RMC Research designed evaluation activities to provide formative and summative feedback to the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation (HBRF) on their NSF Pathways project, Forest Science Dialogues (FSD). FSD consists of a plan to engage with scientists at the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study and with the surrounding community using the Hubbard Brook Roundtable dialogue process in order to facilitate mutual learning. The purpose of this engagement was to increase public knowledge, understanding, and awareness of ecosystem science in the Northern Forest in order to enrich local dialogue surrounding
This poster was presented at ASTC 2016 in Tampa, Florida. Climate change can be abstract to visitors, but seeing, touching and smelling permafrost can make it seem more real. This poster shares lessons about bringing an ISE program to rural Alaska, and how this University & Museum partnership leverages real objects from frozen ground to engage child and adult learners alike in the emotions of climate change.
Produced by the Climate Change Education Partnership (CCEP) Alliance, the "Climate Change Education: Effective Practices for Working with Educators, Scientists, Decision Makers and the Public" guide provides recommendations for effective education and communication practices when working with different types of audiences. While effective education has been traditionally defined as the acquisition of knowledge, Alliance programs maintain a broader definition of “effective” to include the acquisition and use of climate change knowledge to inform decision-making.
The CCEP Alliance is supported
Social media is increasingly being used by science communicators, journalists and government agencies to engage in discourse with a range of publics. Despite a growing body of literature on Twitter use, the communication of science via Twitter is comparatively under explored. This paper examines the prominence of scientific issues in political debate occurring on Twitter during the 2013 and 2016 Australian federal election campaigns. Hashtracking of the umbrella political hashtag auspol was used to capture tweets during the two campaign periods. The 2013 campaign was particularly relevant as a
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Merryn McKinnonDavid SemmensBrenda MoonInoka AmarasekaLea Bolliet
Frontier Scientists is comprised of a website and portfolio of videos created for distribution web-wide and through television broadcast. The goal of this program is to excite the general public about ongoing science in Alaska and the Arctic. This is the summary evaluation of a three-year National Science Foundation grant received by Frontier Scientists. Frontier Scientists contracted PEER Associates to conduct the evaluation. Over the course of the three years, the evaluation was focused on both formative (intended to inform and improve programming) and summative (what has the program
Whereas the evolution of snow cover across forested mountain watersheds is difficult to predict or model accurately, the presence or absence of snow cover is easily observable and these observations contribute to improved snow models. We engaged citizen scientists to collect observations of the timing of distributed snow disappearance over three snow seasons across the Pacific Northwest, U.S.A. . The primary goal of the project was to build a more spatially robust dataset documenting the influence of forest cover on the timing of snow disappearance, and public outreach was a secondary goal
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Susan Dickerson-LangeKarla EitelLeslie DorseyTimothy LinkJessica Lundquist
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Forest Science Dialogues is a pathways project to develop and
test mechanisms for dialogue-based engagement between ecosystem scientists and local citizens in the rural Northeast.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. The project fosters participatory science learning in rural agricultural communities.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Native Universe (NU) was designed to build institutional capacity in leadership and practice among scientific museums, in order to increase public understanding of environmental change and the human relationship to nature from Indigenous perspectives, while also providing access to science as practiced in the established scientific community.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. This collaborative research project, led by teams at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), will engage the public in the nature and prevalence of permafrost, its scale on the earth, and the important role it plays in the global climate. It builds on 50 years of informal education and outreach at the Alaskan Permafrost Tunnel, the Nation’s only underground facility for research related to permafrost and
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. The SCIENCES project aims to create a STEM ecosystem in Fuller Park, a chronically, severely under-resourced urban community in Chicago.