The Exploratorium is developing a model program that demonstrates the vital role science museum exhibits can play in supporting formal science education reform. The development of exhibitions and enhancement activities is based on the Science Framework for California Public Schools and the emerging National Science Education Standards. The project includes: A series of four museum exhibitions (with a total of 60 exhibits) based on the Science Framework themes of Patterns of Change, Stability, Scale and Structure, and Systems and Interactions Publications (Exhibit Guides and Pathways) for each collection A series of workshops and evening events for teachers, families and students A symposium, video and Internet resource for museum and education professionals An important feature is an information desk and resource kiosk to inform teachers, parents and the general public about science education reform efforts. The project aims at 5,000 teachers, 32,000 parents and caregivers, 140,000 students and 1,320,000 members of the general public.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Thomas HumphreyLynn Rankin
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences plans to conduct a 5 year project to train 150 mentor teachers (30 teachers/year) and their principals, who will then train the remaining 1100 elementary teachers in the Buffalo Public School System. The training would include two 5-week summer sessions (in a Magnet school that is physically incorporated into the Buffalo Museum of Science) and 4 in-service workshops during the academic years following each of the summer workshops. This innovative leadership project is a collaborative effort between the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences (including both education and curatorial/science staff persons) the Buffalo Public Schools, and individuals from local colleges and universities. The setting of the project is enhanced by a Science and Math Magnet School which is housed within the museum, and by the school/museum's location in a largely inner city environment with easy accessibility to minority persons. The project is designed to provide mentor teachers with a strong science background in pedagogy and content over a two-year period of summer and academic-year workshops, and to prepare and support these mentors as they inservice their colleagues. Project staff from the museum, public schools, and the academic community will provide strong support through academic-year workshops, site visits and telecommunications networking. Principals will be appropriately involved, and will work with mentors to develop a science inservice program tailored to meet the needs of their individual schools; as a consequence, virtually all of the 1100 K-6 classroom teachers of science in the Buffalo Public Schools will have been prepared to teach investigative, hands-on science to their students. Non-NSF cost sharing is approximately 27.9% of the amount requested from NSF.
"The Connecticut Museum Collaborative for Science Education" is teacher enhancement program that will serve approximately 5,000 middle school teachers (and their students) from throughout Connecticut over a three-year program period. The proposed program has been developed cooperatively by four of Connecticut's Science Museums and Centers (The Discovery Museum, The Maritime Center at Norwalk, Mystic Marinelife Aquarium, and Talcott Mountain Science Center), in consultation with the school districts they serve and the Connecticut Academy for Education in Mathematics, Science, and Technology, the State's leadership organization solely devoted to enhancing education in mathematics, science, and technology. The Collaborative seeks to enliven and enhance the teaching of science, mathematics, and technology by drawing upon the resources of Connecticut's science-rich institutions and related businesses and industry. The proposed project will provide direct services to a core group of 72 middle school teachers and their students in eight urban and suburban school districts at the four participating museums and in their classrooms, as well as teacher training, curriculum development, and networking activities. Larger numbers of teachers and their students will be served through a planned series of interactive video teleconferences. A theme-based approach will be followed in which the unifying theme of "Earth Resource Monitoring" will serve to connect the activities at the four cooperating museums. The central concept of the project is collaboration among museums throughout the state to provide a bridge between science-rich institutions and the schools for teacher enhancement, curriculum improvement, and student enrichment. Special program components involve the participation of business and industry through "Video Field Trips", and parents through a "Family Science" activity. The involvement of the Connecticut Academy for Education in Mathematics, Science and Technolo gy as a member of the "Connecticut Collaborative" provides a direct link for integration of project activities into Connecticut's NSF-funded Statewide Systemic Initiative.
The Family Science Learning Project is comprised of a research study and subsequent program development designed to fundamentally improve family science learning in museums. The endeavor will be carried out in the Philadelphia area by PISEC, a partnership of The Academy of Natural Sciences, The Franklin Institute, the Thomas H. Kean New Jersey State Aquarium at Camden and the Philadelphia Zoo, joined for this project by the University of the Arts. To achieve the goal of fostering science literacy by encouraging families to engage in successful learning strategies while visiting science museums, PISEC has identified the following objectives for the project: - To increase understanding of the processes and potential of science museum-based family learning. - To apply this understanding to the development and implementation of effective program and exhibit enhancements in four science museums. - To involve existing staff so that evaluation and research become an ongoing component of program and exhibit development in the participating museums. - To utilize a multi-institution team approach designed to maximize impact, be cost-effective and be replicable in other regions across the country. The project has three phases. First, a research study using ethnographic data collection and focus groups will be conducted at the participating museums. This study will lead to the formulation of a set of criteria for successful family science learning and hypotheses about what is needed to facilitate this behavior. Second, utilizing these findings, the four institutions will develop four distinct programs and/or exhibit enhancements designed to foster positive family learning experiences. Formative evaluation and inter-museum collaborative will be integral parts of this process. Finally, the summative findings of the individual efforts will be compared to look for constants in successful programming across the sites. Results will be assembled in a handbook which will be widely disseminated to the field. In carrying out this study, the project will fill in the body of existing museum-based family learning research. The knowledge gained will give science museum professionals a new set of tools which can be used to increase the frequency of positive learning experiences in their facilities, and to broaden the diversity of visiting families as well. Because the subject matter under investigation represents a wide range of scientific disciplines, the results of the projects should prove applicable to many different types of informal science learning environments, including science centers, natural history museums, zoos, aquariums and botanic gardens. The collaborative nature of the project will serve as a model for similar partnerships among cultural institutions and universities in other large metropolitan areas.
The Exploratorium will develop an exhibit "Memory: A Biological Cognitive and Cultural Exploration" along with various complementary components. The primary objective of this project is to increase the public's awareness of the extent, importance, and nature of their everyday rememberings. Exploratorium staff will use an approach to memory, and cognition in general, that considers culture and cultural differences as essential to people's thinking and behavior. The exhibit area will be about 2000 sq ft in size and will consist of ten to twelve new activities and six revised interactive, interdisciplinary exhibits. Here visitors will have the opportunity to interact with the exhibits, researchers, scientists, artists, and other visitors, to explore the nature of memory and its effect on their lives. The exhibits will give visitors direct, experiential insight into the workings of their memories. Other major components of the project include multimedia presentations, printed materials, demonstrations, film programs and a symposium. A publication Memory and Perception will be a supplemental guide that can be used by teachers and students at the secondary level. It will address appropriate themes in the Science Framework for California Public Schools. Museum professionals, researchers, teachers, and evaluators will be invited to participate in a one- week symposium on Cognition in Science Centers. The purpose of the symposium is to develop a conceptual and practical model of what presenting cognition in an informal education setting means. A report will be published and broadly disseminated by professional museum organizations. It is estimated that the project will reach approximately 629,000 visitors annually which includes 69,000 students and 550 teachers.
The San Francisco Zoological Society will use this planning grant to involve representatives of their audience in the development of the learning experiences that will be encorporated into their new exhibit program "ZooWEB: Worldwide Education for Biodiversity." They will bring together an Advisory Panel made up of representatives of a broad spectrum of potential and current zoo visitors (traditionally underserved groups, formal education specialists, people with special needs, family groups, scientists) and science educators to meet with the zoo's Planning Team who are developing the master interpretive plan called ZOO Web. ZooWEB will adapt ecological themes and topics from the section of Systems and Interactions in the California State Science Framework for Public Schools. The planning activity is a modification of a business model designed to understand and meet customer needs by constant improvement of product and service quality pioneered by W. Edwards Deming. This is a considerable departure from the traditional manner in which zoo interpretation is developed. Thus, the Zoo will implement a new approach to exhibit development, one that begins with focusing on visitors' interests in science, their needs, learning styles, perceptions of zoos, etc. Data will be gathered by a number of techniques including focus groups, interviews, and surveys. Results of the planning activity will be broadly disseminated.
The California Museum of Science and Industry requests $1,103,410 over three years to work in a partnership with the National Council of La Raza to develop two content-rich "discovery rooms" in the Museum that are supportive of further learning in the larger museum context and that guide parents from culturally diverse backgrounds in supporting their children's science learning at the museum and in the home. A major component of the project is the "Our Place Academy," a comprehensive education program that will train Latino parents of preschool and school-age children to serve as learning facilitators in the discovery rooms. The curriculum of the Academy will focus on skills that will both serve Latino parents as partners in their children's science education and as leaders and disseminators within their own communities. A training guide entitled, "Making it our Place" will be developed as a practical guide for building a trained staff from the parents in a community to facilitate learning in a discovery setting. Target audience is parents with preschool and school-aged children.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Ann MuscatSylvia ConnollySharon SchonhautCarol ValentaRoxie EsterleMaria Bonillas
Digital image processing offers several possible new approaches to the teaching of a variety of mathematical concepts at the middle-school and high-school levels. There is reason to believe that this approach will be successful in reaching some "at-risk" students that other approaches miss. Since digital images can be made to reflect almost any aspect of the real world, some students may have an easier time taking an interest in them than they might with artificial figures or images resulting from other graphics- oriented approaches. Using computer-based tools such as image processing operators, curve-fitting operators, shape analysis operators, and graphical synthesis, students may explore a world of mathematical concepts starting from the psychologically "safe" territory of their own physical and cultural environments. There is reason to hope that this approach will be particularly successful with students from diverse backgrounds, girls and members of minority groups, because the imagery used in experiments can easily be tailored to individual tastes. The work of the project consists of creating detailed designs of the learning modules, implementing them on microcomputers, and evaluating their effectiveness in a variety of ways, using trials with students at Rainier Beach High School, which is an urban public high school having an ethnically diverse student body and a Macintosh computer laboratory.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Steven TanimotoMichele LeBrasseurJames King
The Vermont Center for the Book in collaboration with the Vermont Council on the Humanities, Montshire Museum, and other Vermont science activity centers propose to develop a national model of a four-part book discussion/science activity program of early science literacy for parents of preschool children. Parents will be trained to gain confidence in their ability to do science activity kit to keep. The project expects to reach 1200 parents and 240 professionals during this three year project.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Sally AndersonJoan NagyGregory DeFrancis