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 Montana Natural History Center, in collaboration with the University of Montana, will develop an exhibit to showcase a selection of the university's extensive fossil collection. This new exhibit will help create inclusive, inquiry-based, educational opportunities for preschoolers through adults. University faculty will guide specimen interpretation and story development. The exhibit will explore modern research into evolution in a time of climate change, sharing ongoing university research and highlighting STEM careers and citizen science work. The project is based on interests identified through surveys, museum visitor recommendations, and a member focus group.
With input from its community and benchmarking against other natural history museums across the nation, the Delaware Museum of Natural History will transform its exhibits from static, taxonomy-based dioramas to interactive, ecosystem-driven engagement areas with more relevant STEM content and stories. The museum will work with an exhibit design firm to develop interpretive content, exhibit design, and related elements. Project activities will also include testing of exhibit prototypes and workshops for museum staff on best practices in evaluation. A final design development package will be presented to the Board of Trustees for approval and the museum will change its name to the Delaware Museum of Nature and Science.
The Palo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo will create the California Dinosaur Garden exhibition, an inclusive environment for children ages 3 to 11 that promotes science learning. The museum will employ sensory-rich storytelling and interactive experiences to engage children and their caregivers. Project activities will include the completion of initial concept designs and evaluation to inform exhibit development; design development, prototyping, and formative evaluation; and engaging external contractors to fabricate and install the exhibit. The exhibition will include prehistoric plants within a seasonal marsh landscape, interactive interpretive exhibits, a fossil dig, and life-size dinosaur sculptures. The project will also address the need for science learning experiences for children with disabilities by applying universal design principals such as wheelchair access to the garden experience, braille labels, and tactile, sensory-rich elements.
The Cincinnati Museum Center will develop a permanent exhibition to showcase its invertebrate paleontology collection and develop related educational programming that builds on a strong commitment to gender equity. Using focus groups, prototypes, surveys, and feedback from existing programs, the museum will incorporate community input from key audiences into the design of the 4,800 square-foot immersive gallery, which will blend science, history, and technology. The museum will engage external designers to create schematic and final exhibit designs. The museum will develop and test related educational programs for families and students, with a special focus on engaging girls ages 7 to 14 in STEM activities.
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.
This is an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, under the program Broadening Participation of Groups Under-represented in Biology. The fellow, Robert Habig, is conducting research and receiving training that is increasing the participation of groups underrepresented in biology. The fellow is being mentored by David Lahti at Queens College, City University of New York. The goal of the fellow's project is to perform a comparative evolutionary analysis of nest construction in the weaverbirds (Ploceus spp.). The evolutionary history of behavior can be nearly intractable and resistant to quantitative analysis. One strategy for illuminating our understanding of behavioral evolution is to conduct comparative studies of animal architectures, such as nests. Unlike behaviors themselves, nests persist through time, and have structures that can be disassociated into several quantitative features, which permits easy and comparable measurements and allows scientists to address questions about evolutionary history and functional relevance. The fellow's research addresses two major questions: (1) How do patterns of nest construction vary within and between species? (2) How do interrelated evolutionary processes shape variation in nest structure? This project is important for advancing foundational scientific knowledge, and will be the first study of weavers incorporating both molecular data and nest morphology to better understand the evolutionary underpinnings of a complex behavioral process. The fellow is also broadening participation in science by mentoring students underrepresented in biology.
The Fellow will reconstruct the evolution of nest construction in Ploceus weaverbirds incorporating advanced phylogenetic and morphological techniques including bioinformatics, computer modeling, X-ray computed tomography, and image processing. The Fellow will also conduct fieldwork in two hotspots of weaverbird diversity, the Awash Valley in Ethiopia and the Limpopo Province of South Africa, and collect behavioral data (e.g. rates of predation and brood parasitism; mating and parental behavior) and morphological data (e.g. nest structure) to test hypotheses of how distinct types of evolutionary selection shape the evolution of nest construction. The proposed comparative study can thus address questions such as how rapidly certain nest structural features evolve, which features are ancestral versus derived, which tend to exhibit phylogenetic signal, and which evolve in response to environmental features. The Fellow is receiving training in three-dimensional morphological analyses, phylogenetic tree construction, bioinformatics, computer modeling, and mentoring skills. The plan to broaden participation includes (1) recruitment, training, and mentoring of Queens College students from underrepresented groups in biology; (2) designing an evolutionary biology curriculum that ties in the research of the fellowship; (3) teaching an evolutionary biology class to underrepresented middle and high school students at the American Museum of Natural History; and (4) facilitating a research team for middle school and high school students.
The RASOR project is designed to increase engagement of students from rural Alaska communities in biomedical/STEM careers. Rural Alaskan communities are home to students of intersecting identities underrepresented in biomedical science, including Alaska Native, low-income, first generation college, and rural. Geographic isolation defines these communities and can limit the exposure of students to scientifically-minded peers, professional role models, and science career pathways. However these students also have a particularly strong environmental connection through subsistence and recreational activities, which makes the one-health approach to bio-medicine an intuitive and effective route for introducing scientific research and STEM content. In RASOR, we will implement place-based mentored research projects with students in rural Alaskan communities at the high school level, when most students are beginning to seriously consider career paths. The biomedical one-health approach will build connections between student experiences of village life in rural Alaska and biomedical research. Engaging undergraduate students in research has proved one of the most successful means of increasing the persistence of minority students in science (Kuh 2008). Furthermore, RASOR will integrate high school students into community-based participatory research (Israel et al. 2005). This approach is designed to demonstrate the practicality of scientific research, that science has the ability to support community and cultural priorities and to provide career pathways for individual community members. The one-health approach will provide continuity with BLaST, an NIH-funded BUILD program that provides undergraduate biomedical students with guidance and support. RASOR will work closely with BLaST, implementing among younger (pre-BLaST) students approaches that have been successful for retaining rural Alaska students along STEM pathways and tracking of post-RASOR students. Alaska Native and rural Alaska students are a unique and diverse population underrepresented in biomedical science and STEM fields.
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.
Escape rooms are an engaging and increasingly popular game format in which a team of players is “locked” in a room and challenged to solve a series of narrative-embedded puzzles encoded in the room’s artifacts in order to “escape” within a set period of time. The University of California Museum of Paleontology, with partners University of Kansas Natural History Museum and the California Academy of Sciences, aim to develop, evaluate, and disseminate a “serious game” (i.e., a game designed for a purpose other than entertainment) based on the escape room model. Our traveling/loanable pop-up escape room and associated extension activities will engage diverse families (ages 8 and up) in museums and libraries in solving a biomedical mystery that teaches fundamental concepts in biology, engages critical-thinking and collaboration skills, and stimulates interest in biomedical careers. STEM Escape will address NGSS-aligned content central to medical research – in particular, it will communicate basic concepts regarding evolutionary relationships, a topic with relevance to a wide variety of medical applications, such as determining the source of emerging infectious diseases, tracking the progression of disease within a host, and identifying new medicines. The project is designed to lay the groundwork for extended family interactions surrounding scientific content and biomedical careers. The immersive game will be supplemented by a set of solo and docent-led follow-up activities that reinforce key concepts and emphasize connections between players’ experience in the game and biomedical research careers. Learners will also receive takeaway media (e.g., activity book) that highlights a diverse set of NIH-funded researchers whose work directly relies on evolutionary patterns/processes. Caregivers will have the option of receiving a follow-up email with free at-home activities. The themed inflatable pop-up room will be wheelchair-accessible and all materials will be bilingual in English and Spanish. The STEM Escape experience will be developed with and for the diverse audiences visiting urban/suburban natural history museums and libraries, as well as with and for rural families, whom we will reach through rural libraries. The project will also produce and evaluate a suite of support materials to facilitate institutional adoption and deployment of the experience. Nine host sites across the country have committed to hosting the room (with an additional two sites in the planning stages), and after the life of the grant, the room will continue to make an impact as a rentable traveling exhibit. Long term, this project will improve the public’s understanding of medically relevant evolutionary content, increase interest in biomedical careers, particularly among underserved groups targeted, and improve our understanding of how immersive games can be used to serve educational objectives.