American Indian and Alaska Native communities continue to disproportionately face significant environmental challenges and concerns as a predominately place-based people whose health, culture, community, and livelihood are often directly linked to the state of their local environment. With increasing threats to Native lands and traditions, there is an urgent need to promote ecological sustainability awareness and opportunities among all stakeholders within and beyond the impacted areas. This is especially true among the dozens of tribes and over 50,000 members of the Coast Salish Nations in the Pacific Northwest United States. The youth within these communities are particularly vulnerable. This Innovations in Development project endeavors to address this serious concern by implementing a multidimensional, multigenerational model aimed at intersecting traditional ecological knowledge with contemporary knowledge to promote: (a) environmental sustainability awareness, (b) increased STEM knowledge and skills across various scientific domains, and (c) STEM fields and workforce opportunities within Coast Salish communities. Building on results from a prior pilot study, the project will be grounded on eight guiding principles. These principles will be reflected in all aspects of the project including an innovative, culturally responsive toolkit, curriculum, museum exhibit and programming, workshops, and a newly established community of practice. If successful, this project could provide new insights on effective mechanisms for not only promoting STEM knowledge and skills within informal contexts among Coast Salish communities but also awareness and social change around issues of environmental sustainability in the Pacific Northwest.
Over a five-year period, the project will build upon an extant curriculum and findings codified in a pilot study. Each aspect of the pilot work will be refined to ensure that the model established in this Innovations and Development project is coherent, comprehensive, and replicable. Workshops and internships will prepare up to 200 Coast Salish Nation informal community educators to implement the model within their communities. Over 2,500 Coast Salish Nation and Swinomish youth, adults, educators, and elders are expected to be directly impacted by the workshops, internships, curriculum and online toolkit. Another 300 learners of diverse ages are expected to benefit from portable teaching collections developed by the project. Through a partnership with the Washington State Burke Natural History Museum, an exhibit and museum programming based on the model will be developed and accessible in the Museum, potentially reaching another 35,000 people each year. The project evaluation will assess the extent to which the following expected outcomes are achieved: (a) increased awareness and understanding of Indigenous environmental sustainability challenges; (b) increased skills in developing and implementing education programs through an Indigenous lens; (c) increased interest in and awareness of the environmental sciences and other STEM disciplines and fields; and (d) sustainable relationships among the Coast Salish Nations. A process evaluation will be conducted to formatively monitor and assess the work. A cross cultural team, including a recognized Coast Salish Indigenous evaluator, will lead the summative evaluation. The project team is experienced and led by representatives from the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Oregon State University, Garden Raised Bounty, the Center for Lifelong STEM Learning, the Urban Indian Research Institute, Feed Seven Generations, and the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.
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.
Fostering greater inclusion in science creates benefits for both science and society. In this Innovations and Development project, the University of Utah will investigate how to sustain and scale the STEM Ambassador Program (STEMAP), begun in 2016 with AISL funding. STEMAP developed an innovative process to train scientists to engage members of the public, who cannot or do not gain access to science via conventional science education venues (such as museums, schools, zoos), by implementing activities in non-traditional settings. The 65 scientists trained by the initial STEMAP effort effectively engaged in over 45 settings including an affordable housing development, a youth residential treatment center, a state prison, a cooking class, a daycare facility, and several senior centers. The number of scientists applying to the program quickly exceeded STEMAP's capacity. Other institutions expressed interest in replicating the training. This project will explore strategies for scaling and sustaining public engagement training to support more scientists who can engage more people in more venues. Outcomes will serve to inform the broader implementation of STEMAP and the efforts of other public engagement programs, many of which face similar scaling and sustainability challenges.
Scaling and sustaining public engagement of science (PES) programs is a central challenge for many in the informal science learning community. This project will explore strategies to scale and sustain the STEM Ambassador Program. Research questions include: (1) How do different program formats increase or restrict program capacity and engagement outcomes? (2) What benefits accrue to scientists and their institutions by participating in public engagement in science activities that might serve as motivators to continue these activities? (3) Are funding and organizational models developed in business and other professional settings applicable to sustaining these programs? To address scalability, this project will explore the effectiveness of three dissemination formats: (1) the creation of a mentorship program for in-person trainees, (2) a train-the-trainer approach, and (3) online training with in-person mentorship. The project team will create an evaluation toolkit with participant surveys, rubrics for observers, and "on-the-spot" assessment tools developed under AISL Award 1811022 to assess the effectiveness of engagement activities delivered by trainees in each of the three formats. To address sustainability, the project team will document the values of public engagement training to both the participating scientists and their institutions via surveys and interviews. Consultants from the business sectors will create a PES Campus Council to explore possible financial, organizational, and leadership plans that will help sustain engagement efforts. Outcomes will be published in peer-reviewed journals and compiled into a dissemination framework to inform actions to scale and sustain STEMAP and other public engagement of science programs to engage more hard-to-reach audiences. Inverness Research will serve as the project's external evaluator.
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.
This collaborative project will facilitate rural community education on climate impacts. The Carnegie Natural History Museum and the University of Pittsburgh will work together to form a network of interested community members in Mercer County and Powdermill Nature Reserve in western Pennsylvania to explore the impacts of climate and how its effect could be mitigated or accommodated. The project is has three related ideas: (1) museums hold valuable resources for understanding environmental change, (2) museums are not serving rural audiences well, and (3) complex socio-scientific environmental topics are deeply connected to social decision making in rural communities. This project will bring an inclusive approach to the discussion of socio-scientific issues in rural Western PA, through building relationships between local public audiences, STEM professionals, and informal learning specialists, creating opportunities for co-development of resources and building organizational capacity. The overarching goals of the project are to explore how museums can better serve rural stakeholders and increase the capacity for science-based conversations about human-caused climate impacts.
This project involves a cross-disciplinary team with Carnegie Museum of Natural History providing expertise in interpretation and ecological science, the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out of School Environments (UPCLOSE) providing expertise in learning research, and rural Hubs centered at Powdermill Nature Reserve (PNR) and the Mercer County Conservation District providing expertise in environmental education, conservation, and engagement with rural communities. The Hubs will coordinate professional development workshops, collaborative design sessions, and community gatherings to bring local stakeholders together to examine and adapt existing resources, including environmental science data and climate education tools, to local issues. These activities will be structured through a Research Practice Partnership. Each will have its own unique mix of geography, demographics, resources, and challenges.
The Research questions are: 1. How can the project effectively support the creation of socially safe spaces for rural Western PA communities to have science-based discussions around climate impacts? 2. How does work with rural partners influence the development of the museum's Center for Climate Studies and its mission to offer programs designed to support public engagement?
3. In what ways have museums been able to support learning about climate topics in rural communities? Data will be gathered from interviews and case studies. There will be two longitudinal studies of local network change and museum change. A survey will also be done to assess the impact of the project on the public. Protocols will be developed in collaboration with the Hubs.
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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Lauren GiarrataniNicole HellerKevin Crowley
Future educational robots are emerging as social companions supporting learning. By socially interacting with such a robot, learners can potentially reason and talk about the things they are learning and receive help in seeing the relevance of STEM in their daily lives. However, little is known about how to design educational robots to work with youth at home over a long period of time. This project will develop an informal science learning program, called STEMMates, in collaboration with a local community center, for youth with little interest in science. The program will partner learners with an in-home learning companion robot, designed to read books with youth and provide science activities for them at the community center, where youth will engage in exciting and personally relevant science learning. As the learner reads books, the robot will make comments about what is happening in the book to help connect the reading to the science activities at the community center. The overarching goals of STEMMates are to: (a) positively support youth's individual interest in science and future science learning, (b) connect in-home learning experiences with out-of-school community-based learning, (c) bridge the gap between formal and informal engagement and learning in science, and (d) encourage the participation of youth who are underrepresented and who have low interest in STEM learning. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning program, which seeks to advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning opportunities for the public in informal environments.
Researchers will work with youth and staff at the community center, alongside experts in informal science learning, to design the program and then test how learners respond to reading with the robot and participating in the science activities and whether this program has a lasting impact on their science interest. Social interactions with a robot may help distribute cognitive load during learning activities to help youth reason about STEM and also supplement learning by improving feelings of value and belongingness in order to facilitate lasting interest development. Following a mixed-methods research approach using qualitative and quantitative data-collection techniques, the research team will investigate the following research questions: (1) What social and interest-development supports and activities can be utilized as socially situated interest scaffolds in an informal and in-home, augmented reading and science activity program to promote individual interest and learning in science for low interest learners? How can a social robot best facilitate this program? (2) How do learners perceive and interact with the robot in authentic, in-home, long-term situations, and how does this interaction change over time? (3) Does working with a robot designed with socially situated interest scaffolds increase individual interest in science when compared to a pre-intervention baseline, and do these effects impact future (long-term) interest and engagement in formal science learning? To answer these research questions, researchers will implement the science learning program during an 11-week summer deployment and utilize an AB single-case research design. Interview-based qualitative data and self-report surveys to examine the learner?s perception of the robot and their evolving interest in science and quantitative data on science learning using pre-/post-measure comparisons will be collected. Log data of time-on-task, reading rate, book selection and reading goal attainment will also be collected by the robot. The outcomes of this project will lay the groundwork for future investigations of the design of social robots for a diversity of learner populations and their use in different informal learning 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.
This program will derive knowledge on extreme weather and its concepts to be shared with youth in the Boston and Kansas City areas. Subsequently, the youth will share this knowledge by displaying it as art work on the rapid transit systems. The art projects will culminate in broad-based exhibition at the end of each group's sessions. The project will involve 200 youth per region resulting in an impact of 1000 youth per year, 80 adult mentors and 20,000 adult transportation riders in learning about extreme weather concepts. Participant organizations are the University of Mass-Boston, University of Mass-Lowell, The Massachusetts College of Art, the University of Kansas Center for Research Inc., and the Goodman Research Group Inc.
The goals of this project are to bring the topic of extreme weather to the foreground by educating youth and in turn having them educate a selected group of adults that use the rapid transit system. Groups of youths will learn about the topic through a series of meetings with mentors who are experts on the issues around extreme weather. The youth will derive their own art-works with their interpretation. These art-works will be displayed on the rapid transit systems in New England (Merrimack Valley and Worcester regions) and the Mid-West (Topeka and Kansas City areas). Using a quasi-experimental mixed methodology (demographics, bus ridership, initial level of science awareness, and interest) the goal is to understand science learning outcomes associated with the creation and public display of youth art. Research questions of importance in this regard are 1. In what ways does blending art with the science enhance youth learning about extreme weather concepts? 2. To what extent does youth art support adult learning of science? and 3. How does regional context affect learning about extreme weather?
Broader impacts will result from the youth diversity as well as the diversity of riders of the rapid transit systems where the art of extreme weather is displayed.
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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Robert ChenLois HetlandJill LohmeierStephen MisholSteven SchrockClaudia Bode
In April 2018, FHI 360, under the leadership of Maryann Stimmer and Merle Froschl, convened a meeting of thought leaders in Washington, D.C. to capture a “snapshot” of STEM education. They subsequently conducted additional interviews with more than 50 local and national policy leaders; public and private funders; researchers; PreK-12 and post-secondary educators; parents, and leaders of afterschool programs, science centers and youth-serving organizations. The purpose of this summary report is to identify current trends and gaps to inform research, policy, and practice in order to reinforce
Curiosity is a grant-funding programme from the Wellcome Trust with BBC Children in Need., and it provides funding to help youth organisations develop and deliver inspiring science activities for disadvantaged children and young people. This report looks at the key findings from the 32 projects funded during the first round.
The Round 1 projects were delivered by voluntary and community sector organisations, some of which were in partnership with ISL providers, and offered a variety of science opportunities from surveying local weather to building a green-powered race car. Many projects
Traditionally, programs designed for community audiences are designed by the STEM institution or organization seeking to “serve” a given community, using top-down design processes that are framed by the perspectives of the lead organizations, and typically reinforcing dominant cultural norms in STEM and therefore marginalizing certain audiences. Co-design offers an approach that can lead to more robust and sustainable results by developing programs that are culturally responsive, respectful, and inclusive.
About this resource:
This is a practice brief produced by CAISE's Broadening
Science educators and communicators must value and appreciate science that already takes place in the community, which may look different than traditional (school-like) representations of science, which have historically excluded many communities. "Community science programs" are designed by community members to advance community priorities and recognize that communities themselves—not just the nearby universities or research labs—are rich with people, resources, and practices that make up science in everyday life.
About this resource:
This is a practice brief produced by CAISE's
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Angela Calabrese BartonEdna TanDaniel BirminghamCarmen TurnerCenter for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE)
The aim of this project is to build capacity among institutions of informal science education (ISE) to design co-created public engagement with science (CCPES) activities in partnership with civic, community, and scientist partners.