RISES (Re-energize and Invigorate Student Engagement through Science) is a coordinated suite of resources including 42 interactive English and Spanish STEM videos produced by Children's Museum Houston in coordination with the science curriculum department at Houston ISD. The videos are aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, and each come with a bilingual Activity Guide and Parent Prompt sheet, which includes guiding questions and other extension activities.
Overview
In 2020, RK&A (now Kera Collective) partnered with the National Museum of Natural History to conduct a summative evaluation of the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils: Deep Time, a 31,000 square foot exhibition that explores how Earth’s distant past shapes our future.
Our evaluation explored how visitors process complex scientific topics, such as climate change, mass extinctions, the evolution of life on Earth, and humans’ role in positively impacting Earth’s future.
Approach
We designed a large-scale evaluation study with four distinct but interrelated parts:
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The Rochester Museum and Science Center and partners will plan, design, fabricate, and evaluate its new Water Worlds exhibition using a hybrid exhibition model that integrates hands-on science and interactive technology with authentic collections objects in immersive environments. Reimagining the gallery in this way will allow the museum’s professional staff to work with outside experts in the sciences—including environmental science, sustainability, water resources, and climate—to create a unified watershed-themed narrative for the gallery. Hands-on, inquiry-focused exhibits will inspire visitors to explore the Lake Ontario watershed and analyze critical local issues including water pollution, flooding, invasive species, and the impact of a changing climate on local waterways, as well as innovative solutions to these challenges.
The Northwest Passage Project explored the changing Arctic through an innovative expedition aboard the Swedish Icebreaker Oden to conduct groundbreaking ocean science research, while it actively engaged 22 undergraduate and graduate students from the project’s five Minority Serving Institution (MSI) partners and 2 early career Inuit researchers in the research at sea. Over 35 hours of training in Arctic research techniques, polar science, and science communication was provided to these participants, who were engaged in the Northwest Passage expedition and worked with the onboard science team
Through the T523: Formative Evaluation for Educational Product Development course, our team conducted a semester-long formative evaluation for the Museum of Science, Boston (MoS) Gaia Exhibit. The Gaia Exhibit (Gaia) is a new, temporary art installation located in the MoS’s Blue Wing exhibition hall. Gaia that strives to inspire appreciation for the earth and climate change awareness. The exhibit displays imagery of the Earth’s surface on a twenty feet diameter, three-dimensional globe. Additional exhibit elements include projected questions on the floor to prompt reflection and exhibit-
With snow providing water for about 2 billion people worldwide and playing a major role in the Earth's climate through its high albedo and insulation properties, on-going alterations in global snow resources pose real and extremely expensive societal adaptation/mitigation problems. The project goals are to:
Create opportunities for the public to learn about the vital role that snow plays in climate, water resources, and human lives.
Produce a better understanding of how culture affects informal Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) learning.
The deliverables include:
An outreach program in Alaska that will visit 33 remote native villages;
A 2,000 square foot traveling exhibition on snow produced by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) and exhibited at two additional museums during the life of the award;
Learning research, which will examine how the wide variation of cultural relationships to snow impacts learning in museum exhibitions. Each of these components will be evaluated over the course of the project. The travelling exhibition will tour to three museums per year for eight years, with an anticipated cumulative audience of over one million.
The focus on snow will highlight a fascinating yet under-appreciated part of the Earth system. The project aims to educate the public about snow and to produce a more informed and thoughtful public in the face of potential expensive and difficult snow-related societal decisions. Through informative displays, graphics, models, and other material, the project will engage traditionally under-served communities (at Native/remote villages) in Alaska, where a strong cultural connection to snow exists, as well as communities across the U.S. where the connection to snow can range from strong to weak. Across this cultural gradient, the project will explore through oral interviews and surveys the public response to various types and designs of informal science learning (ISL) displays, attempting to isolate and control for the effect of cultural vs. individual response to the materials. Informal learning theory specifies using front-end exploration of individual visitor-content relationships to guide exhibit design. This project's research goal expands that approach to include the effects of cultural engagement with a topic to develop more general tools to guide and improve the design process. The project is led by the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in collaboration with OMSI researchers from the COSI (Center of Science and Industry), Center for Research and Evaluation (CRE), and evaluators at the Goldstream Group. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants. The project has co-funding support from the Office of Polar Programs.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.