Informal physics programs bring physicists together with youth and adults from local communities to engage with physics content outside of classroom settings. These public engagement or “physics outreach” programs are a significant endeavor of the physics community; however, we lack a systemic documentation of these efforts, which makes it difficult to situate physics education research on individual informal physics programs into a broader narrative. Additionally, informal physics programs have many formats and vary in terms of their audience, content, activities, and resources. It is
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Dena IzadiJulia WillisonNoah Finkelsteinclaudia fracchiollaKathleen Hinko
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
In this paper, we take an in-depth look at the physics faculty and student volunteers, which we will refer to as the program personnel, involved in informal physics programs to better understand their roles and responsibilities, their interactions with audiences, and their connectedness with content and activities. Understanding the complexities between programs, personnel, and audiences allows us to look for areas to improve informal physics programs in being inclusive, in being equitable and accessible, in supporting physics students who participate, and in connecting more strongly to the
This special issue of the Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies (LJCS) highlights the consolidation of the “citizen science” movement, which stems from different forms of direct participation of citizens in scientific projects. This issue also features contributions to the debate on the “open science” movement.
With the ongoing need for water conservation, the American Southwest has worked to increase harvested rainwater efforts to meet municipal needs. Concomitantly, environmental pollution is prevalent, leading to concerns regarding the quality of harvested rainwater. Project Harvest, a co-created community science project, was initiated with communities that neighbor sources of pollution. To better understand how a participant’s socio-demographic factors affect home characteristics and rainwater harvesting infrastructure, pinpoint gardening practices, and determine participant perception of
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Arthur MosesJean McLainAminata KilungoRobert RootLeif AbrellSanlyn BuxnerFlor SandovalTheresa FoleyMiriam JonesMonica Ramirez-Andreotta
Abstract STEM education programs are often formulated with a "hands-on activities" focus across a wide array of topics from robotics to rockets to ecology. Traditionally, the impact of these programs is based on surveys of youth on program-specific experiences or the youths’ interest and impressions of science in general. In this manuscript, we offer a new approach to analyzing science programming design and youth participant impact. The conceptual framework discussed here concentrates on the organization and analysis of common learning activities and instructional strategies. We establish
Environmental educators have used guided-inquiry in natural and supportive learning environments for decades, but comparatively little programming and research has focused on experiences in urban environments, including in constructed ecosystems like green roofs, or impacts on older youth and adults. To address this gap, we designed a tiered, near-peer research mentoring program called Project TRUE (Teens Researching Urban Ecology) and used a mixed-methods approach to evaluate impacts on undergraduates serving as research mentors. During the 11-week program, undergraduates conducted
To advance justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in science, we must first understand and improve the dominant-culture frameworks that impede progress and, second, we must intentionally create more equitable models. The present authors call ourselves the ICBOs and Allies Workgroup (ICBOs stands for independent community-based organizations), and we represent communities historically excluded from the sciences. Together with institutional allies and advisors, we began our research because we wanted our voices to be heard, and we hoped to bring a different perspective to doing science with
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TEAM MEMBERS:
María Cecilia Alvarez RicaldeJuan Flores ValadezCatherine CrumJohn AnnoniRick BonneyMateo Luna CastelliMarilú López FrettsBrigid LuceyKaren PurcellJ. Marcelo BontaPatricia CampbellMakeda CheatomBerenice RodriguezYao Augustine FoliJosé GonzálezJosé Miguel Hernández HurtadoSister Sharon HoraceKaren KitchenPepe Marcos-IgaTanya SchuhPhyllis Edwards TurnerBobby WilsonFanny Villarreal
Many youth programs seek to understand their influence over time on participant outcomes. This paper offers a methodology for measuring a participant’s perception of a program’s contribution amid their perception of other youth influences such as those from family, school, peer groups, hobbies, and other organized activities. The instrument built on the large body of work on youth influences in order to capture the dominant factors in development of the item bank. In addition to item development, the paper documents face validity followed by content assessment of items using a research panel
In this paper, we report ethnicity trends in student participation and experience in high school science and engineering fair (SEFs). SEF participation showed significant ethnic diversity. For survey students, the approximate distribution was Asian-32%; Black-11%; Hispanic-20%; White-33%; Other-3%. Comparing the SEF level at which students competed from school to district to region to state levels, we observed that black students made up only 4.5% of the students who participated in SEF beyond the school level, whereas students from other ethnic groups were more equally represented at all
Diversity, Equity, Access and Inclusion (DEAI) work in museums is multifaceted, but typically approached from the perspective of external audiences and outcomes rather than a change in internal organizational culture. This article discusses findings from a research study examining what happened in five US science museums that were making a concerted, officially recognized effort towards internal change, and explores what those findings reveal about field-wide barriers to appreciable systemic change along with the impacts of the current status quo on marginalized staff. This study focused
Trauma infiltrates all of society – including museums. For guests, the trauma may lie in the context of the visit or what they bring with them from their everyday lives. Staff can develop trauma through daily interaction with stressful content or secondary trauma through interaction with traumatized guests. During the COVID19 pandemic, trauma also developed from workplace issues regarding personal health safety and job security. This is a case study about how one museum educated itself about the presence and impact of trauma through exploration of a framework developed by the Trauma Responsive
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Aaron PriceLeila MakdisiGail HutchinsonDaniel LancasterMicere Keels
The ICBOs (Independent Community-based Organizations), a group of fifteen community representatives from communities historically excluded from the sciences, share results from eight years of community-led de-colonial participatory action research. We wrote this white paper to share our findings and recommendations with funders like the National Science Foundation. These findings, recently published in BioScience (https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biac001), along with preliminary results from our current research, and our lived experiences point towards a critical need to change the existing
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Karen PurcellBobby WilsonMakeda CheatomJohn AnnoniTanya Schuh