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 project is exploring and identifying successful, cross-institutional approaches to using maker activities to engage members of communities of color (with a focus on family groups) in STEM activities.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. This project develops and researches the integration of Peg + Cat (an animated, math-based PBS television series for preschoolers), accompanying digital media, and early childhood educator professional development (PD). PD is designed to enhance educators’ abilities to support preschoolers’ social-emotional learning in the context of math activities, and in turn, their interest and engagement in math. The project also includes recommendations for engaging
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Dr. Discovery addresses the immediate and pressing need for affordable, ongoing, large-scale museum evaluation while encouraging visitors to engage deeply with museum content. The app features a front-end scientist astronaut for use by museum visitors that doubles as an unobtrusive data-gatherer as well as a back-end analytics portal for museum staff, evaluators, and researchers.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. The Expanding Repertoires project is a collaboration between the Center of Science and Industry (COSI) and The Ohio State University (OSU) to begin the systematic study of science and children's museum programs and practice for preschool dual language learners (DLLs), their families, and the community organizations and early childhood professionals who serve them.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Designing Our World (DOW) empowers and promotes girls’ pursuit of engineering careers by cultivating networks of community stakeholders and engaging girls with experiences that illuminate the social, personally relevant and altruistic nature of engineering.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. The study aims to answer the question "How does participation of adolescent youth from traditionally underrepresented groups in a well-established, out-of-school time science program affect their career choices and attitudes towards science as they mature into early adulthood?"
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Living Laboratory is a model for museum-academic partnership that aims to educate the public about child development by immersing museum visitors in the process of scientific discovery. Living Laboratory embraces a "mutual professional development" philosophy, in which museum educators and scientists share their expertise with one another through a variety of regular interactions.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Living Laboratory is a model for museum-academic partnership that aims to educate the public about child development by immersing museum visitors in the process of scientific discovery. Living Laboratory embraces a "mutual professional development" philosophy, in which museum educators and scientists share their expertise with one another through a variety of regular interactions.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. Head Start on Engineering is a pathways project focused on developing the foundations of a long-term, community-based research program to (a) understand how preschool children (4 years old) and their families develop engineering-related interests in early childhood and (b) develop community partnerships and programs that support engineering interest pathways for these families.
This research oriented project integrates the informal and formal science education sectors, bringing their combined resources to bear on the critical need for well-prepared and diverse urban science teachers. It represents a partnership among The City College of New York (CCNY), the New York Hall of Science (NYHOS), and the City University of New York Center for Advanced Study in Education (CUNY-CASE). It integrates the Science Career Ladder, a sustained program of informal science teaching training and employment at the NYHOS, with the CCNY science teacher preparation program. The longitudinal and comparative research study being conducted is designed to examine and document the effect of this integrated program on the production of urban science teachers. Outcomes from this study include a new body of research related to the impact of internships in science centers on improving classroom science teaching in urban high schools. Results are being disseminated to both the informal science education community (through the Association for Science and Technology Centers and the Center for Informal Learning in Schools, an NSF supported Center for Learning and Teaching situated at the San Francisco Exploratorium) and the formal education community (through the National Science Teachers Association and the American Educational Research Association).
The Science Career Ladder program engages undergraduates as inquiry-based interpreters (Explainers) for visitors to the NY Hall of Science. Integrating this experience with a formal teacher certification program enables participants to coordinate experiences in the science center, college science and education classes, and K-12 classrooms. Participants receive a license to teach science upon graduating. The approach has its theoretical underpinnings in the concept of situated learning as noted by Kirshner and Whitson (1997, Situated Cognition: Social, Semiotic and Psychological Perspectives, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum). Through apprenticeship experiences, situated learning recreates the complexity and ambiguity of situations that learners will face in the real world. Science centers provide a potentially ideal setting for situational learning by future teachers, allowing them to develop, exercise and refine their science teaching and learning skills as noted by Gardner (1991, The Unschooled Mind, New York: Basic Books).
There is a well-documented shortage of science teachers in urban school districts. The causes of this shortage relate to all phases of the teacher professional continuum, from recruitment through training and retention. At the same time, the demographic composition of American teachers is increasingly out of synch with the demographics of the student population, raising concerns that a critical shortage of role models may be at hand, contributing to a worsening situation in urban schools. In the face of these challenges many innovative teacher recruitment and teacher preparation programs have been developed to augment traditional pathways to teaching. These programs range from high school academies for students expressing an interest in teaching to the recruitment and training of individuals making mid-life career changes. The CLUSTER program described above represents a new alternative. There are more than 250 science centers in the United States. Many of these have extensive youth internship programs and collaborative relationships with local colleges. Therefore, the proposed model is widely applicable.
These resources are designed to identify opportunities to improve training for educators and researchers during implementation of the Living Laboratory model. The Data Collection Guidelines provide general instructions and tips for conducting evaluation through observations of (and/or interviews with) visitors. Two versions of each instrument (Researcher-Caregiver Conversations Instrument and Research Toy Interactions Instrument) are included: one can be modified and printed for data collection; the second is an annotated version, which includes more detailed instructions for each item in the