In this paper, Volker Kirchberg of the University of Lueneburg and Basica Research Institute analyses catchment areas to better understand museums' greater impacts. The author defines these areas as not only a function of distance of the the potential visitors' residence to the venue but also a function of socio-demographic structures of residential areas.
You can use CyberTracker on a Smartphone or handheld computer to record any type of observation. CyberTracker, which requires no programming skills, allows you to customize a series of screens for your own data collection needs. Our vision is to enable you to be part of a worldwide environmental monitoring network. Our mission is to help you improve environmental monitoring by increasing the efficiency of data gathering and to improve observer reliability.
The New York Hall of Science and Community School District #24 request $46,744 for a planning grant whose goal is to empower parents by bringing informal science and math education experiences to create a working team of parents, teachers, and museum staff to underserved, ethnically diverse students in their formative years, and their families. A major objective is to develop a framework for a science resource kit for home use by parents and children in grades K-3, and related parent training. The target audience is low income, minority, recently immigrated parents, with little to no involvement in their children's education. Parents from the target audience will serve on the Planning Team. The function of the kits is to provide exciting, intergenerational, exploratory experiences in math and science that are related to the school curriculum. Each kit will be designed to be completely portable and will appear to be a large trunk with wheels. Contents may include: a laptop-size computer; hand lenses and two small microscopes; diffraction gratings and flourescent sources; ramps and balls; mirrors, lenses and other optics.
The Louisville Science Center and the National Center for Family Literacy will engage in a year's planning to introduce the Parent- Child Interaction Project to teams of educators in six target cities. The goal is to explore the feasibility of a future national implementation of the model. The Parent-Child Interaction Project aims to empower underserved parents to become their child's most important teacher and provide these parents and their children the opportunity to gain science, mathematics, and technology education together. The participants are the parents and pre-school children enrolled in family literacy programs. During the Project, parents and children will make at least four trips to the participating science-technology center and evaluate their trips during follow-up class sessions. The joint efforts of the family literacy programs and science- technology centers can achieve the following goals: * Improve the involvement of low-income and low-literacy parents in the education of their children, specifically in the areas of science, mathematics and technology. * Increase the awareness of local science and technology centers as available community resources, particularly for underserved audiences. * Use science center visits and related projects to extend NCFL classroom learning for adult education students, their children and their teachers.
The Education Development Center (EDC) is implementing the national expansion and institutionalization of the Playing to Win (PTW) Network. With the goal of working toward universal technology enfranchisement and prior support from the NSF Informal Science Education Program, the PTW Network currently links close to fifty agencies in a mutually supportive community of neighborhood technology learning centers serving people living in low-income areas who otherwise would have little or no access to computer-based technologies. The purposes of this phase of the project are: - to increase the number of affiliates nationally - to provide effective support for their technology programs and to do so in a planned and thoughtful manner which also is flexible and responsive to the flows, demands, and unforeseen opportunities fro community technology center development -- to move the affiliate membership toward independence and self-governance. Each year of the project, PTW will work in collaboration with the United Neighborhood Centers of America, the Alliance fro Community Media, NTIA-funded programs, FreeNets, and others in three to four target areas of the US to recruitment additional primary affiliates. The goal is to add 20 additional affiliates annually who will be supported by local coordinators and another 30 with subsidized telecommunications support. PTW plans to enrich programmatic content at the centers with special emphasis on math and science. The network will support an on-line math and science program consultant and continue to recruit and support affiliates with a math/science program emphasis. The Co-Principal Investigators for the project will be Myles Gordon, Director of EDC's Center for Learning, Teaching and Technology, and Antonia Stone, Founder of PTW and PI for the previous phases of the project.
This project plans to develop a partnership with KCTS Public Television, Laubach Literacy Action, and the National Alliance of Urban Literacy Coalitions to develop an implementation plan to promote higher science literacy in at-risk families in inner city settings. These organizations reach families that seldom participate in formal and informal science learning programs. A training design for literacy providers to use science literacy materials as an integrated part of their adult literacy curriculum will be developed. Video and print materials that are specifically designed for low literacy adults will be developed. These are expected to be simple, fun, and effective ways to foster the love of science and learning in themselves and their children. Front-end evaluation focus groups will be conducted with providers and parents to gain insights into the specific needs and general expectations of the parents and literacy providers, and to get feedback on the proposed project materials.
The Discovery Center is a "hands-on" science museum with a mission to provide the public with a basic science literacy. The proposed HOFPP project is an outreach program that will take an informal science education activity to disadvantaged parents and children in the facilities of four (first year) collaborating "parents": The Urban League, the Spanish Action League, the North American Indian Club and Girls Inc. of Central NY. The purpose of the program is to encourage and enable parents of disadvantaged school children to play an active role in their child child's education. Phase I of the program is implemented as a series of ten weekly classes in which parents and children will work together on hands-on science activities; Phase 2 follows with a science club program. Graduates will be informally channeled into an inner-city magnet school for science and math. Past Discovery Center outreach programs have already demonstrated ability to attract disadvantaged parents. The proposed program will touch 1,000 disadvantaged persons during the initial three-year period. During the third year the HOFPP project will be transported and implemented at a Science museum in another New York State community. A three year cost-shared NSF project is proposed that will be later sustained by The Discovery Center operating budget with local donations. A professional outside evaluation will be performed to measure program success. Program reports, materials and consultation will be propagated to other interested organizations to gain maximum impact.
DATE:
-
TEAM MEMBERS:
Rachel NettletonMary StebbinsAnnette SalsberyElizabeth Kneale
The National council of La Raza (NCLR), the nation's principal Hispanic constituency-based organization, seeks funding from the National Science Foundation's Informal Science Education Program for a four-year community-centered demonstration program. Project EXCEL-MAS, the Math and Science component of its EXCEL-MAS is designed to develop and encourage the adoption of supplemental math and science programs for at-risk Hispanic elementary and middle school students and their parents, using thematic, hands-on approaches; and ultimately help to increase the numbers of Hispanic student enrolling and succeeding in paths which lead to advanced study in math and science. Hispanics -- the youngest and fastest-growing major U.S. population, numbering 22.4 million or 9% of the U.S. population according to the 1990 Census -- continue to be most undereducated major U.S. population. Only about half of Hispanics are high school graduates, and fewer than one in ten have completed college; only about one-quarter of high school graduates have followed curricular tracks including the math, science and language arts needed for college attendance; national studies suggest that Hispanic 17-year-olds on average have math and science skills at the level of White 13-year- olds. Contributing to these problems are a lack of culturally appropriate, meaningful parent involvement or family-wide approaches to education, supplemental programs to motivate and support at-risk students, wrap-around social services for low- income students and their families, and efforts to promote more equitable Hispanic access to the full school curriculum.
WGBH will develop, produce, and distribute Wonders of the Modern World, a project that examines the science and technology behind the building of five international landmarks -- the Golden Gate Bridge, the Aswan Dam, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Toronto Skydome, and the English Channel Tunnel connecting Great Britain and France. Wonders of the Modern World is an integrated, synergistic project that combines a nationally-broadcast, prime time television series with print, interactive components, and on-line products for home and school. The goals of the project are to educate the public about concepts in physical science, technology, and engineering and to engage youth and adults in a diverse range of science and technology activities using various media ranging from on-line telecommunications to print. The specific components of the project include: o A prime time PBS television series consisting of five one-hour programs that will be hosted by David Macaulay, author of numerous popular books on technology such as How Things Work, Cathedral, Castle, and Pyramid, o A World Wide Web site where users can conduct interactive science and technology activities, o Print guides to help with on-line activities, o Family-oriented video vignettes with experiments in structural design, o Activity kits that include the materials needed for conducting family-based science experiments, o Curriculum-based school videos, o Student/teacher guides that will help interpret the series for classroom use, and o A CD-ROM. WGBH has formed alliances with four national organizations that will undertake a major effort to engage members of underserved and low-income communities in the series and the ancillary activities. These organizations are The Boys and Girls Clubs of America, The Community Technology Centers Network, The Public Library Association, and The American Architectural Foundation. The PI and Project Director will be Paula Apsell, Executive Producer for NOV A and Head of the WGBH Science Unit. Larry Klein, Head of Production Group, Inc., will be the Series Executive Producer and Co-PI. Beth Kirsch of WGBH will serve as Director of Educational Print and Outreach, and Mark Olshaker will be series editor and scriptwriter. Ted Sicker, Executive Producer for Interactive Projects/New Media at WGBH Educational Foundation will direct the development and deployment of the on-line components of the project. Barbara Flagg will conduct formative evaluation and Irene Goodman will conduct summative evaluation.