The fields of science education and science communication are said to have developed as disparate fields of research and practice, operating based on somewhat different logics and premises about their audiences. As the two fields share many of the same goals, arguments have been made for a rapprochement between the two. Drawing inspiration from a historical debate between the scholars John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, the present article is a case-oriented theoretical contribution applying models from science education and science communication in relation to a current socio-scientific issue
Chicago's DuSable Museum of African American History will develop and present the "Exploration of African American Physicians and Surgeons" project with an overall goal to expose young people in the community to the opportunities and benefits of STEM education. Project components will include educational programming, lectures, and an historical exhibition revolving around African American contributions and achievements within the world of medicine. The exhibition will focus on work of Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the founder of Chicago's Provident Hospital, the first non-segregated hospital in the United States. Dr. Williams was the first general surgeon to perform a documented and successful pericardium surgical procedure to repair a wound. The project's educational programming will explore the ways in which other African American doctors broke down racial barriers within the field of medicine.
In November 2020, President-elect Joe Biden identified four priority areas for the incoming administration: COVID-19; climate change, economic recovery, and racial equity. These crucial areas of national interest will be the focus of media attention, policy debates, funding initiatives, and community discussions over the next four years. Will museums be part of these important conversations and initiatives? Are there opportunities for museums to affirm or to reposition their roles within the difficult public deliberations ahead? Addressing Societal Challenges through STEM (ASCs) is a research
This RAPID award is made by the AISL program in the Division of Research on Learning in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, using funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. COVID-19 presents a national threat to the health of children and families, presenting serious implications for the mental and physical health of children. This project addresses two critical aspects of the impact on COVID-19 on families: (a) the large-scale shift to at-home learning based on nationwide school closures and (b) the critical need for families to understand the basic science of virus transmission and prevention. To address these needs, the project team will develop a series of STEM activities for families with children in grades K-6 that make use of items readily available in most households. The activities help children and their families learn about viruses, virus transmission, and virus prevention while also developing other STEM-skills, particularly related to engineering design. Importantly, the project team also considers the emotional well-being of children and families during the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Led by researchers from Indiana University and Binghamton University, and experts in educational resource development from Science Friday (a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the public's access to science and scientific information through podcasts, digital videos, original web articles, and educational resources for teachers and informal educators) the project is further supported by partnerships with the New York Hall of Science, Amazeum (AR), the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (ME), The Tech Museum of Innovation (CA), the Indiana State Museum, and Kopernik Observatory Science Center (NY). The activities will be shared with families through live-streamed web sessions that introduce the activity, give tips to adults for facilitation, share a bit on related STEM careers and engage the audience in dialog about the activity and their current experiences. Versions of the sessions that are recorded will be edited and include closed-captioning and subtitles in multiple languages before being posted on platforms such as YouTube.
This project uses a design-based research approach to investigate strategies for enabling families to actively engage with STEM while home and away from their traditional institutions during a period of crisis. The research components focus on:
Engagement: How do families engage in the activity tasks, in terms of processes, practices, and use of resources? Who participated, why did they choose to participate and how did they engage (including modification of activities)? What barriers prevented interested families from completing activities?
Impact: How did the activities change participants? feelings of: a) efficacy around STEM and b) connectedness/ isolation, during extended school closures?
The Activities: Which activities had the greatest uptake? How many activity ideas were submitted by those outside of the team? What was the age/content focus of each of these activities?
The researchers will analyze social media data (including data on resource downloads and use of tracked links, YouTube and Facebook views, comment threads during livestreams and Likes/Shares/Follows across social media sites) to refine and improve the activities and programming as well as learn about the ways families are engaging in the activities. The researchers will solicit survey responses from website visitors to gather more information on participants, why they participated, how they engaged and how the activities impacted participants? efficacy around STEM and their feelings of connectedness or isolation. The researchers will also ask participants to submit images, videos and text that describes what they are making and their process along the way. Analysis of this data would lead to insights on how children and families use STEM language and practices; how children and families ask questions and use COVID-19-related and other information as part of their design work; and how ideas are formed, shaped and refined as families engage in design and making. While the project focuses on a unique opportunity to collect data on family STEM engagement as families respond to disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, this project and its findings will provide a knowledge base that can be utilized to inform future responses to national emergencies, other work aimed at promoting family learning at home, and approaches to supporting children in open-ended problem solving.
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.
Exploratorium’s The Phenomenal Genome: Evolving Public Understanding of Genetics in the Post-Mendelian Era project addresses the increasing need to develop genomic literacy in the public at large. The explosion of genomics research over the past two decades has led to an increasingly complex picture of the determinants of human health and human phenotypes, and the applications of this research are now making their way into the clinic, the media, and the hands of consumers. The goal of this project is to create a model for increasing genomic literacy through Informal Science Education programming (ISE), creating a pathway for better decision making for the health of individuals and society at large. The Phenomenal Genome focuses on general science museum visitors and teachers of middle and high school students.
The core of the Exploratorium’s approach to science education is the creation of intriguing, provocative and investigable phenomena that are experienced directly and personally through exhibits, facilitated explorations, programs, and teacher professional development. Over two years, we will develop, test, and iterate inquiry-based professional development to help teachers develop understanding and integrate the principles of contemporary genomics and genetics into their classrooms. 120 middle and high school teachers will be served during this period, and many more beyond that, as the activities and workshops developed become a regular part of our teacher professional development programming. A learning scientist specializing in teacher learning will conduct research to determine which approaches and experiences are most effective for this context, and why.
In a parallel process, we will develop and test exhibits and experiences on the museum floor for museum visitors, using a similar iterative process of prototype testing with an embedded learning scientist to study visitor learning. We plan to define the approaches that work across audiences and contexts, as well as those that work best in particular contexts.
Through this work, we will develop new resources for teaching and learning contemporary genomics and genetics, and identify promising practices in communicating contemporary genomics and genetics in informal spaces across audiences. We will disseminate our findings via conferences, peer-reviewed articles, and workshops for the ISE community.
For nearly 20 years, the UAB Center for Community OutReach Development (CORD) has conducted SEPA funded research that has greatly enhanced the number of minority students entering the pipeline to college and biomedical careers, e.g., nearly all of CORD’s Summer Research Interns since 1998 (>300) have completed/are completing college and most of them are continuing on to graduate biomedical research and/or clinical training and careers. CORD’s programs that focused on high and middle school students have drawn many minority students into biomedical careers, but a low percentage of minority students benefit from these programs because far too many are already left behind academically in grades 4-6, due, at least in part, to a significant drop in science grades between grades 4 and 6, a drop from which most students never recover. A major contributor to this effect is that most grade 4-6 teachers in predominantly minority schools lack significant formal training in science and often are not fully aware of the great opportunities offered by biomedical careers.
In SEEC II, CORD will deliver intensive inquiry-based science training to grade 4-6 teachers, providing them with science content and hands-on science experiences that will afford their student both content and skills that will make them excited about, and competitive for, the advanced courses needed to move into biomedical research careers. SEEC II will also link teachers together across the elementary/middle school divide and bring the teachers together with administrators and parents, who will experience firsthand the excitement that inquiry learning brings and the significant advancement it provides in science and in reading and math. At monthly meetings and large annual celebrations, the parents, teachers and administrators will learn about the opportunities that biomedical careers can provide for the student who is well prepared. They will also consider the financial and educational steps required to ensure that students have the ability to reach these professions.
SEEC II will also expand CORD’s middle school LabWorks and Summer Science Camps to include grade 4-5 students and provide the teachers with professional learning in informal settings. During summer training, in small groups, the teachers will expand one of the inquiry-based science activities that they complete in the training, and they will use these in their classrooms and communicate with the others in their group to perfect these experiences in the school year. Finally, the teachers and grade 4-5 students will develop science and engineering fair-type research projects with which they will compete both on the school level and at the annual meeting. Thus, the students will share with their parents the excitement that science brings. The Intellectual Merit of SEEC II will be to test a model to enhance grade 4-6 teacher development and vertical alignment, providing science content, exposure to biomedical scientists and training in participatory science experiments, thus positioning teachers to succeed. The Broader Impacts will include the translation and testing of a science education model to assist minority students to avoid the middle school plunge and reach biomedical careers.
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.
Citizen science is a form of Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) in which the participants are engaged in the scientific process to support research that results in scientifically valid data. Opportunities for participation in real and authentic scientific research have never been larger or broader than they are today. The growing popularity and refinement of PPSR efforts (such as birding and species counting studies orchestrated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology) have created both an opportunity for science engagement and a need for more research to better implement such projects in order to maximize both benefits to and contributions from the public.
Towards this end, Shirk et al. have posted a design framework for PPSR projects that delineates distinct levels of citizen scientist participation; from the least to the highest level of participation, these categories are contract, contribute, collaborate, co-create, and colleagues. The distinctions among these levels are important to practitioners seeking to design effective citizen science programs as each increase in citizen science participation in the scientific process is hypothesized to have both benefits and obstacles. The literature on citizen science models of PPSR calls for more research on the role that this degree of participation plays in the quality of that participation and related learning outcomes (e.g., Shirk et al., 2012; Bonney et al., 2009). With an unprecedented interest in thoughtfully incorporating citizen science into health-based studies, citizen science practitioners and health researchers first need a better understanding of the role of culture in how different communities approach and perceive participation in health-related studies, the true impact of intended educational efforts from participation, and the role participation in general has on the scientific process and the science outcome.
Project goal to address critical barrier in the field: Establish best practices for use of citizen science in the content area of human health-based research, and better inform the design of future projects in PPSR, both in the Denver Museum of Nature & Science’s Genetics of Taste Lab (Lab), and importantly, in various research and educational settings across the field.
Aims
Understand who currently engages in citizen science projects in order to design strategies to overcome the barriers to participation that occur at each level of the PPSR framework, particularly among audiences underrepresented in STEM.
Significantly advance the current knowledge regarding how citizen scientists engage in, and learn from, and participate in the different levels of the PPSR framework.
Determine the impact that each stage of citizen science participation has on the scientific process.
Museums in the US receive approximately 55 million visits each year from students in school groups. Field trip visits to an art museum have been found to positively impact critical thinking skills, empathy and tolerance - an increase that can be even more significant for youth from rural or high-poverty regions. While field trips are popular, especially at science museums, there have been no experimental studies about their impact on STEM career choices and interests, much less any which used a culturally sensitive and responsive approach. Given the resources put into field trips, this study investigates if causal links can be drawn between museum experiences and impact on youth. The Museum of Science & Industry uses a Learning Labs approach for engaging its visitors. These "Learning Labs" are facilitated experiences that run roughly an hour. Currently there are 12 lab topics. This study focuses on MedLab--one of the learning labs--as the setting for the research. MedLab is designed for on-site and online experience using ultra-sophisticated and highly versatile technology in challenges taken from research on the top healthcare issues that face adolescents in their communities.
This study is informed by research and theory on Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) and Racial and Ethnic Identity. The former describes a process many follow when thinking about career options, broadly. The latter describes how people see themselves in the world through their membership with a racial and/or ethnic group. Both processes can collectively influence STEM career choices. This study follows an embedded mixed-method design. The quantitative portion includes an experimental, pre/post/delayed post-test design of both educators and their students using multiple measures taken mostly from previously published instruments. The qualitative portion includes observation rubrics of MedLab sessions along with interviews and focus groups with staff, educators, students and families that take place both within and outside of the museum. This is an experimental study of moderate size of both heterogeneous teacher and student populations in real world settings. It involves comparing youth and educators that participate in MedLab with those who do not. By conducting research that looks at each community through the lens of their unique experiences, the research will measure their impact more sensitively and authentically, addressing a gap in current literature on informal science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) career education with diverse students.
This study is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program and the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.
Families play a large role in igniting children's interest in science pathways, but they may not always have access to high-quality materials that demonstrate clear connections between science and their daily lives. This project will address this issue by developing high-interest materials that teach the science of food preparation to families with children ages 7-13. These materials include the following four components: (a) Food Labs, food-based investigations taking place in museums or in food service facilities; (b) take-home kits allowing families to conduct similar types of Food Labs at home; (c) a series of question starters called Promoting Interest and Engagement in Science (PIES) designed to facilitate meaningful family conversations around food preparation; and (d) a mobile app designed to deepen families' understandings of relevant science concepts and containing embedded measures of STEM learning. This project will advance knowledge regarding features of take-home materials that foster family science learning and ignite children's interest in science pathways.
This Innovations in Development Project will result in empirically-tested instructional materials that support families, with children ages 7-13, in conducting scientific investigations and holding scientific conversations related to food preparation. Kent State University, in partnership with The Cincinnati Museum Center and La Soupe, a food service provider for families who face food insecurity, will collaboratively develop and test the four interrelated sets of instructional materials mentioned above that are designed to deepen families' scientific content knowledge related to the chemistry of food preparation. To iteratively design and evaluate these materials, the team will conduct both laboratory and in-vivo experiments using a Solomon design with a pre- and post-demonstration survey. The survey will measure children's interest, knowledge, and engagement. For a month after interacting with instructional materials, families will document their science activity at home through the app. Additionally, through analyzing audio-recordings, the team will determine whether and how families ask questions using the PIES materials. Finally, post-demonstration interviews with participating families will focus on the usability and accessibility of the instructional materials. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the pre-post surveys, interview transcripts, and audio-recordings will be used to improve the instructional materials, and the revised materials will be re-assessed using the same experimental methods and outcome measures. The final set of instructional materials will be developed and widely disseminated for easy use at other science museums, food service providers, and in families' homes. This project leverages partnerships to generate empirical knowledge on features of learning environments that support family science learning and engagement, resulting in empirically-based materials designed to broaden participation in science. 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 project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.