This multiplatform media and science center project is designed to engage audiences in humanity's deepest questions like the nature of love, reality, time and death in both scientific and humanistic terms. Project deliverables include 5 hour-long radio programs for broadcast on NPR stations, public events/museum exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, kiosks in venues throughout the city, and a social media engagement campaign. The audience of the project is large and diverse using mass media and the internet. But the project will specifically target young, online, and minority audiences using various strategies. The project is designed to help a diverse audience understand the impact of new scientific developments as well as the basic science, technology, engineering and math needed to be responsible, informed citizens. Innovative elements of the project include the unique format of the radio programs that explore complex topics in an engaging and compelling way, the visitor engagement strategy at the Exploratorium, and the social media strategy that reaches niche audiences who might never listen to the radio broadcasts, but find the podcasts and blogs engaging. The Exploratorium will be opening a new building in 2013 and will include exhibits and programs that are testing grounds for this project. This is a new model that aligns the radio content with exhibitions, social media, and in person events at the Exploratorium, providing a unique holistic approach. The project is designed to inspire people to think and talk about science and want to find out more. The evaluation will measure the impacts on the targeted audiences reached by each of the key delivery methods. Data will be collected using focus groups; intercept interviews with people in public places, and longitudinal panels. The focus will be on 5 targeted audiences (young adults, families with children, non-NPR listeners, underrepresented minorities, and adults without college experience). This comprehensive evaluation will likely contribute important knowledge to the field based on this multiple-platform collaborative model.
This media and research project will develop and study the use of new media, broadcast television, and social networks to introduce Citizen Science to a national audience, and motivate their direct involvement and participation. Project deliverables will include: four nationally-distributed public TV programs hosted by Waleed Abdalati, Director of CIREs at the University of Boulder and former NASA Chief Scientist; online videos for training and outreach of citizen science partners; digital engagement via social media; and a custom-designed application ('2nd screen app') that enables users to obtain additional informational content, share information, and connect with other viewers. The evaluation and research study will build new knowledge on how these deliverables can motivate the public to become citizen science participants. The investigators estimate the four television programs will reach approximately 80% of U.S. television households. In addition, videos and other content will be distributed through channels such as iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, and social media. Target audiences will include the general public, citizen science activists, and professional scientists. Underrepresented groups will be reached through special Google Hangouts, and professional societies such as SACNAS and AGU. The research components of the project will provide evidence on how traditional researchers respond to citizen science, and explore the deliverables' use as recruitment tools for citizen science projects and impacts on viewers' attitudes, behaviors, and skills related to citizen science. Data will be collected from multiple sources, including online surveys, in-person focus groups, and analyses of users' online postings. Retrospective surveys will be administered to explore changes in behavior regarding whether respondents have increased their interaction with professional scientists, or participated in citizen science initiatives. A quasi-experimental study will be conducted to assess the value added by the 2nd screen app.
QUEST Beyond Local is a consortium of six public media providers across the country coming together in a unique collaborative structure to foster widespread STEM literacy for general audiences; support formal and informal education outcomes in the sciences; and revive ailing science and environment journalism in the face of its rapid decline. QUEST Beyond Local is built on the success of the local, cross-editorial QUEST model, in which media making professionals from multiple disciplines--radio, television, web, and especially education--collaborate to distribute high-quality content to general and underserved audiences. Two years ago, KQED (serving Northern California) introduced a capacity-building effort with five other public media stations serving markets across the nation: Seattle (KCTS), Wisconsin (WPT/WPR), Nebraska (NET), Cleveland (ideastream), and North Carolina (UNC-TV). On the heels of this pilot process, QUEST Beyond Local will expand production in all markets and focus its multimedia efforts around the theme "Science of Sustainability" so as to achieve maximum effect on critical STEM outcomes in formal and informal education settings, and to foster science/environment literacy among a wide general audience. QUEST Beyond Local is defined by an organizationally and technologically innovative model of content creation: a newsroom structured according to a hub and spoke model; with common branding, technical, and style guidelines; and with a central coordinating and editorial office liaising between local production teams. Under the guidance of this central office, the collaborative seeks to create content with both local authority and national relevance. Building on existing media impact research, and previous research and evaluation of QUEST, research firm Rockman et al will apply evaluation theory to determine: (1) the structures and strategies to a successful STEM collaborative that contribute to a greater understanding of and engagement in science and environment topics; and (2) determine the interests, priorities, and media consumption habits of local and national STEM audiences. Primary project deliverables include three diverse multimedia packages for general and professional audiences, focusing on three main themes and anchored in STEM disciplines. In total, the three packages will include: 18 television segments; 6 half-hour television programs; 20 radio reports; 18 "web extras" (slide shows, maps, etc.); 12 web-based videos; 144 blog posts; 18 education "explainers"; 5 educator trainings; and a comprehensive distribution and social media campaign. All efforts will be supported by at least 18 science community partners, including zoos, museums, aquariums, research centers, and others. Through these efforts, the collaborative seeks to repair the systemic damage done by years of neglect to science/environment journalism--particularly the marked decline in this type of coverage over the last decade. This decline is perhaps related to the observed disconnect between the public and scientific knowledge, despite a demonstrated public appetite for science content and educators' reported desire for more resources and professional development opportunities focused on STEM topics. At a time when an evolving workforce and economy increasingly demand STEM skills and environmental literacy, QUEST Beyond Local will contribute resources to address these challenges.
This project will bring STEM content knowledge to visitors to Cuyahoga Valley National Park via mobile device applications. Visitors will be able to use their mobile phones to access details about Park features (such as where they are in the park, what they are looking at, and where are related features), supporting just-in-time STEM learning. Cuyahoga Valley National Park receives around 2.5 million visitors every year and experiences multitudes of inquiries. Until this project, visitors were subjected to less than optimum signage for information and background about a given feature that may or may not be of interest to them. In this project, knowledge building information will be selected by the visitors and delivered to them with convenience and speed. The data base supporting this effort will provide the visitor with identification and the history of park features as well as more in depth knowledge building information while they are in the park and after the leave, providing a more holistic experience than is currently available. The investigators will build the system in parts, testing the feasibility at each stage and evaluating affective and cognitive outcomes of each portion. Research questions that will be addressed in the course of this project include: (1) What outcomes associated with use of this GPS-base system could inform future development and implementation? and (2) What contributions do these GPS-based mobile learning applications have on informal science learning as understood within the Six Strands of Informal Science Learning? It is expected knowledge generated in this project will stimulate additional programing for increasing efficacy and use in other widely ranging venues. If successful, it is easy to imagine how this STEM knowledge-building application could be extended for use in other venues across the country.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Richard FerdigRuoming JinPatrick LorchAnnette Kratcoski
This project is making novel use of familiar technology (smartphones and tablets) to address the immediate and pressing challenge of affordable, ongoing, large-scale museum evaluation, while encouraging museum visitors to engage deeply with museum content. Using a smartphone app, museum visitors pose questions to a 'virtual scientist' called Dr. Discovery (Dr. D). Dr. D provides answers and the chance to complete fun mini-challenges. The questions visitors ask are gathered in a large database. An analytics system analyzes these data and a password-protected website provides continuous, accessible evaluation data to museum staff, helping them make just-in-time tweaks (or longer term changes) to exhibit-related content (such as multimedia, lecture topics, docent training, experience carts, etc.) as current events and visitors' needs and interests change. The intellectual merit of this project is that it is building evaluation capacity among informal educators, advancing the fields of visitor studies, museum evaluation, informal science learning, and situated engagement, and is contributing to the development of novel evaluation techniques in museums. This project has many broader impacts: The Ask Dr. Discovery system is available to any venue that wishes to use or adapt it to their context. By enhancing the visitor experience and improving museum access to data for evaluation and data-driven decision making across the country, Ask Dr. Discovery has both a direct and indirect impact on museums and visitors of all types. This project is also training the next generation of STEM and education innovators by employing a diverse team of undergraduate students.
The Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies Program funds efforts that will help in envisioning the next generation of learning technologies and advancing what we know about how people learn in technology-rich environments. Development and Implementation (DIP) Projects build on proof-of-concept work that showed the possibilities of the proposed new type of learning technology, and project teams build and refine a minimally-viable example of their proposed innovation that allows them to understand how such technology should be designed and used in the future and answer questions about how people learn with technology. Although for years researchers have believed technology could afford anytime-anywhere learning, we still don't understand how learners behave differently across contexts, such as home, school, and in the community, and how to get youth to identify as learners across those contexts. This proposal aims to use mobile devices and strategically placed shared kiosks to 'scientize' youth in two low-income communities. Through strategic partnerships with community organizations, educators, and families, the innovation is to get primary and middle-school students engaging in scientific inquiry in the context of their neighborhoods. Research will help determine how the technology can best be deployed, but also answer important questions about how communities can provide support to help kids think like scientists and identify with science. This project will design and implement ubiquitous technology tools that include mobile social media and tangible, community displays (collectively called ScienceKit) that are deeply embedded into two urban neighborhoods, and demonstrate how such ubiquitous technologies and related cyberlearning strategies are vital to improve information flow and coordination across a neighborhood ecosystem, in order to create environments where children can connect their science learning across contexts and time (e.g. scientizing). A program called ScienceEverywhere comprised of partnerships between tightly connected neighborhood organizations with mentors, teachers, parents, and researchers will help learners develop scientifically literate practices both in and out of school, and will demonstrate students' learning to their communities. Research will consist of mixed methods studies of use of the tools, including iterative design-based research, ethnography, and the use of participant observers from the community; these will be triangulated with usage logs of the technologies and content analysis of microblogs by the learners on their identities and interests. Discourse analysis of interviews with focal learners will orient the qualitative work on identity development, and analysis using activity theory will inform the influences of the social practices and sociotechnical systems on learner trajectories. Formative evaluation will help shed light on if and how the sociotechnical system promotes STEM literacy and STEM identity development.
The Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies Program funds efforts that support envisioning the future of learning technologies and advancing what we know about how people learn in technology-rich environments. Development and Implementation (DIP) Projects build on proof-of-concept work that shows the possibilities of the proposed new type of learning technology, and PI teams build and refine a minimally-viable example of their proposed innovation that allows them to understand how such technology should be designed and used in the future and that allows them to answer questions about how people learn, how to foster or assess learning, and/or how to design for learning. This project team aims to explore how to foster learning in socially-networked communities, particularly learning that results in behavior change. Understanding how to foster such learning could have a wide variety of societal impacts, e.g., better fostering science, engineering, mathematical, or design thinking in school or college or on the job, fostering healthy behaviors, helping teens develop pro-social behaviors, and helping people learn to make environmentally-friendly choices as they live their lives. In previous work, this team has developed YardMap, an infrastructure for citizen science that brings together retired adults who are interested in planting and managing their yards in environmentally-friendly ways. YardMap enables social interactions and shared creation of virtual worlds in which participants can try out different ways of managing their yards and see what the downstream effects will be. They also track and display their changing practices and actual yards in ways that are visible to others. YardMap is used by many thousands of participants. In this project, the team is taking YardMap to the next level, using what is known about how people learn and come to change their behaviors to design and refine ways to more directly support individuals in critiquing and improving their behaviors and designs for the common good. What can be learned from the new YardMap will be useful in other fields that focus on helping people change their behaviors in productive ways. The PIs seek to explore how people learn and how to foster learning in socially-networked citizen science communities. Their research addresses how learning happens, how to foster learning, how to design to increase social activity, and how increased interaction with others elevates interest, generates knowledge, and leads to behavior change. Their technological innovation, an infrastructure for citizen science that fosters behavior change, builds on YardMap, an existing infrastructure for citizen science around environmental issues that allows collective data collection and analysis and supports interactive graphing and mapping. Participants design and refine ways of managing their yards in ways that take into account environmental concerns. YardMap enables social interaction and co-creation of a set of virtual worlds for trying out new ideas; learners who are part of the community interact with others in the community, create and refine virtual worlds together, interact with things in the virtual world, manipulate those worlds and collect and analyze data about outcomes, and discuss visual objects that represent real things and practices. As well, individuals track and display their changing practices and actual yards in ways that are visible to others. YardMap can be thought of as a maker movement community focused on yard maintenance; like other maker communities, it encourages participants to create, share and discuss new inventions and practices in a social-networked community setting. Using both what is known about learning in communities and what is known about social drivers of interaction, the team is is extending YardMap to focus on fostering learning and investigating the relationships between learning and behavior change and the influences each has on the other. Much will be learned about how to use social interactions in positive ways to help individuals become more comfortable with behaviors they need to or should take on for health, civic, or educational reasons. What is learned and the technological infrastructure that is created will be directly applicable to other situations where individual behavior changes are needed for change to happen in a social system (e.g., environmental action, changing the culture of an organization, changing norms in a community, perhaps even creating learning communities in formal on-line courses).
This project will help address the urgent need for a new engineering workforce. Middle school students will be entering a workforce that is increasingly global. They will need not only technical skills but also global competencies including: the ability to investigate the world, recognize perspectives, communicate ideas, and take action. This model integrates engineering with global competencies and will provide new knowledge about how this type of learning experience impacts students and educators. This project builds on the success of the previous Design Squad project funded by NSF and developed by WGBH, which has implemented a national model for engineering education for middle school youth. This project expands the model internationally, connecting U.S. based youth with those in Southern Africa (including South Africa, Botswana, and Swaziland). The project partners are FHI 360, a non-profit organization in 60 countries around the world that helps build capacity for improving lives. They will facilitate the implementation of the afterschool programs in Southern Africa . The US dissemination partners include Promise Neighborhoods Institute, Middle Start, Every Hour Counts, and the National Girls Collaborative Project. Project deliverables include a global engineering curriculum; a web platform with videos, games, activities; an afterschool Club Guide; and a Community of Practice for informal engineering educators. A knowledge building component will provide new evidence on how high quality accessible resources and strategies can impact students' development of global competencies and engineering skills to solve real world problems. An iterative approach will be used to develop the resources including the global engineering afterschool curriculum, Club guide, and other components. The methodology uses a continuous cycle of improvement including: assess/design, test/ implement, synthesize/reflect, and utilize/disseminate. The Summative Evaluation will generate evidence about whether and how this kind of collaborative work builds children's understanding of engineering, motivation to participate, and confidence in taking informed action on behalf of pressing global problems. This will contribute to a larger body of work about whether and how engaging with global, collaborative engineering problems leads to greater self-efficacy for children with very different backgrounds, experiences, and opportunities. This project will add new knowledge about how the well-honed Design Squad model in the U.S. can be expanded with a global context and global partners. This proposal was co-funded by EHR/DRL, Engineering/EEC, and International Science and Engineering. During the project period approximately 125,000 children in the US and 5000 children in southern Africa will be reached. In the long term, with the continued global access to the resources, the reach will potentially be in the millions.
The Rutgers Film Bureau in collaboration with the scientists of the LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) project at Palmer will produce a multi-platform documentary project, Antarctic Quest: Racing to Understand a Changing Ocean. This Connecting Researchers to Public Audiences proposal will focus on the scientists who are studying ocean physics, chemistry, biology, and ecology in the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP), which is the fastest winter warming location on earth. The aim of the project is to promote scientific knowledge about the world's oceans and climate change, inspire interest in scientific careers, as well as train a cadre of next generation film students in the craft of science documentary filmmaking. The project will articulate the research of the Palmer LTER's quest to understand the impact of climate change on the marine ecosystems of the WAP, while involving university students in the filmmaking process. Deliverables include an hour television documentary intended for PBS television broadcast, an online "Antarctic Quest community" created through interactive and interconnected social media, three five-minute educational videos produced for the PBS Learning Media website, and a Digital Media Library to assist Earth science educators. The production team will employ a diverse group of twenty film students from Rutgers University to be involved in the many phases and components of the project. The project is designed to advance the public's environmental literacy. The project will raise awareness of the changes being observed in the world's oceans by illustrating how small changes in the physical conditions in the WAP can have profound impact on marine ecosystems and potentially the entire ocean system. The project will also highlight the significance of innovative new technologies that are revolutionizing research methods as well document the importance of scientific collaboration to understand a complex interdisciplinary problem and the challenges of working in extreme environments. The summative evaluation of the project will assess the effectiveness of the project in meeting its educational goals. By communicating significant scientific research to the public while training a cohort of next generation of science documentary filmmakers, the project will also contribute to capacity-building in the Informal Science Education field.
This project will research factors influencing the implementation of programs designed to increase diverse participation in informal science. The goal is to provide the informal science education field with information and tools that will help them design effective programs that more effectively engage a broad range of diverse audiences. The project has two major components. First, the project will research the implementation of a citizen science project, Celebrate Urban Birds (CUB), in major U.S. cities. Citizen science projects involve public volunteers in gathering scientifically valid data as part of ongoing research. Second, building on results of the research, the project will launch a website and learning community (called a Community of Practice or CoP) supporting informal science educators that are involved in designing and implementing informal science programs with an emphasis on engaging diverse participants. The project will be lead by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO), a leader in designing and researching citizen science projects, in collaboration with the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) and five science center members of ASTC, where the CUB program will be implemented and researched. The objective of the research is to better understand contextual factors and how they impact implementation even when accepted practices are followed. Such research is key not only to revealing accepted practices but also to understanding how projects are implemented in the face of concrete operational, cultural, economic, and demographic variables. The research will use a comparative case study approach, which is designed for studies requiring holistic, in-depth investigation. The development of the website and the CoP will be guided by a Network Improvement Strategy, a research-based approach to designing educational CoPs. The development of the CoP will involve the project stakeholders including the informal science organization practitioners, community organization representatives, CUB staff, ASTC staff, advisors and consultants. This strategy will allow the project team and pilot sites to leverage their diverse experiences and skill sets to improve practice; provide space for researchers and practitioners to work together as partners; and develop a nuanced set of strategies that can be implemented across a variety of organizational contexts.
This Michigan State University and University of Texas-Austin project will focus on making science communication more scientific. It will primarily use interview and survey research to improve societal understanding of how those involved in science communication, particularly scientists, think about science communication. The goal is to use this knowledge to help improve science communication training and recruiting with a focus on increasing the likelihood that scientists will adopt evidence-based communication strategies to increase public interest, engagement, and identification with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). A central underlying reason for the study is a mismatch between scientists' motivations and goals when interacting with public audiences and what research suggests would be the most positive and productive with public audiences. This study is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants. The project will be conducted in three phases. The first is interviews with a wide range of science communication experts to assess priority research questions. These interviews will be followed by surveys with U.S.-based members of up to 10 different scientific societies representing a broad range of academic fields as well as a survey of science communication researchers. The survey will focus on three different public engagement modes, including face-to-face engagement, online engagement, and engagement via the news media. Consistent with the Theory of Planned Behavior, the surveys will assess scientists' attitudes about public engagement and specific public engagement goals, as well as perceptions of social norms (both descriptive and injunctive) and efficacy beliefs (both internal and external). These will be used as predictors of general and goal-specific engagement willingness, as well as reported past behavior, using multigroup modeling. Potential communication goals of interest include transferring knowledge, developing interest and excitement, building trust in scientists, demonstrating openness and a willingness to listen, shaping how people think about subjects (i.e. framing), and/or defending science. The final phase of the project will explore the potential to design experiments aimed at testing the impact that mention of specific goals has on communication training recruitment as well as the degree to which online content about various goals is attractive to scientists interested in developing their communication skills. The research is the most targeted and largest attempt to date to understand how scientists' views about the public and communication processes may shape science communication behavior.
This early-stage design and development, integrated media and research project will contribute important new understandings to the informal science learning literature by exploring science engagement on social media when integrated with broadcast television. It will help answer questions including: What does such engagement look like? Who participates? How and why does it happen? and What is the degree or depth of engagement? The project builds on the previous successful work by WGBH nationally distributing the television series NOVA scienceNOW and the research expertise of EDC. WGBH's NOVA scienceNOW program will collaborate with EDC to develop new metrics to understand how and why learners engage with science on social media. Deliverables will include six one-hour episodes of NOVA scienceNOW, short online videos, moderated online discussion events, and an online film festival. A new social Media Initiative will develop six live broadcast microblogging events, six post-broadcast online discussion events, daily social media updates, and an online film festival that will feature user generated videos. A range of STEM content in the videos and online posts will be framed around big science and engineering questions such as animal communication and survival systems, the biology of sleep, climate change, new technologies, energy, genetics, and natural disasters. The continued innovations and expansion of social media channels provides significant new opportunities for providing learner's access to high quality science content, researchers, and opportunities to participate in science. In the first phase of this work to deepen the evidence based understanding of how social media supports informal science engagement, NOVA and EDC will collaborate to develop new measurement instruments: (1) a Network Profile to quantitatively represent the size and activity of NOVA's social media network; (2) an Informal Science Engagement (ISE) index to measure the degree of engagement by coding and analyzing conversations and posts; (3) a Follower Profile to assess the degree of activity and the nature of the engagement; and (4) a Science Social Media Engagement survey instrument. They will then use these measures and data collection protocols to explore whether and how the initiative might influence science engagement. External expert reviewers with content and methodological expertise will review all aspects of the project at critical junctures. This project will contribute important new knowledge and research instruments and methods to better understand how the learning opportunities of social media channels can be realized most effectively. This has significant potential for broad and lasting benefits to society as well as advancing the informal science learning field.