This article presents key results of a ten-year study of media coverage of agricultural biotechnology in the Philippines, the only country in Asia to date to approve a biotech food/feed crop (Bt corn) for commercialization. The top three national English newspapers – Manila Bulletin, Philippine Daily Inquirer, and Philippine Star were analyzed to determine patterns of media attention measured by coverage peaks, tone, source of news, keywords, and media frames used. Biotechnology news was generally positive but not high in the media agenda. News coverage was marked by occasional peaks brought
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Mariechel NavarroJenny PanopioDonna Bae MalayangNoel Amano, Jr.
This Broad Implementation media project (building upon prior NSF award 0639001) will address science literacy among Latinos via mass media, increasing the amount of Spanish-language science content available in the U.S., increasing the representation of Latino scientists in mainstream media, and expanding the knowledge base about Latino's interest and engagement in science. The STEM content will be based on the research conducted by the Hispanic scientists being interviewed and therefore includes a wide range of topics including astronomy, biology, physics, earth sciences, and engineering. The criteria for selecting the Hispanic researchers and the content is based on the importance of the research, how it is immediately relevant to a Latino audience, and how it draws on the indigenous knowledge system or ethnic pride for U.S. Latinos. Project deliverables include 150 audio-video interviews with Hispanic scientists distributed on both commercial Hispanic radio and TV stations, as well as public broadcasting and online. In addition to the broadcasts, social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter will be used to reach out and engage Hispanics. It is estimated that 300 Spanish-language radio stations will air the programs, resulting in 3 million radio impressions for each daily 60-second broadcast. Television broadcasts are estimated to result in another 2 million impressions per program. Project partners include the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS); V-Me, a national Hispanic educational channel; KLRN, the San Antonio, Texas public television station that will provide the national PBS distribution; and DaGama Web Studio that will develop and implement the social media marketing plan to attract and engage Latinos online. Comprehensive evaluations of project deliverables and impact will be conducted by Informal Learning Solutions (video-audio formative evaluations), and Knight-Williams Research (summative evaluation of project impact). The Summative Evaluation Plan will focus on the programs\' overall appeal, clarity, and effectiveness in meeting the two key audience objectives in the proposal: (1) increasing familiarity with and understanding of science concepts among U.S. Latinos, and (2) demonstrating engagement activities such as talking with friends/family about the presented topics, and/or seeking out additional information. It will furthermore assess the extent to which listeners and viewers find the Hispanic researchers featured in the programs to be effective communicators and the importance they assign to hearing from Hispanic researchers themselves. It will look at whether and how the programs are effective selecting topics with immediate relevance to listeners'/viewers' everyday lives. Finally, the evaluation will gather information about listeners'/viewers' demographic and background characteristics, including their country of origin, degree of fluency in Spanish, reasons for preferring Spanish media, number of generations in the U.S., reasons for tuning into the programming, efforts to recommend the programs to others, and the likelihood of continuing to listen to or view the programs in the future.
The Challenger Reach 2 U program will reach over 6,500 fourth-grade students in 261 missions from underserved communities throughout southwest Colorado and northwestern New Mexico, including primarily rural, lower socio-economic status, Hispanic and Native American districts that seldom have such STEM educational opportunities. The Colorado Consortium for Earth and Space Science Education (CCESSE) will show that increasing the quality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is not only a NASA goal set at the national level and a state and local priority, but is the underlying core competency of our organization as well. As an integral part of our Challenger Reach 2 U proposal to motivate interest in STEM curriculum and to strengthen the Nation's future workforce, we will thoroughly train teachers of these students to be more comfortable with technology and more prepared to deliver motivational STEM lessons, leaving an educational legacy that will greatly outlive the life of this grant. We will provide these students with cross-curricular preparatory lessons which will culminate with an exciting simulated space mission delivered in their own classrooms and moderated by a "NASA" mission director at our Center. With the help of the NASA grant, all of these services will be provided at no cost to the schools.
The youth-based ITEST proposal, Invention, Design, Engineering and Art Cooperative (IDEA), will provide 100 students in grades 8-12 from the East Side of St. Paul, Minnesota with IT experiences in engineering and design. The content focus is mechanical and electrical engineering, such as product design, electronics, and robotics with an emphasis on 21st century job skills, including skills in advanced areas of microcontrollers, sensors, 3-D modeling software, and web software development for sharing iterative engineering product design ideas and maintaining progress on student product development. These technologies are practical and specific to careers in engineering and standards for technological literacy. During the three-year project period, a scaffolding process will be used to move students from exploratory activities in Design Teams in the 8th and 9th grades to paid employment experiences in grades 10-12 as part of Invention Crews. All design and product invention work will be directly connected to solving problems for local communities, including families and local businesses. For grades 8 and 9, students will receive 170 total contact hours per year and for grades 10-12, 280 contact hours per year. The participant target goal is 75% participation by girls, and African-American and Latino youth. Students participating in this project are situated within the country's most diverse urban districts with students speaking more than 103 languages and dialects. The schools targeted by this project average 84% of students receiving free or reduced price lunches, and have a population with 81% falling below proficiency in the Grade 8/11 Math MCA-II Test. To achieve the project goals of recruiting underrepresented students, and supporting academic transitions from middle and high school to college and university, the project team aggregated an impressive group of project partners that include schools, colleges, universities, and highly experienced youth and community groups, technology businesses that will provide mentoring of students and extensive involvement by parent and family services. Every partner committed to the project has a longstanding and abiding commitment to serving students from economically challenged areas.
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Anika WardKristen MurrayRachel GatesDavid Gundale
The NISE Network Forums were created to provide an in-depth learning experience that would (1) enhance participants' understanding of nano and its potential impacts; (2) increase participants' confidence in participating in public discourse about nanotechnologies; and (3) build informal science educators' knowledge and ability to conduct this type of programming at their institution (NISE Network Public Forums Manual, 2007). In an effort to reach out to a more diverse audience, the NISE Network Forums Team translated into Spanish the existing NISE Net forum "Nanomedicine in Healthcare" to
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Elizabeth KollmannJane MorganNanoscale Informal Science Education NetworkRoxana del Campo
This Communicating Research to Public Audiences (NSF 03-509) project is based on the PI's current NSF award: SBE-0545361- ADVANCE: Determining national science faculty demographics in order to empower women and guide solutions. This project will help address the need for underrepresented female faculty as role models and mentors in science and engineering. Although the number of female under-represented minority students (URM) in college has been increasing, there are astonishingly low numbers of female URM faculty in each science discipline. This project would produce a series of female URM faculty biographical videos to substitute for the lack of personal contact young women have with these role models. The videos would be widely disseminated through schools, colleges, and minority serving organizations to reach young women.
Michigan Technological University will collaborate with David Heil and Associates to implement the Family Engineering Program, working in conjunction with student chapters of engineering societies such as the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), the Society of Hispanic Professionals (SHP) and a host of youth and community organizations. The Family Engineering Program is designed to increase technological literacy by introducing children ages 5-12 and their parents/caregivers to the field of engineering using the principles of design. The project will reach socio-economically diverse audiences in the upper peninsula of Michigan including Native American, Hispanic, Asian, and African American families. The secondary audience includes university STEM majors, informal science educators, and STEM professionals that are trained to deliver the program to families. A well-researched five step engineering design process utilized in the school-based Engineering is Elementary curriculum will be incorporated into mini design challenges and activities based in a variety of fields such as agricultural, chemical, environmental, and biomedical engineering. Deliverables include the Family Engineering event model, Family Engineering Activity Guide, Family Engineering Nights, project website, and facilitator training workshops. The activity guide will be pilot tested, field tested, and disseminated for use in urban, suburban, and rural settings. Strategic impact will result from the development of content-rich engineering activities for families and the dissemination of a project model that incorporates the expertise of engineering and educational professionals at multiple levels of implementation. It is anticipated that 300 facilitators and 7,000-10,000 parents and children will be directly impacted by this effort, while facilitator training may result in more than 27,000 program participants.
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Neil HutzlerEric IversenChristine CunninghamJoan ChaddeDavid Heil
Voyage of Discovery is a comprehensive and innovative project designed to provide K-12 youth in Baltimore City with an introduction to mathematics, engineering, technology, environmental science, and computer and information science, as it relates to the maritime and aerospace industries. The Sankofa Institute, in partnership with the Living Classrooms Foundation and a host of marine, informal science, community, and educational organizations, collaborate to make science relevant for inner-city youth by infusing science across the curriculum and by addressing aspects of history and culture. Youth are introduced to historical, current, and future innovations in shipbuilding as a means to learn the science, mathematics, and history associated with navigation, transportation, environmental science, and shipping. Activities will take place at the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park and Museum where students participate in intensive afterschool, Saturday, and summer sessions. Families are invited for pre-session orientation meetings and again at the end of each session to observe student progress. This project will provide over 3,900 K-12 youth with the opportunity to learn mathematics (algebra, geometry, and trigonometry), physics (gravity, density, mechanics), design, and estuarine biology while participating in hands-on sessions. Project deliverables include a 26-foot wooden boat, a working model of a dirigible, a submarine model, and pilot control panel models, all constructed by students and subsequently incorporated into exhibits at the USS Constellation Museum. The project also results in the production of two curricula--one each on celestial navigation and propulsion. Voyage of Discovery informs the literature on inquiry-based informal science education programs and strategies to engage minority and low-income youth in learning science and technology.
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Sandra ParkerScott Raymond
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Based on nearly two decades of museum programming for low-income Hispanic and African American girls at the Miami Science Museum, this extension service project employs a train-the-trainers approach to build a network of museum-based Extension Agents dedicated to helping informal science educators attract the interest and support the persistence of minority girls, grades 6-12, currently underrepresented in STEM studies. Led by the Miami Science Museum, the collaboration brings together an experienced group of institutions with representation from the informal science, gender research, and engineering communities. In addition to the Museum, the Expert Project Team consists of key staff from the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC), and SECME Inc. (formerly the Southeastern Consortium of Minorities in Engineering), who serve as the conduit for the participation of minority engineering professional organizations. An advisory/research panel of researchers in gender in STEM, whose work complements those of the project investigators, works closely with the Expert Project Team to prepare Extension Agents from ten geographically dispersed museums, who in turn provide a range of training and peer mentoring services to the practitioner community of informal science educators in science-rich institutions nationwide. Participating museums include: Connecticut Science Center (Hartford, CT), New York Hall of Science (New York, NY), Maryland Science Center (Baltimore, MD), Miami Science Museum (Miami, FL), COSI (Columbus, OH), St. Louis Science Center (St. Louis, MO), Louisville Science Center (Louisville, KY), Sci-Port (Shreveport, LA), Explora (Albuquerque, NM), and California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco, CA).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Judy BrownLaura Huerta MigasMichele Williams