Framing: Broadening participation and achieving equitable outcomes has been a core goal of the science museum field for over two decades. However, how to make progress has proven an intractable problem.
Methods: Focusing on five organizations who officially committed to diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI) by participating in a national professional development program, the researchers investigate how science museums attempt to enact internally-focused change via a mixed methods case study.
Findings: While these organizations considered a variety of structurally focused change
The pilot test for Changemakers: Advancing Community Science Literacy was a capacity building program integrating strategic discourse & community change theory that identified a new path for advancing community STEM literacies. The results of experiment established partnerships with locally based non-profits, and a collaborative effort to address environmental justice and social disparities in areas threatened by climate change.
The evaluation was underaken with instruments developed for multiple research projects to support cross-project comparative analysis.
This instrumemts presented
The pilot test of a capacity building program integrating strategic discourse & community change theory identified a new path for advancing community STEM literacies. The results of experiment established partnerships with locally based non-profits working to address environmental justice and social disparities in areas threatened by climate change identified five recommendations to reset the role of ISLC’s as more relevant to the communities: 1) Allocate Time to Build Relationships; 2) Develop a Shared Definition of Resilience; 3) Situate Community Aspirations as Context for STEM Learning; 4)
The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Research+Practice Collaboratory in 2012 to develop strategies for (1) making educational research more usable for educators, and (2) helping educators and researchers productively collaborate to advance research on educational effectiveness.
The Collaboratory comprised four partnering teams. Three of these teams were researchpractice partnerships (RPPs) that functioned as demonstration sites or “local labs.” Together, they pursued a shared commitment to improving quality and equity in STEM education while respectively, they selected different
DATE:
TEAM MEMBERS:
Kea AndersonTim PodkulCorinne SingletonCynthia D'Angelo
resourceevaluationProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The One Sky Institute (One Sky) was an NSF-funded Exploratory Pathways project aimed at developing a new strategy to broaden participation in informal science education. The program emerged from the current need to expand professional development to help increase and support a more diverse cadre of leaders in ISE. One Sky tested professional learning design strategies for mentoring program participants and engaging them in research and practice by developing equity-focused projects at their home institutions in order to: 1) build new knowledge about broadening participation and the barriers
The attached evaluation is of the A2A (Awareness to Action) Planning Workshop held February 21-23 in two locations simultaneously connected by internet: the University of Colorado, Boulder and Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. It was made possible thanks to a collaboration of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and EcoArts Connections, with additional assistance from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. A2A brought together 39 natural and social scientists, artists, urban planners, “sustainablists” (e.g. sustainability professionals working in a variety
This study researched whether and how affiliation with the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISE Net) led to change in informal science education organizations’ (ISEs) practices. The NISE Net provided an opportunity to look at how participation in a large but loosely-structured network of museums, science centers, educators, and scientists can influence museums to experience organizational change and adopt new practices.
By conducting qualitative case studies of a few selected partners, this research aimed to understand the conditions that facilitate or impede the influence of
In 2016, ETR received a National Science Foundation grant to study, under Principal Investigator Louise Ann (“Lou Ann”) Lyon, PhD, a newly formed, real-world organization dedicated to helping women in the workforce learn to write computer code. This project formed a partnership between a research team with experience in computer science (CS) education and learning sciences research and a newly fashioned practitioner team focused on building a grassroots, informal, volunteer group created to help women help themselves and others learn to write computer code. This research-practitioner
This report summarizes the evaluation outcomes of the Collaborative Project Management (CoPM) Institute project, a two-day convening centered on bringing proven project management skills and approaches in the for-profit world to the informal science education (ISE) community to support effective collaborations and successful outcomes. The CoPM Institute was conceptualized as a pilot effort to test the effectiveness of porting of tools and frameworks for collaborative project management from the business/for-profit environment to advance the following project goals:
Build the capacity of
As part of a grant from the National Science Foundation, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) is conducting regional STEM workshops in partnership with local science museums, entitled NFB STEM2U, for blind youth [youth], grades 3 – 6 and 9-12 [apprentices]. During the sixth and final regional workshop in Minneapolis, MN, the NFB operated two different programs simultaneously: one program for youth and a second program for their parents/caregivers. A third program, for the Science Museum of Minnesota staff, was conducted earlier to prepare the museum staff to assist with the youth program
The National Federation of the Blind (NFB), in partnership with scholars from Utah State University and educators from the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM), has developed the Spatial Ability and Blind Engineering Research (SABER) project to assess and improve the spatial ability of blind teens in order to broaden the participation of blind students in STEM fields.
Activities began this summer (2018) with a week-long, residential engineering design program for thirty blind high school students at NFB headquarters in Baltimore. The evaluation focused on perceptions of process and measures of
In June of 2017, the Exploratorium hosted the GENIAL Summit which brought together approximately 91 practitioners, community leaders, diversity-focused organization staff, researchers, and media/marketing specialists from across the country and Puerto Rico for a one and a half day gathering. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Summit focused on increasing Latino participation in Informal STEM Learning (ISL) environments by examining these five content strands identified by the GENIAL team:
1. Latino Audiences
2. Marketing, Communicating, and Media
3. Community Collaboration and