The Montana Natural History Center, in collaboration with the University of Montana, will develop an exhibit to showcase a selection of the university's extensive fossil collection. This new exhibit will help create inclusive, inquiry-based, educational opportunities for preschoolers through adults. University faculty will guide specimen interpretation and story development. The exhibit will explore modern research into evolution in a time of climate change, sharing ongoing university research and highlighting STEM careers and citizen science work. The project is based on interests identified through surveys, museum visitor recommendations, and a member focus group.
During the course of our ongoing collaboration with KQED, my fellow academic researchers and I have learned that science media professionals are especially interested in improving strategies for headline design, with the goal of increasing audience engagement. Their intuitions about the importance of headlines are supported by research findings. At least when browsing on social media platforms, media consumers often make decisions about whether to engage with stories based only off of the headline. Moreover, headlines influence the way people interpret the story and the impressions they form
For an award-winning, public media YouTube science and nature series like KQED’s Deep Look, which delights its audiences by exploring unusual, tiny animals and plants up-close in ultra-high definition, how do you quantify and assess the value of different kinds of behind-the-scenes content when your original short videos are so fantastic at engaging your target audience?
Below is a summary of the key findings of the behind-the-scenes survey. Attached is the full report.
1. The measurable benefits of appending a fully produced behind-the-scenes video to a Deep Look episode appear to
The KQED digital video team explored why they have gender disparity in viewership of their YouTube series Deep Look. For almost every one of our episodes, the percentage of women who watch is considerably lower than the percentage of men, a disparity that also happens on other science shows distributed by PBSDS. On average, about 70% of Deep Look’s YouTube audience is male and only 30% is female. Our audience’s disparity is even more pronounced than that of YouTube’s average audience, which is 60% male.
Below is a summary of the survey’s findings. You can read the full report, called “A
This NOVA multiplatform media initiative consisted of a 2-hour nationally broadcast PBS documentary, Polar Extremes; a 10-part original digital series, Antarctic Extremes; an interactive game, Polar Lab; accompanying polar-themed digital shorts, radio stories, text reporting, and social media content; a collection of educational resources on PBS LearningMedia; and community screening events and virtual field trips for science classrooms. Across multiple media platforms the project’s video content had nearly 13 million views.
The research explored the potential for informal STEM learning
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program 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. This two-year Pilots and Feasibility project seeks to build knowledge and strategic impact in the informal STEM learning field by studying how and why science-education-art collaborations yield impactful informal STEM learning experiences. By design and implementing interactive and participatory experiences for adult audiences, this project will build knowledge about how to help communities learn about environmental science and apply scientific knowledge to environmental decision-making in their lives.
The project's two overarching research questions are: (1) What are the essential elements of collaboration among scientists, educators, and artists that support learning about adaptation in a changing environment? (2) In what ways do designed, participatory, informal science learning experiences support participant learning? This pilot project will: a) develop methods for facilitating and assessing collaboration among scientists, educators, and artists; b) pilot and refine approaches for engaging scientists, educators, and artists with community members for high quality participatory experiences focus on learning about adaptation to environmental change in informal learning settings; c) pilot and refine methods to measure the outcomes for community participants on knowledge about environmental change and its application to problems in their everyday lives. This project is innovative in bridging a diverse body of scholarship in order to study the process of collaboration and the specific ways interdisciplinary collaborations foster learning. Because informal STEM learning settings often combine the work of multiple disciplines, examining the process and outcomes of collaborative, participatory STEM learning has the potential to deliver widely applicable guidance for achieving more impactful educational outcomes.
The proposed project will broaden participation by engaging adult members of environmentally vulnerable communities in participatory STEM activities and will improving individual and community well-being by delivering tools for future decision-making. The collaborative project will build valuable partnerships and capacity between disparate sectors of society, allowing co-learning and co-production of knowledge. Results will be published in scholarly journals as well as shared with community participants.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Amy LesenSameer HonwadAma RoganCalvin Mackie
Across the country, educators and mentors in informal settings have provided youth with opportunities to persist and thrive along STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) trajectories. Unfortunately, the current COVID-19 pandemic may limit youths' opportunities to continue pursuing STEM pathways by removing their access to important resources, such as mentors in science labs and other STEM learning spaces. The impact of the pandemic may be especially harmful for youth from underrepresented groups whose families have been disproportionately affected by this crisis. The purpose of this project is to study the impact of COVID-19 on the STEM trajectories of teenagers from underrepresented groups who had previously worked with scientists as mentors before the pandemic. A survey, which will be administered to hundreds of teenagers, will identify the supports that they used to successfully navigate disruptions as they continued to pursue college and career pathways in STEM. For teenagers who decided not to actively pursue STEM pathways during the pandemic, this survey will illuminate how loss of supports and new challenges discouraged their active pursuit of STEM. By identifying supports and challenges that encouraged or discouraged STEM pursuits, this project will advance knowledge on how informal learning programs can support underrepresented teenagers in persisting along STEM pathways during national crises and emergencies.
The American Museum of Natural History will conduct mixed-methods research to explore the impact of the pandemic on the STEM trajectories of underrepresented teenagers. They will administer surveys to 560 teenagers from underrepresented groups who previously participated in the New York City Science Research Mentoring Consortium. The survey will ascertain whether and how the youth found access to new supports or lost access to former supports; whether they face new challenges and how they have responded to those challenges; and whether and how their feelings about pursuing STEM in college and beyond have changed. Teenagers who complete the survey will identify adults in their lives who have been important in supporting their pursuits in STEM, and two adults per teenager will also be invited to complete surveys on perceived disruptions. Latent class analyses, cognitive interviews, and consultation with youth and survey experts will be used to establish survey validity, while the survey results will be analyzed via two-mode social network analysis. Additionally, 16 teenagers will participate in in-depth interviews regarding the impact of the pandemic on their STEM trajectories. Findings and implications for practice will be disseminated widely to researchers, educators, and mentors in informal science education. These findings will help stakeholders to provide better supports for underrepresented youth during the current pandemic and during future national emergencies. This project is funded by the Advanced Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program. As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the AISL program 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.
This RAPID award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Preeti GuptaTimothy PodkulKaren Hammerness
This RAPID was submitted in response to the NSF Dear Colleague letter related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This award is made by the AISL program in the Division of Research on Learning, using funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The major public policy of social distancing relies, in part, on the cooperation of younger and healthier people who may not experience symptoms and can spread the virus unknowingly to more vulnerable populations. Science journalists, who are on the front lines of covering the pandemic, can play an important role in educating millennial audiences about the science behind the virus, how it is transmitted and effective ways to prevent the virus from spreading. This award will help the STEM field better understand how to engage millennial audiences with effective COVID-19 media content and to urgently capture professional knowledge on crisis reporting. KQED and Texas Tech University are suited to rapidly implement a science media informal science learning project targeting millennials and younger audiences in light of their current NSF-funded "Cracking the Code: Influencing Millennial Science Engagement" collaborative research and evaluation project (DRL 1810990 and 1811091). The project team has built a functional research protocol for its media practitioner and academic researcher collaboration, and will apply these new RAPID funds to complement on-going efforts, mobilize the existing team, research protocol, and research tools to respond to the communication challenge of reaching younger adults posed by COVID-19. Content to be created includes: 1) Radio broadcasts - daily news coverage, live talks; 2) A real-time blog - live Coronavirus updates and 3) Social media content on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
The project team will explore the following research questions:
How could COVID-19 coverage be designed to best inform, engage and educate millennials and younger audiences about the science of virus transmission and prevention?
What are some best practices for crisis reporting, as journalists respond to both constantly updated information and changing audience needs, that can be used by media outlets (such as advisors PBS Digital Studios, PBS NewsHour, NOVA, NPR Science, and more)?
The research protocol centers around "media testing cycles," which are time-bounded studies (5 months long) exploring a subset of research questions about the effectiveness of KQED's science content (articles, videos, social media posts and radio reporting) at reaching younger audiences. Steps include identifying problems that are suited for empirical examination; formulating plausible competing hypotheses on the nature of those problems and their potential solutions; and crafting study designs calculated to support valid, realistic inferences on the relative strength of those hypotheses. Data will be gathered from COVID-19 audience "chatter" from Twitter and Facebook through Crimson Hexagon, a social media listening platform. In addition to the social media listening, researchers will conduct a thematic analysis of the questions currently being collected through the audience engagement platform Hearken, where KQED has gathered nearly 2,000 questions to date about the virus and lifestyle changes. This data will also help the project team understand knowledge gaps about prevention and transmission of the virus. These two qualitative studies will be conducted concurrently and reported to KQED journalists quickly to inform reporting.
Texas Tech researchers will create a virus transmission and prevention knowledge assessment. This assessment will be validated using a national online survey. The project will examine knowledge differences based on, for example, generation and gender. TTU will examine relationships between performance on this assessment and two relevant measures: science curiosity and ordinary science intelligence. The national survey will help identify what knowledge gaps are present in which audiences. Using this information, KQED journalists will develop "explainers" and other news content, to meet audience needs and to fill knowledge gaps.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
The National Academy of Sciences’ LabX program came into existence in 2017 with a directive to develop programming meant to engage with a young-adult (18-37 years old) target audience who are active decision-makers and whose actions impact current and future policies. While conducting preliminary research, the LabX staff and advisory board discovered that available research on young adults’ relationship with science was sadly lacking in detail, beyond obvious conclusions about high levels of interest in technology and social experiences.
To fill these knowledge gaps, gain a deeper
This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by engaging in hands-on field experience, laboratory/project-based entrepreneurship tasks and mentorship experiences. This ITEST project aims to research the STEM career interests of late elementary and middle-school students and, based on the results of that research, build an informal education program to involve families and community partners to enhance their science knowledge, attitudes, experiences, and resources. There is an emphasis on underrepresented and low income students and their families.
The project will research and test a new model to promote the development of positive attitudes toward STEM and to increase interest in STEM careers. Phase 1 of the project will include exploratory research examining science capital and habitus for a representative sample of youth at three age ranges: 8-9, 9-10 and 11-12 years. The project will measure the access that youth have to adults who engage in STEM careers and STEM leisure activities. In phase II the project will test a model with a control group and a treatment group to enhance science capital and habitus for youth.
This pilot study will examine the effectiveness of an innovative applied social change, community and technology based program on marginalized youths' access, interest, efficacy and motivation to learn and engage in digital technology applications. Using stratified near-peer and peer-to-peer mentoring approaches, the pilot builds on extant literature that indicates that peer-supported hands-on mentoring and experiences can alleviate some barriers to youth engagement in digital technologies, particularly among underrepresented groups. In this project, undergraduate students will mentor and work collaboratively with high school youth primarily of Hispanic descent and community-based organizations to develop creative technology-based solutions to address social issues and challenges within their local communities, culminating in events called Impactathons. These community-hosted local and state-wide events set this pilot project apart from similar work in the field. The Impactathons not only provide a space for intellectual discourse and problem-solving among the undergraduate-youth-community partners but the Impactathons will also codify expertise from scientists, social scientists, technologists, community leaders, and other stakeholders to develop technology-based solutions with real world application. If successful, a distal outcome will be increased youth interest in digital technologies and related fields. In the short term, favorable findings will provide preliminary evidence of success and lay the foundation for a more extensive study in the future.
This pilot project is a collaboration between the Everett Program, a student-led program for Technology and Social Change at the University of California Santa Cruz - a Hispanic Serving Institution - and the Digital NEST, a non-profit, high-tech youth career development and collaboration space for young people ages 14-24. Through this partnership and other recruitment efforts, an estimated 70-90 individuals will participate in the Impactathon pilot program over two years. Nearly two-thirds of the participants are expected to be undergraduate students. They will receive extensive training in near-peer and peer-to-peer mentoring and serve as mentors for and co-innovation developers with the high school youth participants. The undergraduates and youth will partner with local community organizations to identify a local social challenge that can be addressed through a technology-based solution. The emergent challenges will vary and could span the spectrum of STEM and applied social science topics of interest. Working in informal contexts (i.e., afterschool. weekend), the undergraduate-youth-community partner teams will work collaboratively to develop practical technology-based solutions to real world challenges. The teams will convene three times per year, locally and statewide, at student and community led Impactathons to share their work and glean insights from other teams to refine their innovations. In parallel, the research team will examine the effectiveness of the Impactathon model in increasing the undergraduate and youths' interest, motivation, excitement, engagement and learning of digital technologies. In addition to the research, the formative and summative evaluations should provide valuable insights on the effectiveness of the model and its potential for expansion and replication.
The project is co-funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) Program and STEM +C. The AISL program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. STEM + C focuses on research and development of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to the integration of computing within STEM teaching and learning for preK-12 students in both formal and informal settings.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
Explore the Science of Spring: A Live Media Event is an Innovations in Development project produced by the signature PBS series Nature. The new primetime series Spring LIVE (working title) will break the frame of a traditional documentary, letting viewers themselves explore the dramatic seasonal changes of spring through the immediacy of live television. On-camera hosts, scientists and naturalists in locations across the U.S., and scores of citizen scientists will use observation and scientific inquiry to explore the workings of nature during this season of rebirth. The unfolding stories of seasonal change will illuminate larger scientific insights--into the biodiversity of species in habitats, the interconnectedness of plants and animals in diverse ecosystems, the global phenomenon of species migration, and how spring "green-up" can be affected by environmental change--while inspiring appreciation for species conservation and habitat preservation. Spring LIVE is conceived as an ongoing series, with this inaugural season composed of three one-hour programs broadcast live on three consecutive nights, along with real-time interactions via Facebook. Reaching long-standing Nature viewers (2.5 million per episode), Spring LIVE will seek to turn mature adults and diverse families into citizen science doers, and leverage younger Nature online audiences through social media and community engagement in partnership with citizen science projects.
Spring LIVE will build public knowledge of and engagement in phenology and citizen science. The project will also conduct knowledge-building research on the effectiveness of Facebook as a science learning tool. It will experiment with eliciting audience participation via Facebook within the live shows to generate synchronous, second-screen thought and discussion. An exploratory study by Multimedia Research will look at the impact of this feature, addressing the question: To what extent and how does Facebook interactivity within live science shows impact adult engagement, learning and motivation? Spring LIVE will also engage multiple partners to expand reach and impact and build capacity in their fields. National partners include the National Park Service and Next Avenue; citizen science partners include Celebrate Urban Birds, National Phenology Network, Monarch Blitz, and SciStarter, among others. PBS stations will work with these organizations to involve diverse, intergenerational audiences in observation of nature and seasonal change. Project evaluation, implemented by Knight Williams Research Communications, will focus on the impact of live television on science learning, and the success of the integration of citizen science projects on air, online, and in communities. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) 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.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.