In 2011, the Space Science Institute (SSI) engaged Insight Evaluation Services (IES) to conduct a summative evaluation of an online, multi-user space science game called MyStar. The game, which was developed with funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), was designed to introduce late middle school-early high school students to the basic concepts of stellar and planetary evolution. IES assessed the effectiveness of MyStar in meeting specific learning goals, including in particular (1) The galaxy has “habitable zones” where planetary formation and/or life is more
SciGirls CONNECT is a broad national outreach effort to encourage educators, both formal and informal, to adopt new, research-based strategies to engage girls in STEM. SciGirls (pbskids.org/scigirls) is an Emmy award-winning television program and outreach program that draws on cutting-edge research about what engages girls in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) learning and careers. The PBS television show, kids' website, and educational outreach program have reached over 14 million girls, educators, and families, making it the most widely accessed girls' STEM program available nationally. SciGirls' videos, interactive website and hands-on activities work together to address a singular but powerful goal: to inspire, enable, and maximize STEM learning and participation for all girls, with an eye toward future STEM careers. The goal of SciGirls is to change how millions of girls think about STEM. SciGirls CONNECT (scigirlsconnect.org) includes 60 partner organizations located in schools, museums, community organizations and universities who host SciGirls clubs, camps and afterschool programs for girls. This number is intended grow to over 100 by the end of the project in 2016. SciGirls CONNECT provides mini-grants, leader training and educational resources to partner organizations. Each partner training session involves educators from a score of regional educational institutions. To date, over 700 educators have received training from over 250 affiliated organizations. The SciGirls CONNECT network is a supportive community of dedicated educators who provide the spark, the excitement and the promise of a new generation of women in STEM careers. Through our partner, the National Girls Collaborative Project, we have networked educational organizations hosting SciGirls programs with dozens of female role models from a variety of STEM fields. The SciGirls CONNECT website hosts monthly webinars, a quarterly newsletter, gender equity resources, SciGirls videos and hands-on activities. SciGirls also promotes the television, website and outreach program to thousands of elementary and middle school girls and their teachers both locally and nationally at various events.
This CRPA project produced a human-like avatar exhibit for the Orlando Science Center that verbally communicates with middle and high school grade visitors, engaging them in the subjects of computer science, artificial intelligence, and engineering. Human-like characteristics include features to match the demographics of the Center's clientele and verbal communication in the English language. In addition to discussing how avatars are developed and how artificial intelligence works, the avatar image will answer questions from the visitors on selected topics, including subjects from the media models of Avatar and IBM's Watson event on Jeopardy. Considerable planning and research has gone into this project to make sure that the avatar is life-like and can engage in realistic dialog. The avatar images will resemble real individuals who have diverse demographic characteristics in order to enhance the human-computer interface. The system is designed to deal with background noise and antagonistic visitors. Evaluation at all levels (front-end, formative, and summative) will make the exhibit most effective and facilitate the goals of the project which are to inform the target audience on STEM subjects. The desire to have electronic analogs of humans has been a goal for half of a century. This project builds on prior research in this area and is one of the most sophisticated contemporary models in the field. It is anticipated that this work may contribute to future applications in education and assistance for individuals with disabilities. Moreover, engagement with the avatar may ignite curiosity among young visitors and stimulate interest in science careers.
The Principal Investigator's Guide: Managing Evaluation in Informal STEM Education Projects (PI Guide) is designed to help principal investigators and other leaders of informal STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education projects integrate evaluation into all phases of project design, development, and implementation. Such projects include exhibits, media projects, websites, community science projects, afterschool programs, festivals, family activities, online games, citizen science projects, and other efforts to help people learn about science in the course of their everyday
The overarching purpose of the Climate Literacy Zoo Education Network is to develop and evaluate a new approach to climate change education that connects zoo visitors to polar animals currently endangered by climate change, leveraging the associative and affective pathways known to dominate decision-making. Utilizing a polar theme, the partnership brings together a strong multidisciplinary team that includes the Chicago Zoological Society of Brookfield, IL, leading a geographically distributed consortium of nine partners: Columbus Zoo & Aquarium, OH; Como Zoo & Conservatory, St. Paul, MN; Indianapolis Zoo, IN; Louisville Zoological Garden, KY; Oregon Zoo, Portland, OR; Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium, PA; Roger Williams Park Zoo, Providence, RI; Toledo Zoological Gardens, OH, and the organization Polar Bears International. The partnership leadership includes the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. The partnership is joined by experts in conservation psychology and an external advisory board. The primary stakeholders are the diverse 13 million annual visitors to the nine partner zoos. Additional stakeholders include zoo docents, interpreters and educators, as well as the partnership technical team in the fields of learning innovations, technological tools, research review and education practice. The core goals of the planning phase are to a) develop and extend the strong multidisciplinary partnership, b) conduct research needed to understand the preconceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and learning modes of zoo visitors regarding climate change; and c) identify and prototype innovative learning environments and tools. Internal and external evaluations will be conducted by Facet Innovations of Seattle, WA. Activities to achieve these goals include assessments and stakeholder workshops to inventory potential resources at zoos; surveys of zoo visitors to examine demographic, socioeconomic, and technology access parameters of zoo visitors and their existing opinions; and initial development and testing of participatory, experiential activities and technological tools to facilitate learning about the complex system principles underlying the climate system. The long-term vision centers on the development of a network of U.S. zoos, in partnership with climate change domain scientists, learning scientists, conservation psychologists, and other stakeholders, serving as a sustainable infrastructure to investigate strategies designed to foster changes in public attitudes, understandings, and behavior surrounding climate change.
In 2009, The HistoryMakers was awarded a four-year grant from The National Science Foundation (DRL-0917612) to create ScienceMakers: African Americans and Scientific Innovation (ScienceMakers). ScienceMakers builds upon The HistoryMakers’ extant oral history archives by allowing for new interviews with 180 of the nation’s top African American scientists and facilitating dissemination of the information. The overall goal of this endeavor is to increase awareness in the general public of the contributions of African American scientists (i.e., short-term outcomes), thereby ultimately leading to
We are a non-profit, open access journal dedicated to publishing high quality scientific research articles from high school students. Our mission is to promote the advancement of high school education by displaying the research conducted by students across the country and the schools in which their research was performed. Our journal is developing a blog in which students can conduct peer review of each other's articles and teachers can exchange ideas on how to improve their programs. Schools with advanced science curriculum can contribute ideas and curriculum to schools with less developed programs, thus increasing the overall quality of science education in this program. We are requesting members of the Informal Science community, whose programs involve laboratory research, to submit articles to our journal.
Realizing the power of CyberLearning to transform education will require vision, strategy, and an engaged, talented community. Activities are needed to energize the community, refine and sharpen the path forward, and provide a more active and ongoing forum for clarifying the big ideas and challenging questions. In response to this need, SRI International, together with the Lawrence Hall of Science and with key support from the National Geographic Society, will organize a set of activities to advance a shared vision of the future of learning, encompassing the systems, people, and technology dimensions mutually necessary for any scalable and lasting advances in education. The innovative format for these activities is inspired by the TED talks, Wikipedia, and social networking. As in TED, a small set of leading researchers will be selected to give very short, very high quality, stimulating talks. These CyberLearning Talks will be featured at a 1-day summit meeting in Washington, DC, streamed so that local cyberlearning research communities may participate at a distance, and posted on a website. As in Wikipedia, CyberLearning Pages will be created, each page featuring a synopsis of a big idea in CyberLearning and the relevant research challenges. The 1-day conference will be followed by a small 1-day workshop focusing on how to evaluate cyberlearning efforts, identify progress, and identify important new directions. Finally, to disseminate and stimulate conversation about both the video talks and Wikipedia entries, a presence for the community will be created on social networking sites. The target outcomes of the effort will be (i) a cyberlearning research community with participants from across the many current constituent communities, and fostered awareness and appreciation of the broad range of expertise and interests across that wider community; (ii) foundations for sustained discussion of big ideas, insights, and challenges to help this new community define a more engaged, crisper vision of its own future, (iii) a community resource that can become a site for interconnecting stakeholders in the CyberLearning community and supporting investigators in improving field-generated proposals, and (iv) an emerging sense of direction for CyberLearning among a wider audience of leaders. Such community building and awareness is expected to foster collaborations that will lead to innovative and research-grounded ways of using technology to transform education -- formal and informal and across a lifetime.
Researchers at the U.C. Davis will carry out observations of museum visitors to plan for a study of how visualizations affect visitors of an Earth Sciences exhibit using 3D technology. The researchers will be able to conduct an experimental study about how much participants in an education center learn from the model of earthquakes and of a model of the Lake Tahoe basin. The researchers will conduct a quasi-experiment of a sample of 100 visitors to the center at Lake Tahoe to study their experience with visualization and learning of science. The funding for this phase of the project will include the development of audience surveys, conducting focus groups to develop types of feedback, train staff to conduct data collection, and to conduct a literature review of technology visualization.
The objective of this project is to develop resources for 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 objectives is to make the "Jonathan Bird's Blue World" web site content more widely accessible as an open source via an internet connection with a dynamic search capability. The project adds a significant amount of educational material and uses ocean topics to illustrate nationally accepted standards for science learning. It is applicable to both formal and informal environments and contains a multi-faceted approach to achieve its goal including the following objectives: (a) build a web site search capability that includes National Science Educational Standards (NSES) and Ocean Literacy Principles with a link to segments illustrating specific NSES; (b) create webisodes that feature specific NSES and develop an interactive map on the web site; (c) create a user survey tool and outreach for these improvements. By partnering with researchers and educators to incorporate nationally accepted standards for science learning into the website redesign, the project has a broad impact on professional development for teachers. It has the potential to reach diverse audiences in schools, homes and afterschool programs. "Jonathan Bird's Blue World" is designed to complement other educational materials and provide a useful resource for teachers everywhere, improving public scientific literacy in informal and formal settings.
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Christine BirdBeth MeInikasJonathan Bird
The WGBH Educational Foundation together with the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and dozens of partners, proposes a major new initiative to reshape the image of computing among college-bound high school students, with a special focus on Latina girls and African-American boys. Image is seen as an important factor in the lack of interest in computing majors among high school and college students, who often see computer scientists as geeks and nerds with boring jobs and equally boring lives. Latina girls and African-American boys--among the most underrepresented groups in computing--represent particularly important and challenging audiences. The New Image for Computing project will research and design a "communications make-over"--a new set of messages that will accurately and positively portray the field and will be widely tested for their emotional appeal to and intellectual connection with the targeted audiences. Experienced marketing professionals will help create the messaging campaign using proven marketing and communications strategies. WGBH, a leading producer of programming for public television and non-broadcast educational media, is uniquely positioned to lead this initiative, as they have a current, similar project called Engineer Your Life that aims to encourage academically prepared high school girls to consider engineering as an attractive option for both post-secondary education and as a career choice.
Twin Cities Public Television will produce six new episodes for the Dragonfly TV GPS (Going Places in Science) series in order to inform a mass audience of children, adults and educators about the revolutionary advances taking place in nanoscience and nanotechnology. The new programs will shine the DragonflyTV GPS spotlight on the network of science museums in the NISE Network, showcasing the new nanoscience programs and exhibits that are currently being developed. DragonflyTV, a weekly science television series targeted at children ages 8-12, presents children engaged in inquiry-based investigations, on-location in science centers across America. Each investigation will demonstrate the direct connection between learning experiences in science centers and the application of those lessons in everyday life. Each Nanoworld episode will apply the Dragonfly "Real Kids . . . Real Science" model, communicating both the scientific process and basic concepts in nanoscience. The DragonflyTV GPS will involve collaboration with the NISE Network, led by the Museum of Science in Boston, the Exploratorium, and the Science Museum of Minnesota. The episodes will be distributed by PBS Plus. Ancillary products will include an Educator's Guide, a Nanoworld poster, and a website featured on pbskids.org/go. Multimedia Research and will conduct formative and summative evaluations of the television production. Inverness Research will evaluate the collaborative process between TPT and the museum partners, and identify specific lessons learned by each group.