This document is the final evaluation report for the project, which focuses both on formative evaluation of the collaborative+interdisciplinary presentation creation process and summative evaluation of audience learning outcomes.
Modern science communication has emerged as a field of study, a body of practice and a profession. In the last 60 years, we have seen the birth of interactive science centres, university courses, the first research into science communication, and a growth in employment by research institutions, universities, museums, science centres and industry. Now Ireland has told its story.
The employment demands in STEM fields grew twice as fast as employment in non-STEM fields in the last decade, making it a matter of national importance to educate the next generation about science, engineering and the scientific process. The need to educate students about STEM is particularly pronounced in low-income, rural communities where: i) students may perceive that STEM learning has little relevance to their lives; ii) there are little, if any, STEM-related resources and infrastructure available at their schools or in their immediate areas; and iii) STEM teachers, usually one per school, often teach out of their area expertise, and lack a network from which they can learn and with which they can share experiences. Through the proposed project, middle school teachers in low-income, rural communities will partner with Dartmouth faculty and graduate students and professional science educators at the Montshire Museum of Science to develop sustainable STEM curricular units for their schools. These crosscutting units will include a series of hands-on, investigative, active learning, and standards-aligned lessons based in part on engineering design principles that may be used annually for the betterment of student learning. Once developed and tested in a classroom setting in our four pilot schools, the units will be made available to other partner schools in NH and VT and finally to any school wishing to adopt them. In addition, A STEM rural educator network, through which crosscutting units may be disseminated and teachers may share and support each other, will be created to enhance the teachers’ ability to network, seek advice, share information, etc.
The PEAR Institute: Partnerships in Education and Resilience at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School conducted a year-long study of the Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance (TRSA). Funded by the Overdeck Family Foundation, STEM Next Opportunity Fund, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, this study is the first of its kind among 68 national and international STEM Ecosystems.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kristin Lewis-WarnerPatricia AllenGil Noam
An in-depth case study of one of America’s first STEM Learning Ecosystems in Tulsa, Oklahoma, conducted by researchers at The PEAR Institute: Partnerships in Education and Resilience, finds that strong leadership, deep partnerships, and data-informed methods have led to the creation of diverse, high-quality, STEM-rich learning opportunities for Tulsa’s youth. Additionally, these efforts improved the capacity of STEM educators through high-quality professional development and supported youth pathways to STEM careers by increasing mentoring opportunities for STEM professionals.
These findings
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kristin Lewis-WarnerPatricia AllenGil Noam
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 Innovations in Development project will develop and test a model for audience assessment that STEM professionals can use during their public engagement efforts. These on-the-spot assessments will allow scientists to monitor audience understanding and use this to make immediate improvements to their activity. This project fills a critical gap in the field of public science communication as expressed by outreach scientists and by the professional and academic organizations that train them. Project partners include The Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Oregon State University, Pacific Science Center, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Research questions include: (1) How and under what conditions can scientists, regardless of discipline, learn to build assessment into outreach activities? (2) To what degree are scientists willing and able to change their outreach activities to include assessment to ascertain audience attentiveness or understanding? (3) To what degree will scientists be able to adjust their outreach and engagement efforts based on audience feedback, and what support do they need to do so? (4) With constraints on their time and resources, how can the model help scientists conduct audience assessment on their own? (5) Are audience members finding events more enjoyable and fruitful that use assessment techniques? Several iterative rounds of R&D will be used in the spiral design-based approach. A group of Design Testers will start each of the iterative cycles for the initial development and testing techniques, associated training, and support. Later phases will use Field Testers using a rubric for usability, validity, and reliability of various strategies. The summative evaluation of the project will begin early and add data over the life of the project. A mixed methods approach will be used including surveys of scientists once each year after they have participated in the Prototype training. Descriptive and inferential statistics will be used to document the extent to which the project has achieved its intended outcomes. 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.
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. The Museum of Science, Boston (MOS) and Boston University (BU) will conduct a Pilot and Feasibility Study project that leverages the current Living Laboratory (LL) model and expand it to engage high school students (teens) in experimental psychology research, science communication and science education activities. In LL, which is now an extensive network of museums and university researchers across the country, scientists and museum staff collaborate to engage children in studies on the museum floor and educate caregivers about the research. Multi-site implementation and evaluation of LL has also documented positive impacts for undergraduate researchers. Many sites are eager to extend these benefits to high school students by engaging them as practitioners within the model and by providing them with opportunities to engage in current research, education and communication, thereby helping to foster stronger youth identities with science and its applications in society. This project expands a ten-year LL partnership between MOS and BU to: 1) pilot a program in which high school students both conduct scientific research and engage the public in learning about science; 2) explore strategies for museums and universities to collaboratively engage, support and mentor high school students in science research, communication and education activities; 3) document curricular, other programmatic, and evaluation materials; and 4) convene professional participants to provide feedback on pilot materials, and assess the viability of implementing similar programs at additional sites. Guided by developmental evaluation, these activities will generate knowledge for the field, and act to increase professional capacity to integrate experiences for teens at multiple LL sites in future projects. 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.
Many scientists want to connect with the public, but their efforts to do so are not always easy or effective. Visionary programs and institutions are leading the way identifying the support needed to enable scientists’ connections with the public. However, the current appetite by -- and demand for -- scientists to do this exceeds the capacity of those who facilitate quality communication and engagement efforts. More can be done to ensure that those who support scientists are networked, sharing best practices, and supported by a reliable infrastructure.
This workshop series, convened by the Kavli, Rita Allen, Packard and Moore Foundations, was intended to view the entire system of people who support scientists’ engagement and communication efforts in order to explore how this system can be most effective and sustainable. The discussions examined where this system is thriving, the limits people within the system face and what can be done to ensure their efforts are commensurate with the demand for quality communication and engagement support.
Conducted over four closely scheduled workshops in late 2017 and early 2018, the convenings brought together leaders in different parts of the field who bridge scientists and the public and led to the emergence of a number of key priority areas. While the initial intention was to also hold a plenary event to provide a more holistic view of scientists’ support system in order to collectively discern directions to advance the field, we feel a more efficient way forward right now is to focus our efforts and resources on building community and advancing these priority areas.
Our invitation-only workshops brought together scientists, academic leaders, engagement professionals, researchers, communication trainers, and foundation leaders. For each workshop, we also commissioned a “landscape overview”, to better understand the high-level state of each community. Workshops included:
Workshop I: Communication and engagement training programs - Dec. 4-5, 2017 at SUNY Global Center/Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science in New York
Workshop II: Associations, societies and other professional organizations - Feb. 28 - March 1, 2018 at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, MD
Workshop III: Academic institutions - March 27-28, 2018 at UC San Diego
Workshop IV: Science engagement facilitators (museums, science festivals, connectors) - May 2-3, 2018 at Monterey Bay Aquarium
TBD - Workshop V: Plenary event
The goal of the workshops was to explore how to ensure scientists’ communication and engagement support is effective and sustained. In doing so, we hoped to 1) deepen our understanding of how scientists are currently supported in these areas, 2) map the broader support system to expose the opportunities and obstacles that play a role in achieving this goal, and 3) identify strategic and practical next steps that move us closer to this goal. This initiative also aimed to forge and strengthen networks across communities and institutions – and in so doing, take a view of the entire system to explore how everyone can better ensure their efforts are impactful, mutually supportive, and connected to a greater whole.
Included in the links below are summaries from each workshop.
The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) is one of the world's single largest employers of science communicators, with over 350,000 students and 40,000 staff. Its science communication activities include five museums (Universum, Museo de la Luz, the Geology Museum, Museo de la Medicina Mexicana and Musem of Geophysics), botanical gardens, as well as a wide range of cultural and outreach activities. It has several programmes for training professional science communicators. The science communication staff are spread across the campuses in Mexico City and four other cities, including
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Ana Claudia NepoteElaine Reynoso-Haynes
The primary goal of MAST-3 is to increase the diversity of students, particularly those from underrepresented groups, electing careers in NOAA related marine sciences. This is done through a multidisciplinary program that engages students in NOAA-related marine research, and explores marine policy, the heritage of African Americans and Native Americans in the coastal environment, and seamanship. MAST students use the Chesapeake Bay to understand efforts to protect, restore and manage the use of coastal and ocean resources through an ecosystem approach to management. To do this, Hampton University has formed partnerships with various NOAA labs/sites, several university laboratories, the USEPA, various museums, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and the menhaden fishing industry.
This poster was presented at the 2010 Association of Science-Technology Centers Annual Conference. The Saint Louis Science Center is a partner in Washington University's Cognitive, Computational, and Systems Neuroscience interdisciplinary graduate program funded by the NSF-IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) flagship training program for PhD scientists and engineers.
This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of an interdisciplinary graduate training program in Cognitive, Computational, and Systems Neuroscience at Washington University in Saint Louis. Understanding how the brain works under normal circumstances and how it fails are among the most important problems in science. The purpose of this program is to train a new generation of systems-level neuroscientists who will combine experimental and computational approaches from the fields of psychology, neurobiology, and engineering to study brain function in unique ways. Students will participate in a five-course core curriculum that provides a broad base of knowledge in each of the core disciplines, and culminates in a pair of highly integrative and interactive courses that emphasize critical thinking and analysis skills, as well as practical skills for developing interdisciplinary research projects. This program also includes workshops aimed at developing the personal and professional skills that students need to become successful independent investigators and educators, as well as outreach programs aimed at communicating the goals and promise of integrative neuroscience to the general public. This training program will be tightly coupled to a new research focus involving neuro-imaging in nonhuman primates. By building upon existing strengths at Washington University, this research and training initiative will provide critical new insights into how the non-invasive measurements of brain function that are available in humans (e.g. from functional MRI) are related to the underlying activity patterns in neuronal circuits of the brain. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kurt ThoroughmanGregory DeAngelisRandy BucknerSteven PetersenDora Angelaki