A frequently missing element in environmental education programs is a concerted effort by communities, organizations, government, and academic stakeholders to build meaningful partnerships and cultivate informal science learning opportunities via public participation in environmental research. This collaborative approach not only makes scientific information more readily available, it also engages community members in the processes of scientific inquiry, synthesis, data interpretation, and the translation of results into action. This project will build a co-created citizen science program coupled with a peer education model and an extensive communication of results to increase environmental STEM literacy. The project targets historically underrepresented populations that are likely to be disproportionately impacted by climate, water scarcity, and food security. Based upon past needs assessments in the targeted communities, gardens irrigated by harvested rainwater will become hubs for environmental STEM education and research. For this project, gardens irrigated by harvested rainwater will serve as hubs for environmental literacy education efforts. Researchers from the University of Arizona and Sonora Environmental Research Institute will work alongside community environmental health workers, who will then train families residing in environmentally compromised areas (urban and rural) on how to monitor their soil, plant, and harvested water quality. The project aims to: (1) co-produce environmental monitoring, exposure, and risk data in a form that will be directly relevant to the participants' lives, (2) increase the community's involvement in environmental decision-making, and (3) improve environmental STEM literacy and learning in underserved rural and urban communities. The project will investigate and gather extensive quantitative and quantitative data to understand how: (1) participation in a co-created citizen science project enhances a participant's overall environmental STEM literacy; (2) a peer-education model coupled with a co-created citizen science program affects participation of historically underrepresented groups in citizen science; and (3) the environmental monitoring approach influences the participant's environmental health learning outcomes and understanding of the scientific method. In parallel, this project will evaluate the role of local-based knowledge mediators and different mechanisms to communicate results. These findings will advance the fields of informal science education, environmental science, and risk communication. Concomitantly, the project will facilitate the co-generation of a robust dataset that will not only inform guidelines and recommendations for harvested rainwater use, it will build capacity in underserved communities and inform the safe and sustainable production of food sources. This research effort is especially critical for populations in arid and semiarid environments, which account for ~40% of the global land area and are inhabited by one-third of the world's population. This program will be available in English and Spanish and can truly democratize environmental STEM research and policy. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understandings of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments.
This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understandings of, the design and development of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) learning in informal environments. Roughly one million refugees resettled in the United States in the past decade, many of whom are school-aged youth. During secondary school, resettled refugee youth are often still developing English language literacy and STEM skills needed for successful postsecondary experiences in the United States. At the same time, these youth bring rich cultural and linguistic resources that they can use as an asset as they grow their STEM skill sets, prepare for future success, and make positive impacts on U.S. society. To promote these assets and engage youth in developing STEM literacy, this after-school program engages these youth in critical STEM literacy development. The project focuses on STEM learning, specifically the relationship between human life and climate, as well as developing youths' STEM identities and agency.
The project will develop and implement a community-based afterschool program that provides resettled Burmese refugee youth with STEM learning experiences. By drawing upon youths' experiences, the program will engage youth in learning about climate science and developing digital stories to communicate with broader audiences. To do so, the team will implement a program that builds on principles of responsive teaching, funds of knowledge, and English literacy development in authentic meaning-making contexts. The project will examine how youth expand their STEM knowledge, develop STEM identities and agency, and develop their expertise in communicating about STEM within and beyond their participation in the after-school program. The research team will explore existing and innovative data collection and analysis methods by drawing on principles of ethnography, video ethnography, mediated discourse analysis, and phenomenological and ethnomethodological analysis of interviews. These analyses will document learning over time in informal STEM learning settings. As there is very little prior research on STEM learning in this population, this project will generate knowledge about how to support STEM sense-making and critical STEM literacy. Furthermore, by testing the designed curriculum and building a partnership with a local community organization, the project will build capacity for broadening participation in informal STEM learning practices.
The project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. Sustainability science is an emerging field that addresses the challenges of meeting human needs without harm to the environment, and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. A strong scientific workforce requires individuals educated and trained in interdisciplinary research and thinking, especially in the area of sustainability science. With the SEES Fellowship support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish herself in an independent research career related to sustainability. This project builds upon Resiliency Theory and theories of applied community participation to explore two specific contexts of participatory communication (i.e., processes of collective learning and shared meaning) at the science-society interface: (1) adaptive co-management meetings in New Mexico and Oklahoma, and (2) existing education efforts by drought scientists at two Great Plains universities (Oklahoma State University and University of Nebraska-Lincoln). A mixed methods approach (including, household surveys, oral histories, key informant interviews, and pilot tests) will model community-partnership capacity for drought adaptation in Cimarron (OK) and Union (NM) Counties, and assess the impact of community-academic partnerships on drought literacy and adaptive capacity across the Great Plains. Research in adaptive co-management meetings and interactive media (as contexts for participatory communication between scientists and citizens) provides the context for innovative case study research on the role of public communication about science in community drought adaptation.
Collaboration in case study research with Host Mentor Vadjunec and outreach efforts with Partner Institution Mentor Thomas (UNL) offers a unique opportunity to research the intersections of participatory communication and scientific literacy about the human and climatic drivers of extreme drought. The core research questions addressed by this proposal are, (1) What formal and informal pathways, players, and partnerships exist for participatory communication between scientists and citizens about drought vulnerability and adaptation, (2) How does communication about drought risk and recovery inform the effective diffusion and translation of drought literacy efforts in the Great Plains, and (3) How can we design forums and spaces for sustained interaction (i.e., engagement and collective learning) between stakeholders involved in adaptive drought communication? The project objectives uniquely related to advancing research at the intersections of sustainability science and education are, (1) to identify dimensions of community and partnership capacity for drought education and pathways of adaptive drought communication across scales, (2) to advance dynamic participatory models which assist in the adaptive co-management of water resources in local communities (i.e., increasing citizen-science dialogue, mobilizing community leaders, and fostering the drought education partnerships), and (3) to design and measure the success of drought literacy efforts based on inputs from sustainability scientists at various stages of community decision-making. The adaptive drought co-management workshops in NM and OK provide spaces for stakeholder interaction, which may lead to new approaches, innovations, and learning outcomes for communities in those regions. Outreach partnerships with UNL maximize dissemination of user-friendly and culturally-relevant drought outreach products, including a project website to consolidate scientific knowledge about drought in the Great Plains and interactive media templates. Interdisciplinary collaborations and research findings will inform efforts in academic community partnerships for sustainable practices across many NSF-supported disciplines.
The goal of this three-year initiative is to expand the implementation of a currently active and proven climate education method delivered by TV weathercasters around the country. The work is a partnership of George Mason University, Yale University, Climate Central (a non-profit climate science research and media production organization), the American Meteorological Society, and NOAA and NASA. This project will include four activities: (1) recruiting 200 TV more weathercasters nationwide (currently just over 100 are participating); (2) providing participating weathercasters with professional development activities and training on use of Climate Matters materials to help them become confident and competent climate educators; (3) developing and distributing to participating weathercasters timely, localized, broadcast-ready graphics and science information, when possible tied to local weather and climatic events, to make it easy for them to educate their viewers about the local relationships between the climate and the weather; and (4) research and evaluation activities to improve the rate of use and effectiveness of Climate Matters materials by weathercasters over time and to study the effect on learning about climate by the public. Learning outcomes by the public will be evaluated using a quasi-experimental method with nationally representative surveys of the public, conducted twice per year over the course of the project. The guiding hypothesis is that there will be a dose-response relationship between the extent of TV weathercaster use of Climate Matters materials in a community (i.e., a media market) and change over time in viewers' understanding of the climate. The development of Climate Matters is based on theories of informal and experiential learning. The scaling up of the initiative applies methods derived from diffusion of innovation and social marketing theories.
This project by teams at the University of Alaska and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry will engage the public in the topic of the nature and prevalence of permafrost, its scale on the earth and the important role it plays in the global climate. It builds on 50 years of informal education and outreach at the Alaskan Permafrost Tunnel near Fairbanks, AK, which, since the 1960s, has been the Nation's only underground facility for research related to permafrost and climate. The project has four components: (1) a nationally distributed 2,000 square-foot traveling exhibition; (2) exhibit and program enhancements to the learning opportunities at the tunnel; (3) programs, table-top exhibits and oral history research in 27 Native Alaskan villages; and (4) an education research study. Each of these components will be evaluated over the course of the work. By upgrading the displays at the tunnel, and by taking traveling programs to the villages, the work will extend the tunnel experience across Alaska. In the villages the team will collect stories about climate change, along with samples of real ancient ice and permafrost. These stories and materials will be used in the traveling exhibit which is expected to be at three museums per year for eight years. The research component of the initiative will build on the observation to date that the tunnel has provided thousands of visitors with an underground immersive environment where they learn about the science research being conducted and engage with climate-sensitive materials (e.g., permafrost, wedge ice, frozen silt, Pleistocene bones) using all of their senses. It has been conjectured that their learning experiences are enhanced by interacting with real vs. replicated objects. As museums often contain exhibits that are more likely to contain replicated and/or virtual objects and environments, understanding the impact that these different categories of objects have on learning is important. Using both types of materials, the project will investigate differences in their efficacy in informal science learning institutions related to climate change. Real objects are postulated to have the following attributes that stimulate fuller engagement; they are (1) information-rich by virtue of such features as their texture, odor, and dimensionality; (2) at real-life scale; (3) authentic, i.e., original objects; and (4) often unique, i.e., have inherent value. Research questions will explore the potential impacts on learning of these and related features. Methods employed will be observation, video, and interviews of the public with a particular focus on visitor talk with respect to explanations and elaborations about permafrost, tipping points, climate change, and geological time.
This early-stage design and development, integrated media and research project will contribute important new understandings to the informal science learning literature by exploring science engagement on social media when integrated with broadcast television. It will help answer questions including: What does such engagement look like? Who participates? How and why does it happen? and What is the degree or depth of engagement? The project builds on the previous successful work by WGBH nationally distributing the television series NOVA scienceNOW and the research expertise of EDC. WGBH's NOVA scienceNOW program will collaborate with EDC to develop new metrics to understand how and why learners engage with science on social media. Deliverables will include six one-hour episodes of NOVA scienceNOW, short online videos, moderated online discussion events, and an online film festival. A new social Media Initiative will develop six live broadcast microblogging events, six post-broadcast online discussion events, daily social media updates, and an online film festival that will feature user generated videos. A range of STEM content in the videos and online posts will be framed around big science and engineering questions such as animal communication and survival systems, the biology of sleep, climate change, new technologies, energy, genetics, and natural disasters. The continued innovations and expansion of social media channels provides significant new opportunities for providing learner's access to high quality science content, researchers, and opportunities to participate in science. In the first phase of this work to deepen the evidence based understanding of how social media supports informal science engagement, NOVA and EDC will collaborate to develop new measurement instruments: (1) a Network Profile to quantitatively represent the size and activity of NOVA's social media network; (2) an Informal Science Engagement (ISE) index to measure the degree of engagement by coding and analyzing conversations and posts; (3) a Follower Profile to assess the degree of activity and the nature of the engagement; and (4) a Science Social Media Engagement survey instrument. They will then use these measures and data collection protocols to explore whether and how the initiative might influence science engagement. External expert reviewers with content and methodological expertise will review all aspects of the project at critical junctures. This project will contribute important new knowledge and research instruments and methods to better understand how the learning opportunities of social media channels can be realized most effectively. This has significant potential for broad and lasting benefits to society as well as advancing the informal science learning field.
NNOCCI is a collaborative effort led by the New England Aquarium with the Association for Zoos and Aquariums, the FrameWorks Institute, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Monterey Bay Aquarium, the New Knowledge Organization in partnership with Penn State University and the Ohio's Center for Science and Industry. With support from the National Science Foundation Climate Change Education Partnership program, NNOCCI's goal is to establish a national network of professionals who are skilled in communicating climate science to the American public.
Who We Are: A network of informal educators, climate scientists, learning scientists and local partners across four cities, dedicated to improving local understanding of and engagement with climate change science. Mission: CUSP aims to foster a network of climate-focused organizations to implement targeted, coordinated, and concentrated educational strategies that explore local climate impacts and community-level responses. What We Do: Unite local organizations committed to addressing the impacts of climate change into collaborative network Use latest climate science and learning science research to inform program development Connect urban residents’ personal interests to larger city systems impacted by climate change, and provide residents opportunities to explore city-wide responses Deliver programs that are targeted (aimed at specific audiences), coordinated (presenting consistent and clear information about the science of climate change), and concentrated (delivered many times, through many programs) Test the hypothesis that when people encounter the same science content in multiple settings, from multiple points of view, they are more likely to understand and remember important concepts What We Offer: A Community of Practice for local organizations, including training on best practices of climate communication and education Provide local organizations with current climate science impacting their city, and latest learning science research Opportunities for city residents to explore local impacts of climate change in every day settings, at neighborhood centers, at schools, online, and at city festivals. Opportunities for city residents to engage with local organizations in community-level responses to climate change
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TEAM MEMBERS:
The Franklin InstituteRaluca EllisFrederic BertleySteven SnyderRadley HortonKevin Crowley
The Chicago Zoological Society (CZS) in collaboration with Eden Place Nature Center, the Fuller Park Community Corporation, and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) will implement the SCIENCES Program, Supporting a Community's Informal Education Needs: Confidence and Empowerment in STEM. The primary goals of this Full Scale Development project are to broaden access to and participation in environmental science, strengthen partnerships between CZS, Eden Place, and UIC, and gain insights into the 'ecosystemic' learning model which promotes scientific literacy and agency in the community. The project targets a low-resource community with a minority audience while the secondary audience is informal science learning organizations and researchers who will advance research in informal learning. The theoretical framework for the project design draws on conservation psychology, informal science learning, civic ecology education, and urban science education to create an ecosystematic, geographically centered approach. The deliverables include research, curriculum, and engaging hands-on programs for youth, families, adults, and teachers, reaching both in-school and out-of-school audiences, in addition to the SCIENCES Implementation Network. Three potential curriculum themes to be explored are water conservation and protection, pollinators for healthy ecosystems, and community resilience to climate change. The SCIENCES project offers a comprehensive suite of engaging programs for community audiences. For example, the year-long Zoo Adventure Passport (ZAP) program for families includes hands-on experiments and field trips, while project-based learning experiences enable teens to create wetlands, design interpretive signage, and develop associated public programming. School-based programs include professional development for teachers on the Great Lakes ecosystem and invasive species. Existing programs that have been previously evaluated and demonstrated to show learning impacts will be adapted and modified to meet the goals of the ecosystemic learning model by providing multiple learning opportunities. New learning resources will also be created to support the content themes and provide continuity. The result will be a comprehensive approach that ensures deep community engagement by individuals, families, and organizations, with cohesiveness provided by the overarching content themes which broaden access to STEM learning resources and leverages partnerships. The project includes both a research and evaluation plan. The primary research question to be addressed is: How does a large informal science learning institution work with a community-based organization to support environmental scientific literacy and agency at all levels of the community? A sociocultural framework will be used for this mixed-methods case study research. Study participants include community leaders, youth, parents, teachers, and staff from Eden Place. The case study sample will include 20 focal individuals drawn from the participant groups and approximately 300 survey participants. Case study data will be triangulated with evaluation data and analyzed using a grounded theory approach. By examining changes from the baseline following the implementation of the community programs, the findings may provide insight on agency and science literacy among community members. The comprehensive, mixed-methods evaluation plan employs a quasi-experimental design and incorporates front-end, formative, and summative evaluation components. The evaluation questions address the quality of the processes and products, access to environmental science learning opportunities, environmental science literacy, sustainability, and barriers to implementation. An extensive dissemination plan is proposed with a dual emphasis on meeting stakeholders' needs at multiple levels. The evaluation and research teams will emphasize publication in peer reviewed journals and presentations at conferences for informal science education professionals. Findings will be shared with the Fuller Park community stakeholders using creative methods such as one-page research briefs written in layperson's language, videos, and recorded interviews with participants. The local project Advisory Board will also be actively involved in the dissemination of findings to community constituents. The SCIENCES National Amplification Network will be created and work collaboratively with the American Association of Zoos and Aquariums and the Metropolitan Green Spaces Alliance to disseminate the model. Collectively, the activities and deliverables outlined in this proposal will advance the discovery of sustainable models of community-based learning while the research will advance the understanding of informal learning support for science literacy and agency.
The Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies Program funds efforts that support envisioning the future of learning technologies and advance what we know about how people learn in technology-rich environments. Development and Implementation (DIP) Projects build on proof-of-concept work that shows the possibilities of the proposed new type of learning technology, and PI teams build and refine a minimally-viable example of their proposed innovation that allows them to understand how such technology should be designed and used in the future and that allows them to answer questions about how people learn, how to foster or assess learning, and/or how to design for learning. This project is building and studying a new type of online learning community. The WeatherBlur community allows kids, teachers, scientists, fishermen/fisherwomen, and community members to learn and do science together related to the local impacts of weather and climate on their coastal communities. Members of the community propose investigations, collect and share data, and learn together. WeatherBlur is designed to be a new form of knowledge-building community, the Non-Hierarchical Online Learning Community. Unlike other citizen science efforts, there is an emphasis on having all members of the community able to propose and carry out investigations (and not just help collect data for investigations designed by expert scientists or teachers). Prior research has demonstrated important structural differences in WeatherBlur from other citizen science learning communities. The project will use social network analysis and discourse analysis to measure learning processes, and Personal Meaning Mapping and embedded assessments of science epistemology and graph interpretation skills to examine outcomes. The measures will be used to explore knowledge-building processes and the scaffolds required to support them, the negotiation of explanations and investigations across roles, and the epistemic features that drive this negotiation process. The work will be conducted using an iterative design-based research process in which the prior functioning WeatherBlur site will be enhanced with new automated prompt and notification systems that support the non-hierarchical nature of the community, as well as tools to embed assessment prompts that will gauge participants' data interpretation skills and epistemic beliefs. Exponential random graph modeling will be used to analyze the social network analysis data and test hypotheses about the relationship between social structures and outcomes.