Under the Small Grants For Exploratory Research guidelines, Dr. George Hein will carry out basic research in informal learning in a museum setting. Dr. Hein will examine the literature and provide a summary of 1) what is known about the motivations of museums visitors, how they learn and how they react to the intellectual, social, and physical context of museums and 2) what is known about the theory and methods of visitor research in museums. These results will then be linked to a detailed discussion of constructivist learning theory and he will explore how that theory can be used to explain visitor behavior and how it can be used as a guide to research in learning in museums. Research will be carried out in England and the United States and will include a thorough review of the relevant literature written in English and extensive consultations with other professionals working on the theory of informal learning in museum settings. The research will result in a monograph that will be broadly disseminated. Although focused particularly on learning in a museum setting, the monograph will be of interest to all those interested in the informal learning process which includes museum professionals, formal educators, executives of community-based programs, and media producers.
The Parents Involved/Pigeons Everywhere (PIPE) project is a collaboration between KCTE-Community Television of Southern California, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. They are developing a three-year model project to engage parents in science education with their children through Project PigeonWatch, a citizen-science program run by Cornell University. The PIPE project will develop videos and written materials for use in a series of parent workshops designed for libraries and community science centers. The materials and workshops will be targeted to low-income parents with children in grades three through five and will be tested at 27 pilot sites around the country. A PIPE leader's Web Site will link all of the pilot sites. At the end of the pilot stage, the video and print materials will be widely available and the applicants will produce a publication that indicates strategies for using and building on PIPE and will provide assistance to new sites that wish to implement the program.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Cynthia RuizDavid CrippensJudy KassRick Bonney
Using a five-month planning grant, the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) will develop a comprehensive 10-year, educational initiative to address the needs of the optical science and engineering communities. A series of workshops will be held at professional meetings of SPIE and the Optical Society of America (OSA) to assess regional needs and resources. Workshop recommendations will be used to create a plan to enhance the scientific and technological literacy of the public and raise the level of awareness about career options in this exciting and expanding field. The meetings will incorporate a diverse array of stakeholders including optical engineering and science professionals, formal and informal educators, as well as representatives from industry and underrepresented groups in science and engineering. Strategic emphasis will be placed on informal science education and efforts to recruit and retain minorities and women in optical engineering and related sciences. The resulting education blueprint will be disseminated to the field in electronic and print media, and subsequently implemented by SPIE and OSA.
In this project, the Education Development Center and Campbell-Kibbler Research Associates Inc., are researching the impact of a set of after-school biology materials on under-represented middle school youth at the Boston Nature Center and two University of New Hampshire 4H Clubs. In response to a general need in the field to examine the relationship between learning in informal science programs and learning in school, this project studies the potential of informal contexts to enhance student engagement in the phases of inquiry, giving special attention to the role of visual representations in the early stages of inquiry. The research identifies how visual representations are directly involved in the ability of young people to discern patterns and externalize their own thinking and how these two abilities impact their science confidence and basic knowledge of the biology content in the units. To identify the potential impact of this strategy on in school learning, the in school learning of participating youth is compared to a similar group of children who do not participate in the program. Secondarily the project identifies how the results of this research influence the work of after-school program developers' use of visual tools. The program goal is to provide a rich foundation of out of school experiences for young people upon which they can more readily grasp concepts that are also introduced in the school context. Deliverables include a peer reviewed research paper, two extended biology units using digital and hand made visual representations, and a manual for developing similar programs. The summative evaluation measures the impact of the deliverables on the professional field. The curriculum will be used at hundreds of after school programs and the manual and research paper will impact program developers field-wide by influencing future programs they develop.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Bernard ZubrowskiBryan WunarPatricia CampbellKerry Ouellet
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The Science Museum of Minnesota is requesting $279,577, of a total budget of $339,074, to plan and conduct a four-day international conference exploring issues, current practices and future directions related to furthering public understanding of current research in science and technology. The conference will bring together leading museum professionals, scientific researchers, science journalists, television producers, web developers and others who are already engaged in preliminary work for such an effort and who stand to learn from each other's experiences. The conference will center on the role of museums in informing the public about research, but will include representatives from other media and institutions crucial to its success. The specific goals of the conference are to: Explore challenges and barriers that hinder the development of public understanding of research programs. Identify "best practices" and promising models, tools and technologies for presenting current research to the public. Develop partnership strategies for creating public understanding of research program collaborations across the museum, media and research communities. Identify strategies for selecting significant research stories that are relevant to the public. Develop funding strategies and operational approaches that help sustain a consistent public understanding of research effort. The project will be under the direction of David Chittenden, Vice President for Education at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Advisors to the project include: Carol Lynn Alpert, Museum of Science, Boston; John Beatty, Distinguished Teaching Professor, University of Minnesota; Graham Farmelo, Head of Science Communications, Science Museum of London; Richard Hudson, Twin Cities Public Television, St. Paul; Ken Keller, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota; Rob Semper, The Exploratorium; David Ucko, Koshland Science Center and Science Outreach, National Academy of Sciences; and Bonnie VanDorn, Executive Director, Association of Science-Technology Centers.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
David ChittendenAnne HornickelDonald Pohlman
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The Self-Reliance Foundation will develop a conference that has the overarching goal of laying the groundwork for the development of strategic partnerships for involving Latino audiences in informal science learning, led by informal science institutions nationwide. Numbering over 42 million, Latinos are now the largest ethnic/racial minority group in America; in recent years, 1 of every 2 new Americans has been Latino. Educational opportunities, formal and informal, are not keeping pace. Latino students score lower on math and science achievement tests than national averages, enroll at disproportionately lower levels, and are underrepresented in undergraduate and graduate science and engineering programs. Latino families are under-represented among those who visit science centers and other like institutions. Latino students are under-enrolled in after-school programs. There is no Spanish-language NPR or PBS; there is little science available on Spanish-language media, including radio, television, and newspapers. The conference will bring together informal science institutions and science research organizations together with Hispanic organizations, media, and educational projects to review current ISE resources, identify needs and gaps, learn about best practices in designing culturally effective programs and resources, and develop new strategies and resources to enrich the informal science learning environment for Latinos.
The proposed conference will bring together leading national and international researchers and practitioners from developmental and cognitive psychology, game design, and media to examine how learning transfers from video game play to formal and informal learning. The conference will convene in New York City and serve to lay the foundation for an interdisciplinary New York-based community of researchers and practitioners interested in examining the implications of video game play on learning. Invited participants will address cognitive skills and content knowledge that children and adolescents acquire and refine during video game play; game features that captivate and promote skills development among game players; and evidence of skill and content knowledge transfer from video game play to informal and formal learning. Discussion of these issues will culminate in specification of the most appropriate research agenda to investigate the academic potential of video game play, particularly using those games that children and adolescent players find most compelling. An edited book will be published of the conference proceedings. The audience for this book will be academics, educators, game designers, media professionals, and policymakers interested in understanding the potential of video game learning for formal and informal instruction based on the most current research and practice.
The Board on Science Education at the National Research Council of the National Academies will develop practitioner-focused resources based on a synthesis study on Learning Science in Informal Environments (LSIE), a comprehensive review of educational research funded through a previous NSF award. Project deliverables will consist of a publication, video and digitized web resources designed to guide the application of the research findings presented in the LSIE report. The goals of this project are to support efforts to advance science education for diverse learners, to bridge research and practice, and to provide the broader informal science education communities access to research-generated knowledge. The project will greatly extend the impact of the synthesis study by making evidence-based approaches more widely available and utilized by informal science educators and insitutions.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Heidi Schweingruber
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The World Congress of Science Producers is an annual event of leading broadcasters and independent science producers from around the world. This year's congress is being planned and osted by WGBH. For this Congress, WBGH will add two new dimensions to the meeting: 1) involve working scientists in the meeting to increase the dialogue and contact between broadcast journalists and scientists, and 2) partially support attendance by individuals who are either are considering entering science journalism or are newly involved in the field. Sessions that include scientists include: an exploration of the most important science stories that journalists should be covering, an in-depth analysis of a specific science issue, a discussion of ethical issues related to genome research, legal issues related to science in the courts, an examination of coverage of science vs. pseudo-science, and visualization of science.
The Scientific Reasoning Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst will conduct a feasibility study for engaging museum visitors in data analysis through this planning grant. Intellectual Merit: This project builds on the extensive prior work of the PI in developing Tinkerplots software for middle school students. At the same time, it potentially takes advantage of the many museum exhibitions that include various kinds of data but provide no mechanisms for visitors to analyze the data and draw conclusions. This project makes the connection by seeking to demonstrate the proof of concept for the transfer of this data analysis program from the formal to the informal setting. Broader Impact: This project will purposefully test three very different settings -- Museum of Science, Boston, MA; Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, Springfield, MA; and Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO -- to explore the advantages and limitations of this approach in those learning environments. If successful, the software could have very wide application.
This project will research distributed, online fantasy basketball games, which are quite popular with many kinds of players, including informal science education under-represented groups, and which entail some degree of informal statistical reasoning and decision-making strategies. The game is not playing basketball per se, but taking on the role of a team owner or coach who needs to decide how best to compose a team given necessarily limited resources. The research team will provide a method for framing and researching statistical understanding and decision making of expert and novice players, then, based on the research, will develop scaffolded techniques for helping players become more reflective on and adept with the statistical knowledge and decision making strategies they use.
The University of Florida, in collaboration with the Florida Museum of Natural History and Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Extension, National 4-H, Association of Zoos and Aquariums, Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens, and the Institute for Learning Innovation will implement Call the Wild, a proof-of-concept project to investigate the educational outcomes of promoting understanding of the nature of science (NOS) through visitor engagement in outdoor exhibits that incorporate mobile technology to further focus attention and deliver unique content. The project will explore: (1) zoo visitor ownership of cell phones, use of the different cell phone features, and likelihood to access interactive content and activities through their phone; (2) the potential of wildlife viewing experiences and technology applications for engaging visitors in learning about NOS; and (3) the potential to measure visitor understanding of NOS related to zoo experiences. This project seeks to advance our understanding of the educational impacts of mobile telephony in informal learning environments such as zoos.