In this paper we compare pre-COVID-19 and post-2021 Tactile Mental Cutting Test assessment data from blind or low-vision participants including scores and test duration between 2019 and 2022. Results show a statistically significant difference in how long it took participants to complete the TMCT between the two timeframes.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
David SearleDaniel KaneNatalie ShaheenWade Goodridge
This document is the final evaluation report for the project, which focuses both on formative evaluation of the collaborative+interdisciplinary presentation creation process and summative evaluation of audience learning outcomes.
This report summarizes findings from the learning event and includes the two instruments developed as part of this project: The STEM Advocacy Survey which is a 36-item measure that includes four subscales that measure components of STEM Advocacy, including Value of STEM for Society, Knowledge of STEM Advocacy, STEM Advocacy Efficacy, and STEM Advocacy Identification; and the STEM Engagement Survey for Older Adults, a ten-item scale adapted for older populations from a previously developed instrument designed for youth (ActivationLab.org) measuring behavioral, cognitive, and affective
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jennifer MangoldSarah OlsenCheryl BrewsterMatthew Cannady
The project team published a research synopsis article with Futurum Science Careers in Feb 2023 called “How Can Place Attachment Improve Scientific Literacy?”
The Montshire Museum of Science in partnership with The Family Place will facilitate the program “Families Learning Together: Strengthening a Local System of Support for STEM Learning” for young parents and their children. Informed by a pilot partnership, the program will provide families with hands-on math and science instruction and informal learning opportunities. Programming for young parents ages 15 to 25 will develop their relevant academic knowledge and core life skills to prepare them for parenthood and the workplace. Participating families will receive free admission to accessible exhibits and programming.
The Exploratorium will increase the museum community's understanding of the impact of a single science museum visit on "emerging adult" learners-young adults aged 18-29, who are not yet married and have no children. In particular, the study will attempt to understand how museum visits help young women build crucially important science self-confidence. The project will build on prior IMLS-funded research that found that a science museum visit mitigated a pre-existing gender gap in science confidence, or self-efficacy (SSE). The research team will replicate and investigate this effect further by observing male and female young adults during their visits, and over the course of the following three months. The study will gather data before, during, and after the visit through interviews, surveys, experience-sampling, and analysis of participants' social media posts. Results of this research will provide valuable information to the science museum community, as they seek to address the challenges of achieving gender equity in STEM education and the workforce.
This brief focuses on a participatory study with the high school program of the Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center (KAYSC) at the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM). Young people are organized into teams of up to 20 youth with an adult practitioner who delivers programming based on a STEM content area. Their activities and project-based learning are based in both STEM and social justice, coined in the KAYSC as “STEM Justice.”
As part of our study, we wanted to understand youth and adult needs that exist in an informal STEM education program that weaves equity into its core. This brief
This brief shares youth development insights from a museum-based, informal science learning program that uses STEM as a tool for social justice. Key to the success of this program were young people and adults feeling at home in a welcoming, diverse, and inclusive space; activities that focused on connecting and relationships; a holistically supportive space that attended to family and personal needs; shared norms for conversation and expectations; and science content grounded in young people’s lives, experiences, and communities as well as work with community members.
These needs were
Across the country, educators and mentors in informal settings have provided youth with opportunities to persist and thrive along STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) trajectories. Unfortunately, the current COVID-19 pandemic may limit youths' opportunities to continue pursuing STEM pathways by removing their access to important resources, such as mentors in science labs and other STEM learning spaces. The impact of the pandemic may be especially harmful for youth from underrepresented groups whose families have been disproportionately affected by this crisis. The purpose of this project is to study the impact of COVID-19 on the STEM trajectories of teenagers from underrepresented groups who had previously worked with scientists as mentors before the pandemic. A survey, which will be administered to hundreds of teenagers, will identify the supports that they used to successfully navigate disruptions as they continued to pursue college and career pathways in STEM. For teenagers who decided not to actively pursue STEM pathways during the pandemic, this survey will illuminate how loss of supports and new challenges discouraged their active pursuit of STEM. By identifying supports and challenges that encouraged or discouraged STEM pursuits, this project will advance knowledge on how informal learning programs can support underrepresented teenagers in persisting along STEM pathways during national crises and emergencies.
The American Museum of Natural History will conduct mixed-methods research to explore the impact of the pandemic on the STEM trajectories of underrepresented teenagers. They will administer surveys to 560 teenagers from underrepresented groups who previously participated in the New York City Science Research Mentoring Consortium. The survey will ascertain whether and how the youth found access to new supports or lost access to former supports; whether they face new challenges and how they have responded to those challenges; and whether and how their feelings about pursuing STEM in college and beyond have changed. Teenagers who complete the survey will identify adults in their lives who have been important in supporting their pursuits in STEM, and two adults per teenager will also be invited to complete surveys on perceived disruptions. Latent class analyses, cognitive interviews, and consultation with youth and survey experts will be used to establish survey validity, while the survey results will be analyzed via two-mode social network analysis. Additionally, 16 teenagers will participate in in-depth interviews regarding the impact of the pandemic on their STEM trajectories. Findings and implications for practice will be disseminated widely to researchers, educators, and mentors in informal science education. These findings will help stakeholders to provide better supports for underrepresented youth during the current pandemic and during future national emergencies. This project is funded by the Advanced Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program. As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the AISL program 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 RAPID 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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Preeti GuptaTimothy PodkulKaren Hammerness
The visit to a science museum may be manifested through complex and dynamic motivations which, according to the literature, are under-investigated in a Brazilian context. In this study, an instrument has been modified and applied to 202 visitors up to 15 years in order to investigate motivation for visiting. Combined application of Exploratory Factor Analysis and the Information Bottleneck method revealed that 17 out of the 20 initial items in the questionnaire aligned with three dimensions of motivation. The main motivation was learning desire, while entertainment and interaction motivations
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Ana Cláudia KasseboehmerRosana de Fátima MartinhãoKenia Naara ParraDaniela Maria Lemos Barbato
Mediators engage in peer-to-peer conversations with young adults visiting the art and science exhibitions at Science Gallery Dublin. Previous evaluation and anecdotal reports show that the interdisciplinary nature of these conversations fosters self-confidence and interest in academic careers. We used the Most Significant Change methodology to evaluate if working as a Mediator has an impact beyond these domains. The results show that civic engagement, interest in social justice and emotional empathy are domains of significant personal change strongly associated with the development of self