This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting. The Prairie Science project is about facilitating learning STEM concepts by integrating a historical perspective (Conner Prairie Museum) and a science center-based perspective (Science Museum of Minnesota).
This presentation about the Online Project Monitoring System (OPMS) was given as part of the "Mining the Field: What Are We Learning?" Diving Deeper session at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC.
The Gallery of California Natural Sciences hosted four preview events before officially opening all sections. The target audiences for the evaluation of developing exhibits were Members and the general public with a focus on families. Researchers collected qualitative data in response to prototypes and developing exhibits for the Introduction and Oakland Sections, as well as for the developing Now and Then and Coastal Issues Lounges, and for the prototyping of live gallery animations. An exit survey was also administered to capture narrative, qualitative responses to visitors’ experience of
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Oakland Museum of CaliforniaMary T. Faria
These are samples of observation/interview testing instruments that were used in front end studies with recruited visitors to experience habitat case "interventions" such as guide cards and question prompts; and understanding concepts for a digital interactive.
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Oakland Museum of CaliforniaMary T. Faria
In this paper, Paris urges educators to actively value and preserve our multicultural and multilingual society while creating space for growth within and across cultures. This recommended change from culturally responsive pedagogy to culturally sustaining pedagogy entails a shift in both terminology and stance.
This article describes how two inquiry games promoted student science skills in a museum setting while minimizing demands on teachers, fostering collaboration, and incorporating chaperones. Students who played these games engaged in more scientific inquiry behaviors than did students in control groups.
This chapter explores what is already known about museums and their long-term impact on visitors, the complexities and challenges inherent in trying to study and understand long-term impacts, future research and methodological approaches that we can use to effectively assess the longterm impacts of museum experiences, and the implications of these efforts for practice.
This chapter discusses learning through the manipulation of three-dimensional objects. The opportunity to touch and interact with objects is helpful for young children as they attempt to understand abstract concepts and processes. How might parents guide children in coming to understand the complex and abstract symbolic nature of representational objects?
After establishing an argument for attention to the role of beauty and aesthetics in science and scientific inquiry, this paper reviews literature in four areas that contributes to an understanding of a "scientific-aesthetic" space: (1) beauty in ideas and their form; (2) beauty in wonder, awe, and sublime; (3) beauty as it relates to cosmology and understanding God's design, and; (4) beauty in experience with science and scientific ideas. Following this, research exploring connections between aesthetics and science, including related conversations like interest, out-of-school transfer, and
This preliminary report, prepared by New Knowledge Organization Ltd. in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University, summarizes evaluation results from the development of an online and in-person national training program to support the creation of a National Network for Ocean Climate Change Interpretation (NNOCCI). The project also explored whether and how training might prove to be an effective and efficient vector for increased public literacy about ocean climate science at a national level.
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New England Aquarium CorporationJohn Fraser
"From Earth to the Universe" (FETTU) is a collection of astronomical images that showcase some of the most popular, current views of our Universe. The images, representing the wide variety of astronomical objects known to exist, have so far been exhibited in about 500 locations throughout the world as part of the International Year of Astronomy. In the United States, over 40 FETTU exhibits have occurred in 25 states in such locations as libraries, airports, nature centers, parks and college campuses. Based on preliminary evaluations currently underway, this project – a large-scale, worldwide
The goal of this study is to explore new tools for analyzing scientific sense-making in out-of-school settings. Although such measures are now common in science classroom research, dialogically based methodological approaches are relatively new to informal learning research. Such out-of-classroom settings have more recently become a breeding ground for new design approaches for tracking scientific talk and ideas within complex data-sets. The research reported here seeks to understand the language people do use to make sense of the life sciences over time. Another goal of this study is to track