Presentation on the evaluation of NSF grant DRL-1114515 (LOOP Production Season One) presented at the CAISE Convening on Sustainability Science and Informal Science Education, February 6th, 2012.
Presentation on the evaluation of NSF grant DRL-0638977 (Water's Journey through The Everglades) presented at the CAISE Convening on Sustainability Science and Informal Science Education, February 6th, 2012.
Presentation on NSF grant DRL-1010818 (""Crowd ID: Collaborative Tools Connecting People to Biodiversity through Social Networks and Machine Learning"") presented at the CAISE Convening on Sustainability Science and Informal Science Education, February 6th, 2012.
Our Year 3 formative evaluation of Go Botany, a four-year NSF-funded project focused on botanical learning, centered on tracking the continued development and the launch of the Go Botany Simple Key, which contains botanical data on more than 1200 native plants in the New England region. The project is a collaboration between the New England Wild Flower Society and three partnering institutions: The Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, VT; The Chewonki Foundation in Wiscasset, Maine; and the Yale Peabody Museum on Natural History in New Haven, CT. During Year 3, the Go Botany Simple Key was
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Judah LeblangNew England Wild Flower Society
In 2009, the Monterey Bay Aquarium began looking at new ways to interpret its Seafood Watch program. This nationwide conservation program strives to educate the public about the importance of buying sustainable seafood. As part of the program, the Aquarium publishes a printed pocket guide that lists the types of seafood consumers should buy and the types they should avoid. (For more information, visit www.seafoodwatch.org.) Over the years, several zoos, aquariums and museums that partner with the Aquarium have expressed interest in displaying an exhibit to encourage more of their visitors to
In October 2009, the Tennessee Aquarium began an ambitious program, Connecting Tennessee to the World Ocean (CTWO), funded by a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. CTWO consists of several individual projects, all intended to increase the ocean literacy of Aquarium audiences and to promote their adoption of an ocean stewardship ethic. This evaluation report summarizes the extent to which the Aquarium accomplished these goals over the 3-year project period. The five project components and their key associated evaluation findings follow. 1. Classroom-based activities
CEG (formerly Veridian inSight, LLC) performed a formative study, including six focus groups, in October 2009 on behalf of WGBH. The focus groups took place in Boston, MA, Nashville, TN, and Phoenix, AZ. In each city, we conducted two focus groups. We divided the groups with respect to age (e.g., 6-7 year olds were recruited for one group in each city, 8-9 year olds were recruited for the second focus group in each city). A total of 41 children participated in the study. The goal of the formative study was to gather kids' feedback on the animated LOOP Six-Minute Sample. The focus group
The YardMap Network (see www.yardmap.org) is an NSF-funded citizen science project at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which will allow participants to map their habitat management and carbon neutral practices in backyards and parks, interact socially within the network, and display their activities and carbon footprints in an online platform such as Google maps. In 2010, the Institute for Learning Innovation (ILI), in collaboration with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, conducted a front-end evaluation to assess the following evaluation questions: 1. What are gardeners', and birders', citizen
The Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM) contracted Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. (RK&A) to simultaneously conduct a remedial evaluation of the exhibition Tissues of Life and its associated elements: the Web site with the same name, presentations at the Demonstration Station, and the What is Life?, play. The National Institutes of Health funded all elements. Data collection took place between July and October 2003. Three data collection strategies were employed: timing and tracking observations, uncued exit interviews, and telephone interviews. Additionally, to understand presenters' experiences
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Randi Korn & Associates, Inc.Science Museum of Minnesota
Exploring Life's Origins is a project funded by the National Science Foundation through the Discovery Corps Postdoctoral Fellowship. Janet Iwasa was the recipient of this grant, and her goals were to help the public understand research on the origins of life conducted in the labs of Dr. Jack Szostak from Harvard University/Massachusetts General Hospital and the Center for Origins Research by creating molecular visualizations based on the research and communicating to the public scientific research concepts related to the origins of life. The science communication portion of this project was
Knight Williams Research Communications (Knight Williams, Inc), an independent evaluation firm specializing in the development and evaluation of science education media, conducted the summative evaluation for Ice Stories. The evaluation focused on the extent to which the project achieved the goals described in the Exploratorium's grant to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Arctic Research and Education, Antarctic Coordination and Information program within the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL). The NSF DRL program provided funding for both the project
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Valerie Knight-WilliamsExploratoriumDivan WilliamsChristina MeyersOra GrinbergTal SraboyantsEveen ChanDavid Tower