In December 2008, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, in partnership with the New England Aquarium and the National Aquarium in Baltimore, hosted a summit of leaders from aquariums across North America and beyond. The intent was to empower aquarium professionals to elevate their collective focus on the relationship between climate change and the ocean, and to develop collaborative strategies for communicating climate change and inspiring solution-‐oriented actions among our institutions and audiences. The summit represented the birth of a community. The three‐day event succeeded in mobilizing 34
The Climate Interpretation Coalition is maturing beyond a set of discrete institutions to become a collective voice for communicating climate change and the ocean. As the three‐year funded NOAA program and the empowerment evaluation end, the question of how to build ongoing communities of support arises. The findings are based upon an interview‐based exploration of individuals who participated in the 2012 Baltimore summit and who represent a broad spectrum of engagement (highly engaged with creating the coalition through to limited engagement in a single summit). The interviews were nested
The Center for Children and Technology (CCT) at Education Development Center, Inc., a nonprofit international research and development organization (cct.edc.org), conducted the formative evaluation of the second year’s implementation of the Be A Scientist! (BAS) project, which is managed by Iridescent—a nonprofit afterschool STEM program (www.iridescentlearning.org). The goal of the BAS project is to provide high-quality afterschool science and engineering courses to underserved families in New York City and Los Angeles. The program specifically targets second graders and their families
Goodman Research Group, Inc. (GRG) served as the external evaluator of the three-year NSF-funded Science Festival Alliance (SFA), a collaborative started by the University of California San Diego, the MIT Museum (Cambridge, MA), the University of California San Francisco, and The Franklin Institute (Philadelphia, PA). The focus of the SFA over its first three years was helping establish and sustain science festivals in each of these four cities. The Alliance’s long-term goal is to facilitate the creation of a growing network of festivals and a community of science festival practitioners. To
In August 2011, nine months prior to the theatrical premiere of Otter 501, Sea Studios Foundation launched the Otter 501 Facebook page in an effort to reach and engage audiences through social media. Initially, Sea Studios organized for Katie Pofahl, the film’s human star and narrator, to author posts and respond to visitor comments about the forthcoming film and related topics. Subsequently, with the theatrical premiere of Otter 501 in May 2012, viewers of the film then had an opportunity to watch the character Katie post updates and respond to comments on her “virtual” Facebook page
The overall goal of the project was to convene a large-scale, open conference on public participation in scientific research, bringing together science researchers, project leaders, educators, technology specialists, evaluators, and others from across many disciplines to discuss advancing the field of PPSR. The conference included three sessions for posters and conversations, and five plenary sessions of presentations. The meeting culminated in an open meeting to explore strategies for large-scale collaborations to support and advance work across this field of practice, through the development
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TEAM MEMBERS:
The Schoodic Education and Research Center InstituteJoe E Heimlich
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This guide provides effective practices for anyone — university faculty member, K–12 teacher, or administrator — who wants to create a project that partners science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate students (Fellows) with K–12 teachers on a sustained basis. These recommendations come from the community of faculty members, graduate students, K–12 teachers, program managers, and evaluators who participated in the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate STEM Fellows in K–12 Education (GK–12) Program from its start in 1999 through 2012. The guide was written to
Living Laboratory® (developed at the Museum of Science, Boston in 2005) is a new model for partnerships between museums and cognitive scientists, bringing cognitive scientists to museums, where they conduct active research studies with museum visitors as their subjects. In 2011, the Museum of Science began scaling up Living Laboratory to create a National Living Lab network. In Year 1, the program expanded to three new Hub sites: Madison Children’s Museum, Maryland Science Center, and Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. This report summarizes all formative evaluation from Year 1 of the
PlanetMania is an iOS and Android mobile app game produced by Maryland Science Center and Eduweb, Inc. in 2012 to accompany the Center's latest permanent exhibit, entitled Life Beyond Earth. Multimedia Research carried out a summative evaluation of the PlanetMania app, focusing on the app's usage in the exhibit, appeal, value and learning outcomes. The evaluation is a pre-post quasi-experimental study in which a sample of 24 9-11 year olds were interviewed prior to and after experiencing the app and exhibit as well as observed during their exposure to the app and exhibit. The app game combines
During 2007, the Exhibits Department conducted a summative evaluation of Wild About Otters to document visitors' interest in and their responses to this temporary exhibition. This study was conducted in three parts to examine visitors' behaviors and responses to aspects of the exhibition, including conservation content, emotional reactions and bilingual graphic panels. Research questions 1. How are visitors using the exhibition? Which exhibits are they attending to and for how long? 2. What did visitors think Wild About Otters was about? 3. What conservation content did visitors remember
In October 2009, the Tennessee Aquarium began an ambitious program, Connecting Tennessee to the World Ocean (CTWO), funded by a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. CTWO consists of several individual projects, all intended to increase the ocean literacy of Aquarium audiences and to promote their adoption of an ocean stewardship ethic. This evaluation report summarizes the extent to which the Aquarium accomplished these goals over the 3-year project period. The five project components and their key associated evaluation findings follow. 1. Classroom-based activities
In October 2007, The Franklin Institute Science Museum (FI) in partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia was awarded a 5-year National Science Foundation grant to build a model museum/library partnership. This partnership project, called LEAP into Science, integrates science content and inquiry into an existing afterschool program at the Library, called LEAP. More specifically, LEAP into Science has three overarching goals: 1) To increase the capacity of influential adults for science teaching and learning; 2) To increase the capacity of libraries for science teaching and learning; 3)
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jessica LukeFranklin InstituteJeanine E. AnceletClaudia Figueiredo