For public health to improve, all sectors of society much have access to the highest quality health science news and information possible. How that information is translated, packaged and disseminated is important: the stories matter. Our journalism and mentoring program will grow the health science literacy of the nation by building the next generation of science communicators, ensuring that cadre of youth from historically disadvantaged groups have the discipline, creativity and critical thinking skills needed to be successful health science-literate citizens and advocates within their own communities.
Using a combination of youth-generated videos, broadcast reporting and online curriculum resources, PBS NewsHour will engineer successful educational experiences to engage students from all backgrounds, and particularly underserved populations, to explore clinical, biomedical, and behavioral research. The PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Labs program, currently in 41 states, will create 10 health science reporting labs to produce unique news stories that view health and science topics from a youth perspective. We will incorporate these videos into lesson plans and learning tools disseminated to the general public, educators and youth media organizations. Students will be supported along the way with curricula and mentorship on both fundamental research and the critical thinking skills necessary for responsible journalism. This process will ensure the next generation includes citizens who are effective science communicators and self-motivated learners with a deep connection to science beyond the textbook and classroom.
PBS NewsHour will develop a STEM-reporting curriculum to teach students important research skills. The program will include activities that expose students to careers in research, highlight a diverse assortment of pioneering scientists as role models and promote internship opportunities. The resources will be posted on the PBS NewsHour Extra site which has 170,000 views per month and our partner sites on PBS Learning Media and Share My Lesson—the two biggest free education resource sites on the web—thus greatly expanding the potential scope of our outreach and impact.
NewsHour broadcast topics will be finalized through our advisory panel and the researchers interviewed for the stories will be selected for their expertise and skills as effective science communicators, as well as their diversity and ability to connect with youth. Finally, we will launch an outreach and community awareness campaign through strategic partnerships and coordinated cross promotion of stories through social media platforms.
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.
Twin Cities Public Television project on Gender Equitable Teaching Practices in Career and Technical Education Pathways for High School Girls is designed to help career and technical education educators and guidance counselors recruit and retain more high school girls from diverse backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) pathways, specifically in technology and engineering. The project's goals are: 1) To increase the number of high school girls, including ethnic minorities, recruited and retained in traditionally male -STEM pathways; 2) To enhance the teaching and coaching practices of Career and Technical Education educators, counselors and role models with gender equitable and culturally responsive strategies; 3) To research the impacts of strategies and role model experiences on girls' interest in STEM careers; 4) To evaluate the effectiveness of training in these strategies for educators, counselors and role models; and 5) To develop training that can easily be scaled up to reach a much larger audience. The research hypothesis is that girls will develop more positive STEM identities and interests when their educators employ research-based, gender-equitable and culturally responsive teaching practices enhanced with female STEM role models. Instructional modules and media-based online resources for Minnesota high school Career and Technical Education programs will be developed in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and piloted in districts with strong community college and industry partnerships. Twin Cities Public Television will partner with STEM and gender equity researchers from St. Catherine University in St. Paul, the National Girls Collaborative, the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-Boulder), the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System.
The project will examine girls' personal experiences with equitable strategies embedded into classroom STEM content and complementary mentoring experiences, both live and video-based. It will explore how these experiences contribute to girls' STEM-related identity construction against gender-based stereotypes. It will also determine the extent girls' exposure to female STEM role models impact their Career and Technical Education studies and STEM career aspirations. The study will employ and examine short-form autobiographical videos created and shared by participating girls to gain insight into their STEM classroom and role model experiences. Empowering girls to respond to the ways their Career and Technical Education educators and guidance counselors guide them toward technology and engineering careers will provide a valuable perspective on educational practice and advance the STEM education field.
The Discovery Research K-12 program (DR-K12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools (RMTs). Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects. This project scales up the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs (SRL), a model that trains teens to produce video reports on important STEM issues from a youth perspective. Participating schools receive a SRL journalism and digital media literacy curriculum, a mentor for students from a local PBS affiliate, professional development for educators, and support from the PBS NewsHour team. The production of news stories and student-oriented instruction in the classroom are designed to increase student learning of STEM content through student-centered inquiry and reflections on metacognition. Students will develop a deep understanding of the material to choose the best strategy to teach or tell the STEM story to others through digital media. Over the 4 years of the project, the model will be expanded from the current 70 schools to 150 in 40 states targeting schools with high populations of underrepresented youth. New components will be added to the model including STEM professional mentors and a social media and media analytics component. Project partners include local PBS stations, Project Lead the Way, and Share My Lesson educators.
The research study conducted by New Knowledge, LLC will add new knowledge about the growing field of youth science journalism and digital media. Front-end evaluation will assess students' understanding of contemporary STEM issues by deploying a web-based survey to crowd-source youth reactions, interest, questions, and thoughts about current science issues. A subset of questions will explore students' tendencies to pass newly-acquired information to members of the larger social networks. Formative evaluation will include qualitative and quantitative studies of multiple stakeholders at the Student Reporting Labs to refine the implementation of the program. Summative evaluation will track learning outcomes/changes such as: How does student reporting on STEM news increase their STEM literacy competencies? How does it affect their interest in STEM careers? Which strategies are most effective with underrepresented students? How do youth communicate with each other about science content, informing news media best practices? The research team will use data from pre/post and post-delayed surveys taken by 1700 students in the STEM Student Reporting Labs and 1700 from control groups. In addition, interviews with teachers will assess the curriculum and impressions of student engagement.
In March of 2016, a total solar eclipse occurred in the southwestern pacific; and in August of 2017, a total solar eclipse occurred across a broad swath of the United States. The Exploratorium launched a 2.5 year public education program—Navigating the Path of Totality—that used these two total solar eclipses as platforms for sparking public engagement and learning about the Sun, heliophysics, and the STEM content related to both. These sequential eclipses provided an unprecedented opportunity to build and scaffold public engagement and education. Our strategy was to start the public engagement process with the 2016 eclipse, nurture that engagement with resources, activities and outreach during the 17 months between the eclipses, so that audiences (especially in the U.S., where totality was visible in multiple areas across the country) would be excited, actively interested, and prepared for deeper engagement during the 2017 eclipse. For the August 2017 eclipse, the Exploratorium produced live telescope and program feeds from Madras, OR and Casper, WY. The Exploratorium worked with NASA to leverage what was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for millions to bring heliophysics information and research to students, educators, and the public at large through a variety of learning experiences and platforms.
The core of this project was live broadcasts/webcasts of each eclipse. To accomplish these objectives, the Exploratorium produced and disseminate live feeds of telescope-only images (no commentary) of each eclipse originating them from remote locations; produce and disseminate from the field live hosted broadcasts/webcasts of each eclipse using these telescope images; design and launch websites, apps, videos, educator resources, and shareable online materials for each eclipse; design and deliver eclipse themed video installations for our Webcast studio and Observatory gallery in the months that lead up to each eclipse and a public program during each eclipse; and conduct a formative and summative evaluation of the project.
These broadcasts/webcasts and pre-produced videos provide the backbone upon which complementary educational resources and activities can be built and delivered. Programs and videos were produced in English and Spanish languages. As a freely available resource, the broadcasts/webcasts also provide the baseline content for hundreds if not thousands of educational efforts provided by other science-rich institutions, schools, community-based organizations, and venues. Platforms such as NASA TV and NASA website, broadcast and online media outlets such as ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and PBS, as well as hundreds of science institutions and thousands of classrooms streamed the Exploratorium eclipse broadcasts as part of their own educational programming, reaching 63M people. These live broadcasts were relied upon educational infrastructure during total solar eclipses for institutions and individuals on the path and off the path alike.
Video has become a key tool for scientific communication because it increases the outreach and impact of projects, furthers scientific research within and across fields of study, and offers an accessible medium to engage the public in the understanding of science. This project supports the expansion of an interactive, online STEM Videohall where hundreds of NSF-funded researchers share their work through brief video narratives and interactive discussion. While the Videohall is accessible year-round, periodic annual Showcase events are used to drive visitors to the site where they can engage with one another, the project investigators and trained facilitators. The Videohall is a multiplier of NSF's investments in individual projects because it allows STEM education researchers to become aware of, and learn from, related work that is funded across NSF programs and directorates, and other federal agencies. In 3-minute video narratives, investigators share ideas, resources, data, evidence of impact, strategies and challenges. The Videohall platform supports open access and is designed to foster communication in ways that scale beyond traditional formats such as academic conferences. Moreover, because the online STEM Videohall is open to the public, it allows STEM investigators to share their work with multiple stakeholder communities including K-12 educators and school leaders, informal educators and community organizations, the STEM industry, education policy makers and families. Finally, because each video narrative is accompanied by a facilitated online discussion thread, investigators have a unique and valuable mechanism for receiving feedback from these various stakeholder communities. The STEM Videohall project is funded by the Discovery Research K-12 program (DRK-12), which seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.
This project brings together seven NSF-funded resource centers who work with their respective communities to encourage Principal Investigators to share video narratives of their work through annual NSF STEM Showcase events. Each annual Showcase event presents videos created by 150-230 projects; many of the projects are affiliated with one of the seven resource centers, but others are from projects across NSF directorates and beyond. During a one-week period, Principal Investigators, their project staff, as well as the public at large, are invited to engage in interactive discourse, providing queries, comments, and feedback. Participants also vote for favorite presentations through "Presenters' Choice," "Public Choice," and "Facilitators' Choice," processes. This participant voting system serves to increase engagement and enhances outreach of the event through social media. After the one-week Showcase event concludes, all of the videos along with the related discourse remain available to the public online, who continue to access the Showcase throughout the year. Based on prior pilot work, it is estimated that over the course of a year, over 30,000 visitors, from over 150 countries, will engage with each annual Showcase. Videos from annual showcase events will be shared, reused, and repurposed to create new products with new constituencies. The project includes technical development efforts to iteratively improve its interactive platform, outreach efforts before each annual Showcase event, facilitation of the week-long event, and intensive dissemination efforts. A research component examines the extent of participation on various constituencies, the benefit of participation to projects, and the success of the events in terms of dissemination nationally and internationally.
Purpose: This project team will develop and test Zaption, a mobile and desktop platform designed to support educators in effectively and efficiently utilizing video (e.g., from YouTube, Vimeo, or their own desktop) as an interactive teaching and learning object. Personalized learning devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets) populated with video content provide opportunities for students to access educationally-meaningful content anywhere and anytime. Yet, video has yet to realize its potential as a learning tool in or out of the classroom. One reason for this is that watching video can be a passive experience for students, whereas learning requires active engagement. A second reason is that even if students are actively engaged while watching a video, there is no easy way to elicit student responses to a video. And finally, there is no easy way to feed student responses to teachers as formative assessment data to guide subsequent instruction.
Project Activities: During Phase I, (completed in 2014), the team expanded a pre-existing prototype by building a mobile app to enable anytime use and increase its functionality for teachers. At the end of Phase I, pilot research with 150 students in 7 classrooms demonstrated that the prototype operated as intended, teachers were able to integrate the videos within instructional practice, and students found the mobile app helpful and engaging. In Phase II, the team will add additional components to the prototype and will develop content-specific modules for use in high school physics classes. After development is complete, the research team will conduct a larger pilot study to assess the feasibility and usability, fidelity of implementation, and the promise of the Zaption for supporting student's physics learning. The study will include 32 Grade 10 physics classrooms, half of whom will be randomly assigned to use Zaption and half of whom will follow business as usual procedures. Analyses will compare pre-and-post scores of student's physics learning.
Product: Zaption will be a mobile and web-based platform to support the use of any video (e.g., from YouTube, Vimeo, or their own desktop) as a teaching and learning tool. Zaption will include an authoring engine where users can find and select video clips and easily insert interactive elements such as questions, discussions, and annotations into the videos. Users will then publish videos directly on Zaption's website, or on any learning management system or classroom website. Students will be able to view videos as homework or in class, respond individually to the questions and prompts, and get feedback on their responses. Teachers will use Zaption Analytics to receive immediate and actionable data showing whether students actually watched and engaged with a video, and how students responded to the questions and prompts.
As part of the development work of Latina SciGirls, the independent evaluation firm Knight Williams Inc. conducted a front-end evaluation focused on gathering input from the project’s primary public audiences (Latina girls and their parents/guardians) and professional audiences (the project’s advisers and partners).
Appendix includes logic model.
Students find meaning and relevance in their learning when they connect lessons to real-world issues and possible career paths. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) Conservation Connect, a freely available video series, connects learners to wildlife, technology, and careers. Videos and supplementary resources are designed to serve middle school youth, but elementary and high school educators—and even FWS retirees—report that they also use the tools. Each episode features a species, a conservation career, and technology that professionals use to study or protect that species and its
PEEP and the Big Wide World/El Mundo Divertido de PEEP is a bilingual, NSF- funded public media project that uses animation, live-action videos, games, mobile apps, hands-on science activities to motivate preschool-age children to investigate the world around them. Online, PEEP extends children’s science and math learning with a mobile-friendly website that offers games, videos, and hands-on activities, as well as a collection of 15 apps. PEEP is also reaching children in preschool classrooms and family/home childcare settings via the PEEP Science Curriculum, which provides resources for a
As a part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds research and innovative resources for use in a variety of settings. This media and technology project will scale up Youth Radio's proven model of STEM education through youth-driven multimedia journalism and related app development using the MIT App Inventor. A new Youth News Network (YNN) will implement a nationwide feeder system of youth reporters and educators using the previously developed and proven STEM curriculum. Previous research and evaluation has demonstrated that this model can engage underserved youth and put them in leadership positions in technological innovation. Key deliverables include the YNN STEM Desk that will produce 15-20 STEM-related stories each year; bootcamps (1-3 day workshops) training youth around the country focusing on app development and media links; and new toolkits providing resources to help with app development, data analysis and other STEM-specific skills. Project partners include MIT Media Lab, National Public Radio, Best Buy's Teen Tech Centers, National Writing Project, Computer Clubhouses, and PBS Learning Media among others.
Over the previous eight years, research and evaluation findings had been used to refine the project. These data served as the foundation for this scale-up project. The research conducted by the investigator and the Scholar-in-Residence in this scale-up uses an embedded ethnographic approach that combines field notes, recorded meetings and discussions, media artifacts, etc.--data that is transcribed and coded for indicators of STEM learning and critical computational literacy. The external summative evaluation will build on prior evidence regarding how this unique model engages youth and impacts their skills in STEM related media and technology.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Elisabeth SoepEllin O'LearyHarold Abelson
Child Trends is a nonprofit organization focused on improving the lives of children and their families by conducting research and sharing the resulting knowledge with practitioners and the public. In this project, Child Trends will conduct research and development to launch a Child Trends News Service aimed at providing news reports that feature social science child-centric research. The resulting work is designed to improve outcomes for at-risk children, particularly Latinos, the largest and fastest-growing minority group among U.S. children. Working with a professional news syndication company, the Child Trends News Service will produce engaging reports for key news media outlets that feature the latest actionable social science research related to behaviors that help mitigate negative child outcomes associated with poverty, lack of education, violence, among other challenges. Child Trends will draw attention to the reports through social media and outreach to stakeholders. By airing these reports on local television news programs in English and Spanish, millions of people will have greater access to this information. This is early R&D work to demonstrate that local television stations will air these stories and to examine the audience impact—how does accessing this social science research through preferred media channels influence news audiences’ knowledge and attitudes toward specific social science research? The study will also delve deeper to better understand how news might, or might not, motivate behavioral change. The study will provide valuable lessons to the informal science education and the STEM communication science field.
The overarching aim of this project is to use commercial news to reach populations, especially Latinos, who have historically been underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and careers. The goals of the project are to:
* Leverage mass media news outlets to effectively communicate developments in social science research on child well-being and development to Latino audiences.
* Advance the field of informal STEM learning by exploring how the public interacts with actionable social science child research.
* Expand the reach and application of the news products through strategic collaborations with provider organizations serving at-risk Latino families; the child research and STEM fields; and other organizations working on Latino family issues.
Activities include the development and formative testing of the news service, the qualitative and quantitative testing of the news service's impact on audiences, and evaluation of the implementation of the project's components. The quantitative research, using a control group and treatment group, will work to establish preliminary evidence that the Child Trends News Service will result in changes in viewers' knowledge, attitudes, and intent to adopt behaviors related to child-centric social science research. The Child Trends' project team will be informed by an Advisory Board and Technical Working Group as well by working closely with Abriendo Puertas, the largest U.S. parenting education program for low-income Latino parents. Child Trends will partner with Ivanhoe Broadcast News to produce and distribute the materials. Group I&I Consultancy will evaluate the project. In year-two, Child Trends will produce a research brief on lessons learned and research outcome measures. The proposed research and development will be conducted over a two-year period; findings will inform ongoing service and additional research.
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.
Throughout the five year SciGirls CONNECT grant the independent evaluation firm Knight Williams assisted Twin Cities PBS (TPT) in a wide range of program evaluation activities. Given the project’s emphasis on a Train-the-Trainer model, the evaluation prioritized two goals: (i) assessing the various levels of CONNECT trainings from different vantage and time points, and (ii) capturing information on the implementation of SciGirls programs led by those who completed a training. This evaluation approach allowed the team to collect ongoing data over the course of the grant and share this