The goal of this evaluation was to determine how museum visitors responded to the museum's existing live animal exhibits and identify recommendations for their new Live Animal Garden exhibit.
The project team published a research synopsis article with Futurum Science Careers in Feb 2023 called “How Can Place Attachment Improve Scientific Literacy?”
The National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation [NNOCCI] is a Community of Practice [CoP] dedicated to advancing the conversation on climate change, based on the principle that wide-scale training with proven communication techniques can change the national discourse around climate change to be more productive, creative, and solutions-focused.
NNOCCI CoP is a network of individuals and organizations in formal and informal education, the social sciences, climate sciences, and public policy. By 2018, the community represented more than 184 institutions in 38 states, and over
The poster shares work conducted as part of the Modeling Zoos and Aquariums as Inclusive Communities of Science for Autistic Individuals (MoZAICS) project and specifically sharing details of the MoZAICS access and inclusion framework (e.g., definitions, structure/levels of the framework).
This paper describes the methodology and the development of the instruments for collecting and analyzing data to better understand 1) what people bring with them to their visit, 2) what people do during a visit, and 3) what people take away from a visit. Elements of what they bring intersect with Knology’s work, and what they do and what they take away intersect with Oregon State University’s work on WZAM3.
COSI’s Center for Research and Evaluation (CRE) led a study was conducted in four phases with three study components. These phases serve to organize the remainder of this report::
The pilot test for Changemakers: Advancing Community Science Literacy was a capacity building program integrating strategic discourse & community change theory that identified a new path for advancing community STEM literacies. The results of experiment established partnerships with locally based non-profits, and a collaborative effort to address environmental justice and social disparities in areas threatened by climate change.
The evaluation was underaken with instruments developed for multiple research projects to support cross-project comparative analysis.
This instrumemts presented
Science museums, science centers, zoos, and aquariums (MCZAs) constitute major settings of science learning with unique characteristics of informal science education. Emphasis will be given to the analysis of four specific characteristics of MCZAs that seem relevant for educational research and practice, namely, conditions of mixed motives and goals, staged popular science, and impact of physical layout, as well as the role of social exchange and participation. By doing so, we focus on the consequences of these characteristics for the learning processes and outcomes of visits of MCZAs. We show
In The Nature of Community: SCIENCES, we share the lessons learned from an innovative partnership designed to leverage the strengths of two nonprofit organizations—a large cultural institution and a smaller, deeply-rooted community-based organization, both of which offer informal science education expertise.
You’ll read first-hand reflections of how staff members, community leaders and members, children, and adults experienced this partnership: the expectations, surprises, challenges, successes, and lessons learned. We hope the description of this partnership inspires other organizations to
In this poster, the Center for Research on Lifelong STEM Learning shared lessons learned from a study that used audio and video data from GoPros to investigate the entry characteristics of zoo and aquarium visitors and how those characteristics played out in terms of decision-making behaviors and meaning-making talk during a visit.
This observational framework can be used with different group types (e.g. family, school group, adult couple, individual, etc.) and across diverse settings such as with public program audiences, camps, or guests at animal exhibits. The framework includes expressions of empathy and related emotions, such as curiosity or appreciation.
Why Zoos and Aquariums Matter (WZAM3) conference presentaiton slides for the 2018 ASTC Annual Conference (Hartford, CT) and the NAAEE 2018 Annual Conference and Research Symposium (Spokane, WA).