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
The Great Immensity is a play with music created by the New York-based theater company, The Civilians. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), this production explores humans' relationship to the environment focusing on critical issues of conservation and climate change. It premiered at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre (KC Rep) from February 17 through March 18, 2012. This summative evaluation employs the Framework for Evaluating Impacts of Informal Science Education Projects (Friedman 2008) to assess the play and its ancillary programs' impact on adult and student audiences
Overall, film viewers and Web site visitors responded positively to the project. Audiences of the film said they were encouraged by and learned the most about the personal stories of amateur astronomers contributing to scientific discovery and were impressed with the visuals presented in the film. Web site visitors consistently liked the design of the site and particularly enjoyed images and tools for viewing the night sky. Study participants said they would encourage further development of the project. They said that while the current design may exclude those who do not already have an
The InformalScience.org web site is a resource for researchers working in the field of informal science and provides access to information linking researchers with one another and to member-contributed resources. Through use of the web site resources such as member projects, publications, and evaluation reports, users have opportunities to develop social and human capital. This report analyzes the value of InformalScience.org in supporting participants in the community as they navigate and advance the changing field of informal science education (ISE) research. In addition, we identify
In 2011, ORG received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning by redesigning and expanding the "Jonathan Bird's Blue World" website; adding components to enable teachers and students to search episodes for specific themes, locations, or scientific concepts; and enhancing the lesson plans to explicitly match the content standards for teaching science. One of the major grant objectives was to make the "Jonathan Bird's Blue World" website content widely accessible as an open source via an Internet
Frozen Planet is a seven-episode prime time television series, with a complementary interactive website, co-produced by the BBC and the Discovery Channel. Through high-definition "blue chip" visuals, the series aimed to increase awareness and understanding about the natural world. The goal of GRG's summative evaluation was to assess the overall influence of the series and website on TV viewers and web visitors. In accord with the Discovery Channel team's hope that Frozen Planet would change hearts and minds of its audience, GRG designed an evaluation to examine the effects of exposure to
In an effort to prepare female high school students for a college curriculum and achieve gender parity in the engineering industry, WGBH has developed an initiative entitled, Engineer Your Life (EYL). The initiative is targeted toward female high school students, career counselors/educators, and professional engineers. It is designed to: 1) increase these target audiences' understanding of engineering, 2) inspire young women to explore engineering as a career option and 3) help adults encourage young women to investigate engineering opportunities. One component of this initiative involves
In 2008, the WGBH Educational Foundation, along with the Association of Computing Machinery, was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation, Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, under the Broadening Participation in Computing Program (NSF 0753686). The purpose of the grant was to develop a major new initiative to reshape the image of computing among college-bound high school students. Based on its market research results, WGBH developed a website and other resources that were intended for use by teachers, parents and students. Concord Evaluation Group
Concord Evaluation Group (CEG) conducted an evaluation of the Spyhounds pilot test in October-December 2011. The goal of the evaluation was to assess the online resources for appeal and interest, as well as to provide WGBH with data on how a full-scale year-long project could be structured. CEG recruited a national sample of 5-8 year old children to participate in the pilot test. We conducted a pre-test survey to measure science-related knowledge (kids only), attitudes and interest (parents and kids). We then invited families to use the online resources during the pilot test and surveyed the
Cyberchase: The Next Frontier is a redesign of the Cyberchase Web site that resides on PBSKIDS.org/cyberchase, designed to increase traffic to this informal mathematics education site and support learning by encouraging users to engage in multiple activities - spanning a variety of media (videos, online games, hands-on activities) - that involve related mathematics content. To that end, in addition to redesigns of the Cyberchase homepage and other areas of the site, prominent aspects of the Next Frontier redesign include: Learning Pathways: Each of the site's games, videos, and hands-on
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Shalom FischThirteen/WNETShina Aladé
Frontier Scientists (FS) is an NSF-funded University of Alaska - Fairbanks (UAF) and WonderVisions (WV) collaborative project whose mission was to excite the general public about ongoing science in Alaska and the Arctic. The Frontier Scientists website (www.frontierscientists.com) covers a wide range of topics including: humanities, geology, biology, marine science, archaeology, ecology, chemistry, and more. At the time of the summative evaluation, it included 53 video clips (the major focus of the website), as well as a number of blog posts, narrative descriptions, and short bios.This
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Deborah PerryUniversity of Alaska - Fairbanks