In the Communities of Learning for Urban Environments and Science (CLUES) project, the four museums of the Philadelphia-Camden Informal Science Education Collaborative worked to build informal science education (ISE) capacity in historically underserved communities. The program offered comprehensive professional development (PD) to Apprentices from 8-11 community-based organizations (CBO), enabling them to develop and deliver hands-on family science workshops. Apprentices, in turn, trained Presenters from the CBOs to assist in delivering the workshops. Families attended CLUES events both at the museums and in their own communities. The events focused on environmental topics that are especially relevant to urban communities, including broad topics such as climate change and the energy cycle to more specific topics such as animals and habitats in urban neighborhoods.
The Universally Designed Museum Programming project was envisioned as a way to create public programs that are more inclusive of people with disabilities. We used the concepts of universal design and Universal Design for Learning as well as our prior experiences with these topics in exhibition design and nanotechnology programming as a foundation for our work. Through this project, we gained insight into building a community of interest, facilitating a charrette in an inclusive way, using universal design guidelines to develop programs, and measuring the effectiveness of our process.
This Science Learning+ project will develop a Youth Access & Equity Research & Practice Agenda, focusing on addressing equity issues for youth, ages 11-14, primarily from non-dominant backgrounds. The project will involve researchers and practitioners from three ISL settings/contexts, (1) Designed spaces, e.g., museums; (2) Community-based, e.g., afterschool clubs; and (3) Everyday science, e.g., science media. The goal of the agenda will be to advance scholarly understanding of equity issues in relation to these three contexts. Taking an ecological view of STEM learning as a sociocultural process of participation and transformation, the project will employ a Complex Adaptive System lens to document multiple pathways youth take (or not) within/across ISL settings over time, the impact these pathways have on learning and development, and their influence on ISL organizations themselves. These lenses will help us identify aspects of learning environments which shape youth access and development, and the value and impact of the equity ideas, tools and practices.
Relatively little is known about how Natural History Museums (NHMs) and schools can complement one another to maximize learning among school-age learners. Nor do we fully understand the long-term benefits to learning and engagement with science that NHMs have. In this Science Learning+ project researchers in UK and US universities will work with practitioners in NHMs and school teachers in the UK and the US to address these questions. The project will (a) undertake a critical review of the published and grey literature to examine the contributions to learning and engagement that NHMs have made; (b) develop improved instruments that are common across schools, NHMs and other out-of-school settings to determine the efficacy of learning experiences; devise protocols to explore the possibility of data obtained from museum evaluations being matched with national databases, thus improving our understanding of the consequences of such experiences; (c) map the areas of science curricula (using the latest version of the science National Curriculum in England and the Common Core Standards in the US) that NHMs might most valuably address; d) through researcher-practitioner collaboration review current pedagogical approaches employed by schools and NHMs, with a view to developing and studying new practice models in Phase 2. The project will devise validated instruments (of the sort that are increasingly used in large-scale social psychology studies) and explore whether data obtained from museum visitors can be matched, both in the UK and in the US, onto external datasets (e.g. the National Pupil Database in the UK; Elementary/Secondary Information System in the US).
This Science Learning+ project will develop research-and-practice activities to explore how an integrated art, STEM, and society (what we refer to as STEAM) approach can expand science engagement and learning of youth aged 15-19, from low-income and non-dominant cultural communities. The project will review current knowledge, practice, and trends related to underrepresented youth, STEAM, and science engagement. The review will be used to develop: (1) A cross-setting research framework for investigating the relationship between informal STEAM learning experiences and young people's developing engagement with science. (2) Design principles for out-of-school STEAM programs that have proven effective in cultivating youth engagement with science and making relevant cross-setting connections. (3) Practitioner-friendly program evaluation tools that integrate findings from current research and practice related to cross-setting science learning of young adults especially non-dominant youth as it relates to STEAM learning experiences.
This poster was presented at the 2014 AISL PI Meeting in Washington, DC. It describes My Sky Tonight, a project that introduces preschool-age children to astronomy.
This design case explores the affordances of gigapixel image technology for science communication and learning in museum settings through the iterative development of an explorable image viewer to engage visitors in an archaeological exhibit. We reflect on the series of user studies, prototype iterations, and design decisions taken to optimize navigation, annotation and exploration in this zoomable user interface. We highlight a set of design precedents, interaction frameworks, and content structuring approaches, while detailing the development of a media rich digital annotation strategy to
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded funding to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) and Portland State University (PSU) in Portland, Oregon to support a “Connecting Researchers and Public Audiences” (CRPA) project titled ResearchLink: Spotlight on Solar Technologies. The primary goals of CRPA projects are to communicate to the public about specific NSF research projects. This ResearchLink project promoted public awareness of two NSF-funded projects led by Dr. Carl Wamser at PSU, Integrating Green Roofs and Photovoltaic Arrays for Energy Management and Optimization of
The CSMC-OMSI Partnership for Public Engagement (COPPE) project was developed to establish a strong and long-lasting partnership between the Center for Sustainable Materials Chemistry (CSMC) and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). Through participation in this project, COPPE researchers and OMSI educators sought a deeper understanding of each other's profession while simultaneously developing a suite of Informal Science Education (ISE) outreach programs that engage the public in new and enduring ways. These new ISE platforms were developed to enhance public awareness in the areas
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Oregon Museum of Science and IndustryAnne Sinkey
The purposes of the STUDIO 3D evaluation were to collect information about the impact upon student learning as a result of participating in the STUDIO 3D Project, as well as to elicit information for program improvement. Areas of inquiry include recruiting and retention, impact on project participants, tracking student impacts, and the project as a whole.
This research follows on a previous study that investigated how digitally augmented devices and knowledge building could enhance learning in a science museum. In this study, we were interested in understanding which combination of scaffolds could be used in conjunction with the unique characteristics of informal participation to increase conceptual and cognitive outcomes. Three hundred seven students from nine middle schools participated in the study. Six scaffolds were used in various combinations. The first was the digital augmentation. The next five were adaptations of knowledge-building
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Susan YoonKaren ElinichJoyce WangJaqueline SchooneveldEmma Anderson
How do informal learning organizations work with schools as part of a broader educational ecology? We examined this question through a comparative case study of two collaborative efforts whereby informal arts education organizations, a children's museum and a community-based organization, worked with an urban school district to redefine the provision of educational services for children and youth. Grounded conceptually in organizational theory, our study identified factors that enable and constrain collaboration across the formal-informal divide. We argue that examining the dynamics of cross