Ruff Family Science is a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that aims to foster joint media engagement and hands-on science exploration among diverse, low-income parents and their 4- to 8-year-old children. Building on the success of the PBS series FETCH! with Ruff Ruffman, the project leverages FETCH’s funny and charismatic animated host, along with its proven approach to teaching science, to inspire educationally disadvantaged families to explore science together. The project is utilizing a research and design process to create resources that meet the needs of families
This third and final report reflects on the entire three-year grant period. It offers the External Review Team’s overall assessment and observations about the accomplishments and challenges experienced by the Child Trends Team while implementing the proof-of-concept study. It further presents several open questions and opportunities for future consideration.
While the term 'failure' brings to mind negative associations, there is a current focus on failure as a driver of innovation and development in many professional fields. It is also emerging from prior research that for STEM professionals and educators, failure plays an important role in designing and making to increase learning, persistence and other noncognitive skills such as self-efficacy and independence. By investigating how youth and educators attend to moments of failure, how they interpret what this means, and how they respond, we will be better able to understand the dynamics of each part of the experience. The research team will be working with youth from urban, suburban and rural settings, students from Title I schools or who qualify for free/reduced-price lunches, those from racial and ethnic minority groups, as well as students who are learning English as a second language. These youth are from groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM and in making, and research indicates they are more likely to experience negative outcomes when they experience failure.
The intellectual merit of this project centers on establishing a baseline understanding of how failure in making is triggered and experienced by youth, what role educators play in the process, and what can be done to increase persistence and learning, rather than failure being an end-state. The research team will investigate these issues through the use of qualitative and quantitative research methods. In particular, the team will design and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions on increasing the abilities of youth and educators in noticing and responding to failures and increasing positive (e.g., resilience) outcomes. Research sites are selected because they will allow collection of data on youth from a wide range of backgrounds. The research team will also work to test and revise their hypothesized model of the influence of factors on persistence through failures in making. This project is a part of NSF's Maker Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) portfolio (NSF 15-086), a collaborative investment of Directorates for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), Education and Human Resources (EHR) and Engineering (ENG).
A frequently missing element in environmental education programs is a concerted effort by communities, organizations, government, and academic stakeholders to build meaningful partnerships and cultivate informal science learning opportunities via public participation in environmental research. This collaborative approach not only makes scientific information more readily available, it also engages community members in the processes of scientific inquiry, synthesis, data interpretation, and the translation of results into action. This project will build a co-created citizen science program coupled with a peer education model and an extensive communication of results to increase environmental STEM literacy. The project targets historically underrepresented populations that are likely to be disproportionately impacted by climate, water scarcity, and food security. Based upon past needs assessments in the targeted communities, gardens irrigated by harvested rainwater will become hubs for environmental STEM education and research. For this project, gardens irrigated by harvested rainwater will serve as hubs for environmental literacy education efforts. Researchers from the University of Arizona and Sonora Environmental Research Institute will work alongside community environmental health workers, who will then train families residing in environmentally compromised areas (urban and rural) on how to monitor their soil, plant, and harvested water quality. The project aims to: (1) co-produce environmental monitoring, exposure, and risk data in a form that will be directly relevant to the participants' lives, (2) increase the community's involvement in environmental decision-making, and (3) improve environmental STEM literacy and learning in underserved rural and urban communities. The project will investigate and gather extensive quantitative and quantitative data to understand how: (1) participation in a co-created citizen science project enhances a participant's overall environmental STEM literacy; (2) a peer-education model coupled with a co-created citizen science program affects participation of historically underrepresented groups in citizen science; and (3) the environmental monitoring approach influences the participant's environmental health learning outcomes and understanding of the scientific method. In parallel, this project will evaluate the role of local-based knowledge mediators and different mechanisms to communicate results. These findings will advance the fields of informal science education, environmental science, and risk communication. Concomitantly, the project will facilitate the co-generation of a robust dataset that will not only inform guidelines and recommendations for harvested rainwater use, it will build capacity in underserved communities and inform the safe and sustainable production of food sources. This research effort is especially critical for populations in arid and semiarid environments, which account for ~40% of the global land area and are inhabited by one-third of the world's population. This program will be available in English and Spanish and can truly democratize environmental STEM research and policy. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understandings of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments.
Chemistry is an important and widely relevant field of science. However, when compared with other STEM content areas, chemistry is under-represented in U.S. science museums and other informal educational environments. This project will build, and build knowledge about, innovative approaches to delivering informal science learning activities in chemistry. The project will not only increase public interest and understanding of chemistry but also increase public perception of chemistry's relevance and increase the public's self-efficacy with respect to chemistry. This project outcomes will include a guide for practitioners along with activity materials that will be packaged into a kit, distributed, and replicated for use by informal science educators, chemists, and chemistry students at 250 sites across the U.S. The project team will reach out to organizations that serve diverse audiences and diverse geographic locations, including organizations in rural and inner-city areas. The kits will provide guidance on engaging girls, people with various abilities, Spanish speakers, and other diverse audiences, and include materials in Spanish. Written guides, training videos, and training slides will be included to support training in science communication in general, as well as chemistry in particular. This project is supported by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds research and innovative resources for use in a variety of settings, as a part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments.
This project will take an innovative approach to develop informal educational activities and materials about chemistry. Rather than starting with content goals, the project will start with a theoretical framework drawn from research about affecting attitudes about science related to interest, relevance, and self-efficacy. A design-based research approach (DBR) will be used to apply that framework to the development of hands-on educational activities about chemistry, while also testing and modifying the framework itself. (DBR blends empirical educational research with the theory-driven design of learning environments.) Existing or new educational activities that appear to embody key characteristics defined in the framework will be tested with public audiences for their impact on visitors. Researchers and educators will determine how different characteristics of the educational activities defined in the framework affect the outcomes. The activities will be modified and tested iteratively until the investigators achieve close alignment between framework and impacts.. The project team will continue the design-based research approach both to examine groups of activities in which synergies can have impacts beyond single interactions as well as to examine varied ways of training facilitators who can also significantly affect outcomes. In this way, the project will generate knowledge about how kits of hands-on informal learning activities can stimulate attitudes of interest, relevance, and self-efficacy with respect to the neglected field of chemistry. The project teams will broadly disseminate project outcomes within the educational research, science and informal Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education communities. While this project will focus on chemistry, the strategies it will develop and test through a design-based research process will provide valuable insight into effective approaches for informal STEM education more broadly.
Capitalizing on the appeal of the PBS KIDS project PLUM LANDING, PLUM RX will research and develop resources to help families and educators infuse environmental science learning into outdoor prescription programs, while ensuring they are appropriate for broad use in other informal settings. The growing outdoor prescription movement is designed to increase the amount of time children spend outside in nature. Programs are structured so that health care providers write "prescriptions" for children to engage in outdoor activity, and informal educators "fill" these prescriptions by facilitating youth and family participation in outdoor activities. There is preliminary evidence that these programs are getting kids outside, but best practices for transitioning "get outside" programs to become "get outside and learn about the environment" programs remain unidentified. PLUM RX is designed to build this knowledge and create resources that are responsive to the needs of both English and Spanish-speaking urban families. The project will work with informal educators and families through multiple cycles of implementation and revision, testing and refining PLUM LANDING resources (animations, videos, games, hands-on science activities, and support materials for informal educators and families), with the goal of designing an effective and accessible PLUM RX Toolkit for national dissemination. 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 (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) learning in informal environments. The proposed research is designed to ensure that the PLUM RX Toolkit--the resources and support materials--will meet the needs of educators working in non-specialized urban settings. Education Development Center (EDC) and WGBH developers will collaborate on design-based research at three urban outdoor prescription programs serving low-income families: Philadelphia Nature Rx in Philadelphia, PA; Outdoors Rx in Boston, MA; and Portland Rx Play in Portland, OR. Moving through cycles of implementation, observation, analysis, and revision, the research team will work closely with educators, families, and developers to determine how the programmatic and structural features of the learning environment, the actions of the educators, and the intervention itself can most effectively support children and families' outdoor exploration in urban contexts. Toolkit materials will include resources for kids and families (including Spanish-speaking families) and informal educators (including those who work with families and directly with children in out-of-school settings). Directors from the three urban outdoor prescription programs will contribute to every phase of the research process, including recruiting families and youth who will participate in a weekly sequence of activities. The overarching focus of the analysis process will be on systematically describing the interaction between two dimensions of implementation: What happened during pilot implementations, and the factors that constrained or supported implementation as planned; and the quality of what happened, which will be defined with reference to the intended impacts. EDC will use a structured descriptive coding process to analyze the qualitative evidence gathered through interviews and observations during design and testing periods. Products of the research activities will include: a series of formative memos to the development team; a report mapping changes made to PLUM RX Toolkit materials in response to formative input and the intended impact of those changes; and findings regarding commonalities and differences across sites in the interaction of local contextual factors and the implementation success of the PLUM RX Toolkit. Concord Evaluation Group (CEG) will provide independent, summative evaluation of the project. Through this process, PLUM RX will build broader knowledge about how to design educational resources, geared for both families and informal educators, which respond to the unique challenges of exploring environmental science in urban environments.