This document is the final evaluation report for the Teen Science Cafes for Advancing STEM in Rural Places project.
A Teen Science Café is a free, regularly occurring event during the school year in which a local scientist, engineer, or STEM expert discusses their field experiences with the teen attendees. Ideally, a Teen Leader cohort, under the mentorship of an Adult Leader, organizes and implements each Café.
The Teen Science Café Network is a community of practice linking the various youth-serving organizations, institutions, community settings, and individuals that host Teen Science
The Lineage project was a collaboration between Twin Cities Public Television and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The project included creation of a feature-length video program, a Virtual Reality game, and a set of hands-on activities designed for use by multigenerational audiences—all of which were incorporated as part of a series of seven Fossil Festival events at museums and other sites around the United States. This report presents findings from a set of external evaluation studies that examined impacts on families who participated in Fossil Festival events as well
New York City is a leader in Open Data initiatives, and has a large and diverse population. This project studies informal data science learning at workshops and trainings associated with NYC’s open data ecosystem.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
This paper is the culmination of several meaning-making activities between an external researcher, PES practitioners, and social scientist researchers who considered the unique contributions that can be made through RPPs on PES (that is, research-practice partnerships on public engagement with science). Based on the experiences from three RPP projects, the group noted that the PES context may be particularly suited to RPPs, and identified the importance of working as thinking-partners who support reciprocal decision-making. Recommendations are made in support of using these approaches to
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
The Rural Activation and Innovation Network (RAIN) project aims to engage, support and better understand rural communities in:
Changing perceptions of the importance of STEM Learning
Leveraging of local STEM resources and expertise with Rural Innovation Councils (RICs)
Strategic Planning embedding asset maps, gap analysis, budget, media, and communication.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting. The Guerilla Science project conducted two studies: one at the Oregon Eclipse Festival, a large multi-day residential music and arts festival, and one during the Figment festival, a cultural and family-oriented free festival on Governor’sIsland (NewYorkCity). We used a multi-method research design: trained data collectors conducted intercept interviews of various length; short written feedback forms were made available post events; and we conducted structured observations of events.We compared Guerilla Science audiences with
But many young people face signifcant economic, cultural, historical, and/or social obstacles that distance them from STEM as a meaningful or viable option— these range from under-resourced schools, race- and gender-based discrimination, to the dominant cultural norms of STEM professions or the historical uses of STEM to oppress or disadvantage socio-economically marginalized communities (Philip and Azevedo 2017). As a result, participation in STEM-organized hobby groups, academic programs, and professions remains low among many racial, ethnic, and gender groups (Dawson 2017). One solution to
This AISL Pilots and Feasibility project will study the data science learning that takes place as members of the public explore and analyze open civic data related to their everyday lives. Government services, such as education, transportation, and non-emergency municipal requests, are becoming increasingly digital. Generally, program workshops and events may be able to support participants in using such data to answer their own questions, such as: "How do City agencies respond to noise in my neighborhood?" and "How do waste and recycling services in my neighborhood compare with others?" This project seeks to understanding how such programs are designed and facilitated to support diverse communities in accessing and meaningfully analyzing data will promote innovation and knowledge building in informal data science education. The team will begin by summarizing best practices in data science education from a variety of fields. Next they will explore the design and impacts of two programs in New York City, a leader in publicly available Open Data initiatives. This phase will explore activities and facilitation approaches, participants' objectives and data literacy skills practice, and begin to identify potential barriers to entry and levels of participation. Finally, the team will build capacity for other similar organizations to explore and understand their impacts on community members' engagement with civic data. This pilot study will establish preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of these programs, and in turn, inform future research into the identifying and amplifying best practices to support public engagement with data.
This research team will begin by synthesizing data science learning best practices based on varied literatures and surveys with academic and practitioner experts.
Synthesis results will be applied as a lens to gather preliminary evidence regarding the impacts of two programs on participants' data science practices and understanding of the nature of data in the context of civics. The programs include one offered by the Mayor's Office of Data Analytics (MODA), which is the NYC agency with overall responsibility for the City's Open Data programs, and BetaNYC, a leading nonprofit organization working to improve lives through civic design, technology, and engagement with government open data. The research design triangulates ethnographic observations and artifacts, pre and post adapted surveys, and interviews with participants and facilitators. Researchers will identify programmatic metrics and adapts existing measures to assess various outcomes related to public engagement with data, including: question formulation, data set selection and manipulation, the use of data to make inferences, and understanding variability, sampling and context. These metrics will be shared through an initial assessment framework for data science learning in the context of community engagement with civic open data. Researchers will also begin to identify barriers to broader participation through literature synthesis, interviews with participants and facilitators, and conversations with other organizations in our networks, such as NYC Community Boards. Findings will determine the suitability of the programs under study and inform future research to identify and amplify best practices in supporting public engagement with data.
This project is funded by the NSF Advancing Informal STEM Learning program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.
This Pilots and Feasibility Studies award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
In the 1990s, Science Cafes emerged that brought together people from all walks of life with scientists in conversation over science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) topics. The cafes were popular as conversations were informal in casual settings and engendered deep discussions. In 2007, Science Education Solutions received a grant from NSF and began an experiment to see if the adult science café model could be adapted to appeal to high school teens. The program, Café Scientifique New Mexico, became very popular with teens in towns across northern New Mexico. The blend of conversing with scientists about interesting science topics in an out-of-school social setting and digging deeper with hands on activities proved successful. The teen model was refined through trial and error and formal evaluation over several years. Today it continues to provide teens with a new perspective on the nature of science and a picture of scientists as real people leading interesting lives. The Teen Science Café Network (TSCN) was formed in 2012 with NSF funding to allow other individuals and organizations to start their own versions of the Teen Science Café, adapted to their local institutions and demographics. Five founding member organizations around the United States formed the initial Network and each began creating their own Teen Science Café programs. Today the TSCN is a dynamic, growing community of practice spread across the country with the mission of connecting high school teenagers with STEM and STEM experts via the science café model. The network currently has approximately 133 member organizations in 46 states and Canada. This project will move the network to a much larger scale by creating organization and professional support structures to create a strategically growing social movement with distributed leadership, organizational infrastructure, and robust professional development for long-term stability with a goal to increase the number of member organizations to 500 over five years. Building on the literature on professional development for informal science educators and the literature on network capacity building, network sustainability, and scale, the project will also conduct research that will inform the field about successful model diffusion. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understanding of deeper learning by participants.
This Innovations in Development project has five objectives. The first is to re-structure the Teen Science Café Network (TSCN) to a more distributed leadership model that will move the network to long-term sustainability. The PI team will identify five experienced individuals already leading strong café programs to become Guides for new sites. These Guides will provide training, support, and mentorship to new network members. Each Guide will have responsibility over a given year for mentoring two cohorts of nine sites, allowing the network to increase in size over the next five years. The second objective is to implement an interactive program of professional development for new network members. The training will involve approximately 15 hours of adult leader training focused on building skills around teen engagement and café management. The third objective will be to strategically engage all members in the network community of practice through opportunities to participate in and lead ongoing learning with their peers. Through webinars, Birds of a Feather groups and annual workshops and a Science Events Summit, café leaders will actively hone professional skills and broaden their personal network. Objective four is to broaden the involvement of organizations and communities not currently in the network through strategic recruitment of STEM professional societies, military youth programs, library networks, and youth-serving organizations, among other organizations. Finally, objective five is to implement a research agenda to contribute to the informal learning knowledge base. The research will focus on how the project's approach to network growth and distributed leadership leads to effective scaling and sustainability.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
This blog post describes a Teen Science Café in Oxford Hills, Maine, which featured the role of drones in emergency response. Colonel Dan Leclair of the University of Maine at Augusta brought drones of all sizes and demonstrated how they were used following hurricanes to make maps of the damage that was caused. He talked about the advantages of a drone being able to go where a plane can’t go: above a hurricane, a wildfire, or a burning building. In addition to mapping the severity of the disaster, drones can deliver much-needed supplies, even portable cell-phone towers. Drones are being used
This paper describes innovative ways of bringing mathematical learning into community venues in rural settings. We selected highly engaging mathematical activities, adapted them for middle school youth and their families, and brought them to the “locavore” contexts of Farmers Markets and community agricultural fairs. “STEM Guides”—community people hired to connect youth with local STEM resources—set up math-oriented booths at local Farmers Markets and fairs. They enlisted visitors in weighing produce, comparing weights of typical fruits/vegetables to record-weighing produce, and composing
This evaluation brief summarizes the kinds of formative feedback and resources that Rockman et al evaluators provided to inform content and marketing of two science cafés, and support the construction, refinement, and dissemination of a questionnaire about café participants understanding of Science Technology and Society (STS). REA staff members served as educational assessment consultants who worked with the project team to (a) qualitatively assess the validity of and refine the constructs for the science café assessment tool; and (b) construct and refine the summative assessment