The night skies and the planet on which we live can be inspirational to young and old alike. In the run up to its 200th anniversary in 2020, the U.K.'s Royal Astronomical Society has put together a £1 million scheme to fund outreach and engagement activities for groups that are less well served in terms of access to astronomy and geophysics. This article outlines the projects funded and the impact they are starting to have.
We found that the learners seeking out resources to teach themselves to code were generally college educated women who were motived either by the desire to be able to read and understand the code written by hired developers or the desire to become developers themselves. The importance of a female-focused learning setting was mixed; while most women acknowledged a more comfortable atmosphere created by such a setting, very few cited that as a primary reason for joining the group.
All learner participants in this study persisted through the ten weeks of the Women’s Coaching and Learning
In 2016, ETR received a National Science Foundation grant to study, under Principal Investigator Louise Ann (“Lou Ann”) Lyon, PhD, a newly formed, real-world organization dedicated to helping women in the workforce learn to write computer code. This project formed a partnership between a research team with experience in computer science (CS) education and learning sciences research and a newly fashioned practitioner team focused on building a grassroots, informal, volunteer group created to help women help themselves and others learn to write computer code. This research-practitioner
Are you interested in an innovative approach to collecting a large amount of formative data via Facebook? RMC Research Corporation conducted a formative evaluation for Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) to ensure the social media tag lines and clips created by OPB engage the target audiences. The primary target audience for the Hacking Your Mind (HYM) television series is the PBS primetime television viewing audience. According to the PBS Research Audience Insight 2016 Annual Report, the PBS primetime audience is older (median age of 65) and college educated (43% have a 4-year degree). To
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The National Academy of Sciences’ LabX program came into existence in 2017 with a directive to develop programming meant to engage with a young-adult (18-37 years old) target audience who are active decision-makers and whose actions impact current and future policies. While conducting preliminary research, the LabX staff and advisory board discovered that available research on young adults’ relationship with science was sadly lacking in detail, beyond obvious conclusions about high levels of interest in technology and social experiences.
To fill these knowledge gaps, gain a deeper
In 2017, PBS NewsHour produced one of their most complex transmedia series to date. #AmericaAddicted, which focused on the opioid crisis facing communities around the U.S., included 14 broadcast reports, 10 articles on the NewsHour site, four livestreams, three Twitter chats, and more than 200 associated videos and posts on over half a dozen platforms. The different reports take a wide range of perspectives and focus on different aspects of this crisis. Each report is embedded in dense networks of content, with a variety of entry points for audience members, that tell a single overarching
In October 2017, the PBS NewsHour team produced a week and a half of opioid-related content, including several online explainers, which presented the opportunity for a natural experiment for the Experiments in Transmedia project.
Knology (formerly New Knowledge Organization Ltd.) conducted a two-wave research study to advance understanding of the youth audience’s knowledge and news consumption on the topic.
The first wave of the study, conducted in September 2017, provides a baseline. The content aired in October 2017, and the second wave of the study, conducted in November 2017, asked a
Participants in this study reported a variety of resources used in the past to learn to code in Apex, including online tutorials, one-day classes sponsored by Salesforce, and meet-up groups focused on learning. They reported various difficulties in learning through these resources, including what they viewed as the gendered nature of classes where the men already seemed to know how to code—which set a fast pace for the class, difficulty in knowing “where to start” in their learning, and a lack of time to practice learning due to work and family responsibilities. The Coaching and Learning Group
Participants in this study reported a variety of resources used in the past to learn to code in Apex, including online tutorials, one-day classes sponsored by Salesforce, and meet-up groups focused on learning. They reported various difficulties in learning through these resources, including what they viewed as the gendered nature of classes where the men already seemed to know how to code—which set a fast pace for the class, difficulty in knowing “where to start” in their learning, and a lack of time to practice learning due to work and family responsibilities. The Coaching and Learning Group
Participants in this study reported a variety of resources used in the past to learn to code in Apex, including online tutorials, one-day classes sponsored by Salesforce, and meet-up groups focused on learning. They reported various difficulties in learning through these resources, including what they viewed as the gendered nature of classes where the men already seemed to know how to code—which set a fast pace for the class, difficulty in knowing “where to start” in their learning, and a lack of time to practice learning due to work and family responsibilities. The Coaching and Learning Group
Grassroots women's learn-to-code groups are springing up in many places. This infographic a study of one such group, in which more-knowledgeable "coaches" lead novice "learners" in learning software programming on the Salesforce platform. This study found that women create such groups to have supportive, non-threatening environments that nuture their learning to build confidence before entering male-dominated software development communities.
This project will research and develop the Circuit, a mobile phone and web-based application that will empower families and the general public to discover the broad spectrum of informal Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) opportunities that exist in most communities. These informal STEM resources include science and children's museums, science and computer camps, maker spaces, afterschool programs, citizen science and much more. There is currently no "one-stop" searching for these resources. Instead, participants must conduct multiple, inefficient Internet searches to find the sought for STEM resources. The Circuit will enable users to efficiently search a rich informal STEM database, identifying resources by location, geography, age levels, science discipline, type of program and other factors. The Circuit builds on SciStarter, an existing online platform that connects thousands of prospective and active citizen scientists to citizen science projects. SciStarter has made possible the collection and organization of several thousand citizen science projects that would otherwise be scattered across the web. The Circuit will build on SciStarter's technical achievements in the citizen science sector, while systematically encompassing the offerings of established national networks. By integrating existing networks of informal STEM resources, the app will afford the public with unrivaled access to informal STEM opportunities, while collecting data that reveals patterns of engagement towards understanding factors of influence between different types of STEM experiences.
The app will provide researchers with new opportunities for researching how families and adults participate in the ecosystem of informal STEM resources in their communities. The Circuit will develop web tools to aggregate and organize digital content from trusted, currently siloed, informal STEM networks of content providers. These include science festivals, science and children's museums, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Discover Magazine (3 million readers), the largest general interest science publication. Each content partner will feed the app with information directly or through their membership and encourage adoption of The Circuit within their respective communities. The project will design digital tools, including APIs (application program interfaces) to acquire and share digital content, embeddable tools to record and analyze data about movement, engagement, and persistence across domains, and social media tools and related APIs to distribute, track, and analyze content, engagement and demographics. (An API is a code that allows two software programs to communicate with each other.) The project will conduct small-scale, proof-of-conduct studies, to test the viability of the platform to support future, independent full-scale research. An analytics dashboard will be designed and tested with partners, researchers, and evaluators to ensure access to data on patterns of visits, clicks, referrals, searches, "joins," bookmarks, shares, contributions, user-locations, persistence, and more, within and across domains. Because each partner will feed their analytics into the shared dashboard, this will provide unprecedented and much-needed data to advance research in informal STEM learning. The Circuit will allow the tracking of patterns of engagement across networks and programs. Anonymized analytics of behavioral data from end users of The Circuit will support new approaches to advance evidence-based understanding of connected informal STEM learning by exhibiting engagement patterns across informal STEM domains. Through volunteer participation by the public, the Circuit will explore the geographic and demographic patterns of participants in the system, and derive important design lessons for its own and future efforts to create curated systems of connected learning across STEM education in informal settings.
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.