graduate education (e.g., NSF, Council of Graduate Schools, and AAAS).
The UMN MRSEC conducts an ambitious and multi-faceted education and outreach program to extend the impact of the Center beyond the university, providing undergraduates, college faculty, high school teachers, and K-12 students with opportunities that augment their traditional curriculum and increase their appreciation of materials science and engineering (MS&E). Our summer research program provides high-quality research and educational experiences in MS&E to students and faculty, drawn primarily from undergraduate institutions with limited research opportunities, while placing a strong emphasis on inclusion of women and members of underrepresented groups.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Phil Engen
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Based on nearly two decades of museum programming for low-income Hispanic and African American girls at the Miami Science Museum, this extension service project employs a train-the-trainers approach to build a network of museum-based Extension Agents dedicated to helping informal science educators attract the interest and support the persistence of minority girls, grades 6-12, currently underrepresented in STEM studies. Led by the Miami Science Museum, the collaboration brings together an experienced group of institutions with representation from the informal science, gender research, and engineering communities. In addition to the Museum, the Expert Project Team consists of key staff from the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC), and SECME Inc. (formerly the Southeastern Consortium of Minorities in Engineering), who serve as the conduit for the participation of minority engineering professional organizations. An advisory/research panel of researchers in gender in STEM, whose work complements those of the project investigators, works closely with the Expert Project Team to prepare Extension Agents from ten geographically dispersed museums, who in turn provide a range of training and peer mentoring services to the practitioner community of informal science educators in science-rich institutions nationwide. Participating museums include: Connecticut Science Center (Hartford, CT), New York Hall of Science (New York, NY), Maryland Science Center (Baltimore, MD), Miami Science Museum (Miami, FL), COSI (Columbus, OH), St. Louis Science Center (St. Louis, MO), Louisville Science Center (Louisville, KY), Sci-Port (Shreveport, LA), Explora (Albuquerque, NM), and California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco, CA).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Judy BrownLaura Huerta MigasMichele Williams
Informal science education is a broad field of research marked by fuzzy boundaries, tensions, and muddles among many disciplines, making for an unclear future trajectory (or trajectories) for the field of study. In this commentary, I unpack some of the hidden dimensions, tensions and challenges the five articles raise or point to implicitly in terms of theory, methodology, and future research. I explore ideas to think with in terms of learning pathways or trajectories and time-space dimensions of science learning. I also explore future dimensions for partnerships, collaborations, boundary
If we truly wish to promote science or STEM education, then it would seem that the joining of resources and expertise from the communities of formal schooling and informal science education institutions or ISEIs (museums, aquariums, and the like) would be an important early step. Yet creating such connections between teacher and museum remain a challenge for both teachers and informal educators. This study employs a communities of practice lens (Wenger, 1998) to provide a deeper explanation for the challenges inherent in those programs and experiences (field trips, outreach programs, teacher
This paper explores how participating in a program spanning an informal science institution and multiple school sites engaged youth with science in a different way. In particular, teens in the program selected and researched science topics of personal interest, and then authored, revised, and published science news stories about those topics in an authentic publication venue with an outside editor. Through five case studies analyzed according to a sociocultural framework for engagement understood as involving actions, interests and identifications, the authors describe how the news story
Socioscientific issues in connection to energy production, use or influence on climate change continue to be at the forefront of local, national, and global debates. The pressing nature of these issues requires citizens not only to understand relevant disciplinary knowledge but also to have the ability to use that knowledge to take action. This paper investigates the work of youth in an after school science program designed to examine socioscientific issues as they took educated action in science by putting on a “green carnival” for their peers and community members in relation to green energy
In this paper, we explore the details of one youth's science-related learning in- and out-of-school at the time of her participation in an ethnography of youth science and technology learning across contexts and over time. We use the Cultural Learning Pathways Framework to analyze the youth's interests, and the related sociocultural, historical, material, and affect-laden practices in which she and her family participated. The following question guided our analysis: How do everyday moments—experienced across settings, pursuits, social groups, and time—result in scientific learning, expertise
"Ongoing collaboration-wide IceCube Neutrino Observatory Education and Outreach efforts include: (1) Reaching motivated high school students and teachers through IceCube Masterclasses; (2) Providing intensive research experiences for teachers (in collaboration with PolarTREC) and for undergraduate students (NSF science grants, International Research Experience for Students (IRES), and Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) funding); and (3) Supporting the IceCube Collaboration’s communications needs through social media, science news, web resources, webcasts, print materials, and displays (icecube.wisc.edu). The 2014 pilot IceCube Masterclass had 100 participating students in total at five institutions. Students met researchers, learned about IceCube hardware, software, and science, and reproduced the analysis that led to the discovery of the first high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. Ten IceCube institutions will participate in the 2015 Masterclass. PolarTREC teacher Armando Caussade, who deployed to the South Pole with IceCube in January 2015, kept journals and did webcasts in English and Spanish. NSF IRES funding was approved in 2014, enabling us to send 18 US undergraduates for 10-week research experiences over the next three years to work with European IceCube collaborators. An additional NSF REU grant will provide support for 18 more students to do astrophysics research over the next three summers. At least one-third of the participants for both programs will be from two-year colleges and/or underrepresented groups. "
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle physics facility, provides museological opportunities and challenges. Visitor interest in cutting-edge physics, with its high media profile, is tempered by anxiety about understanding complex content. The topic does not readily lend itself to traditional museum showcase-dominated displays: the technology of modern particle physics is overwhelmingly large, while the phenomena under investigation are invisible. For Collider, a major temporary exhibition, the Science Museum adopted a ‘visit to CERN’ approach, recreating several of the
Oramics to Electronica was a 2011 Science Museum project designed to put the tools of museum participation in the service of research into public history, taking the history of electronic music as our example. The primary output was a temporary exhibition. Whereas the term ‘public history’ is often used to denote popularisation of academic history, in this inflection we are primarily concerned with how lay people like our visitors think about the past in general, and about the past of science and technology in particular. Taking the opportunities that arose, we worked with two ‘expert’ groups
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Tim BoonMerel van der VaartKaty Price