The New England Aquarium will create Conservation STEM — an online curriculum that features engaging videos and hands-on activities aligned with state and national standards that are easily accessible for teachers to use in the classroom. The project responds to a need that the aquarium’s Teacher Advisory Council — composed of Pre-K through 12 teachers from the greater Boston area — identified, which was to help students develop critical and systems thinking skills. It also will provide a means for teachers to engage students with authentic experiences to address real-world problems and build an understanding of the need for a balanced use of the ocean.
The Hollister Herbarium at Tennessee Tech University will implement “Rooting Students in their Botanical History” — an educational module targeted for 11th and 12th grade biology students. The module will address “plant blindness,” a phenomenon defined as the failure to notice or appreciate plants. The herbarium will collaborate with three Tennessee high school biology teachers, a videographer, and a graduate research assistant to increase knowledge, awareness, and appreciation of plants over the three-year project. Students also will get to know herbarium specimens as an essential resource for information about the natural world.
The Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden will conduct the Million Orchid Project Authentic STEM Initiative to provide inclusive and accessible STEM learning opportunities for approximately 1,800 students annually from the most diverse and under-resourced middle and K-8 schools in Miami–Dade County. The initiative will use the Fairchild's STEMLab — a mobile plant propagation lab designed especially for schoolchildren — to bring the museum’s specialized scientific research to young learners in South Florida neighborhoods. Students and teachers will collect and analyze scientific data, devise research questions, and test hypotheses that will advance local conservation and contribute to the propagation of endangered orchids. Students will have the opportunity to explore STEM careers through interactions with Fairchild botanists.
The Nest: A Nature Inspired Space, Design Workshop, and Art Studio is a new project of the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Museum of American Bird Art designed to provide a dedicated space and robust mobile component for pre-K to grade 5 aged children, their families, and educators. Working with community partners, the museum will create an interactive exhibition integrating nature, art, and science, using existing underutilized space at the museum. The project team will test and develop prototypes of content, materials, and equipment for the Nest, along with curriculum and programmatic activities. Through the immersive exhibition and supporting programmatic activities, the museum will better serve an expanded group of learners with nature-based STEAM programs.
The Whaling Museum & Education Center will expand its educational programming to benefit underserved and high-risk students in grades 2 to 5, as well as their teachers and families. The museum will develop, implement, market, and evaluate core components of its programming to reach nearly 3,000 students and 50 teachers. Museum educators will present hands-on activities in nearby schools, using real and replica artifacts and other learning materials. They will also deliver workshops for teachers at the museum to help them incorporate primary resources from the museum's collection into their curricula. A family day event will showcase what students learned from the in-class visit through displays of art projects and science posters. Other project activities will include free afterschool library programs exploring STEAM and history topics and an increase in the number of scholarships to the museum's summer camp program.
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County will design and fabricate the La Brea Tar Pits Mobile Museum to provide kindergarten to 2nd grade students with hands-on, immersive experiences based on its Ice Age fossil collections. The traveling exhibition will reach 20 underserved schools and 7,500 students annually. Programming will use early childhood play-based models. These models allow students time to explore and observe followed by periods of play that allow time to process, reflect, and retain. A museum educator will prepare classroom teachers for the school residency by providing a workshop and orientation to the Tar Pits, pre-visit classroom activities and lesson plans aligned with Next Generation Science Standards. The mobile museum will also be deployed at community parks, festivals, and special events on weekends and during the summer, reaching a total of 15,000 youth and families each year.
The L.C. Bates Museum will deliver STEAM programming to neighboring rural, mostly low-income second grade children and their families through the Observing Ornithology science project. Over a two-year period, the museum will work with 40 teachers in 12 schools to support student learning tied to Next Generation core science performance measures. The project activities will use museum collections and other resources to present a series of three ornithology programs designed to motivate curiosity and engage children in observation activities that support a new approach to thinking, analyzing and solving. The museum will loan a new pop-up display to each of the 12 school libraries and will present four family and four children's museum bird days at the museum for participating students and their families during each year of the project. An external evaluator will measure the project's success in achieving defined performance measures that include strengthening the children's knowledge, understanding, and attitude toward the regional environment.
Informal learning institutions (ILIs) create opportunities to increase public understanding of science and promote increased inclusion of groups underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers but are not equally distributed across the United States. We explore geographic gaps in the ILI landscape and identify three groups of underserved counties based on the interaction between population density and poverty percentage. Among ILIs, National Park Service lands, biological field stations, and marine laboratories occur in areas with the fewest sites for informal
Final External Evaluation Report for Informal STEM Learning at Biological Field Stations, an NSF AISL Exploratory Pathways project, which studied the pedagogical and andragogical characteristics of informal educational outreach activities at field stations. This report summarizes the project team’s major research activities and the contextual factors that supported that work.
Appendix includes interview protocol.
The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community developed an informal environmental health and sustainability (EHS) curriculum based on Swinomish beliefs and practices. EHS programs developed and implemented by Indigenous communities are extremely scarce. The mainstream view of EHS does not do justice to how many Indigenous peoples define EHS as reciprocal relationships between people, nonhuman beings, homelands, air, and waters. The curriculum provides an alternative informal educational platform for teaching science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) using identification, harvest
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of settings.
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 project will develop and research an integrated package of high-quality, widely accessible media and other outreach materials designed to engage middle school youth, educators, and libraries in learning about viruses in relation to COVID-19. There is an immediate need to provide youth with accurate, engaging, and accessible materials to help them understand the basic biology underlying the COVID-19 pandemic, including the routes of COVID-19 transmission and mechanisms to prevent its spread. This is particularly important for those without science backgrounds or interests so that the rumors, hearsay, and gossip circulating among youth can be replaced with research-based information. Since 2007, the project team and partners have focused on developing and studying new ways of educating youth and the public about biology, virology, and infectious disease. The project will develop a web-accessible package of customizable graphics, illustrated stories, and essays--all of which can be easily incorporated into free-choice and directed on-line learning as well standards-based lesson plans for Grades 6-8. These resources will be disseminated broadly and at no cost to youth and educators of all kinds, including schools, libraries, museums, and other established networks for formal and informal science education. The project web package will be linked to multiple websites that serve as important educational resources on science and virology for youth, the general public, and educators. A prominent university press will publish and promote the illustrated stories and support distribution of 7,000 free copies.
The project will conduct research examining how richly-illustrated science narratives impact youth understanding of and curiosity about science. The research will help develop the foundation for better understanding how to educate youth about COVID-19 (and future pandemics) while generating new knowledge about effective methods for public science outreach during a major unanticipated natural event. For formative evaluation, the project will use an innovative rapid response feedback method. Youth will be invited to provide timely, specific comments on the serialized stories through a curated portal. As new excerpts are related online, different questions will be posed to youth who are selected because of specific characteristics (e.g., low or high initial science interest). These data will guide story development in real time and provide a mechanism to gauge the story appeal, comprehensibility, and initial impacts. The project will address two research questions: (1) How effective are illustrated stories in having positive impacts among participants on COVID-19 knowledge, science identity, attitudes, and interest in science careers?; and (2) How do story lines and characters have differential impacts on virus knowledge, epidemiology, and youth attitudes towards science and science careers? To conduct this research, the project will conduct online surveys using adapted items from prior research conducted by the project team. Additional items will assess COVID-19 knowledge, attitudes, personal experiences with the virus, well-being, and exposure to public health messaging about the virus. Research findings will be shared widely to inform the field about new ways delivering science education content during the advent of rapidly evolving global and educational challenges.
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:
Judy DiamondJulia McQuillanPatricia Wonch HillElizabeth VanWormer