The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will amplify its partnership with Hart Magnet School, a Title 1 elementary school in urban Stamford, Connecticut, by increasing exposure and access to the arts for first-fifth graders, their families, and educators. A new program model, leveraging the museum's artist exhibitions, will focus on technology and an inquiry-based approach to science. Students, educators, and families will be encouraged to see and think in new ways through on-site STEAM tours at the museum, artist-led workshops at Hart, teacher professional development, and afterschool family activities. Outside evaluators will work with the project team to develop goals and associated metrics to measure how the model of museum-school partnership can enhance student achievement, engage families more deeply in their child's school experience and community, and contribute to teacher professional development. The evaluator will also train museum staff on best practices for program assessment.
Maker education has increased tremendously in community settings and classrooms across the country. Maker education is learner-driven and hands-on, often collaborative, and may focus on solving a problem or designing an object or device. There is a growing need for assessment and evaluation tools and approaches to understand and improve the nature of maker learning and provide evidence for the value of maker pedagogy. This workshop will bring together approximately 25 researchers from formal and informal settings as well as practitioners to review current maker assessment and evaluation tools and examine the role those tools can play for informing research and practice. The workshop will identify areas where future work is needed, including designing assessment and evaluation that effectively addresses the interests and needs of diverse learners. The workshop will disseminate an online collection of these assessment and evaluation tools, a research brief, and several webinars sharing the results and recommendations of the conference.
The two-day, in-person conference will include pre-workshop surveys to determine and refine issues for consideration at the conference, identify a core set of readings and resources for conference participants, and to identify key topics for research briefings presented at the conference. The conference will include background briefings, hands-on try-outs of assessment tools, synthesis discussions, and identification of future directions for research and next steps. Resources developed from the workshop will be widely disseminated through workshop partner Maker Education’s website, an annual maker conference held at the University of Wisconsin, and through other publications reaching researchers and practitioners in informal and formal educational settings,
This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.
This workshop is funded through the "Dear Colleague Letter: Principles for the Design of Digital Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Learning Environments (NSF 18-017)." In today's educational climate, organizations are creating physical learning spaces for hands-on STEM activities, often called makerspaces, co-working spaces, innovation labs, or fablabs. These spaces have evolved to be interdisciplinary centers that personalize learning for individual, diverse learners in collaborative settings. When designed well, these physical spaces create communities that contextualize learning around participants' goals and thus address STEM learning in a dynamic and integrated way. Participation in these learning environments encourages the cultivation of STEM identities for young people and can positively direct their career trajectories into STEM fields. This workshop will bring together a community of collaborators from multiple stakeholder groups including academia, public libraries, museums, community based organizations, non-profits, media makers and distribution channels, and educators within and beyond K-12 schools. Led by the University of Arizona, and held at Biosphere 2, an international research facility, participants will engage in activities that invite experimentation with distributed learning technologies to examine ways to adapt learning to the changing technological landscape and create robust, dynamic online learning environments. The workshop will culminate in a synthesis of design principles, assessment approaches, and tools that will be shared widely. Partnerships arising from the workshop will pave the way for sustained efforts in this area that span research and practice communities. Outcomes will address research and development of the next generation of digitally distributed learning environments.
The three day workshop convening will provide a unique forum to (1) exchange innovative ideas and share challenges and opportunities, (2) connect practical and research-based expertise and (3) form cross-institutional and cross-community partnerships that envision, propose, and implement opportunities for collecting and analyzing data to systematically inform the collective understanding. Participation-based activities will include design-based experiences, participatory activities, demonstrations of works in progress, prototyping, creative pitching, practitioner lightning talks, small group breakouts, hands-on design activities, and an 'unconference' style synthesis of bold ideas. Participants will be invited to experiment with distributed learning technologies. Five focus areas for the workshop include (1) inclusivity of learning spaces that invite multiple perspectives and full participation, (2) documenting learning in ways that are linked to outcomes and impacts for all learners, (3) implementing the use of new technologies in diverse settings, such as the workforce, (4) interpersonal interactions and peer-to-peer learning that may encourage a STEM career-path, and, (5) methods for collecting and analyzing data at the intersection of people, the learning environment, and new technologies at multiple levels. Outcomes of the workshop will serve to advance knowledge regarding critical gaps and opportunities and identify and characterize models of collaboration, networking, and innovation that operate within and across studio-based STEM learning environments.
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.
Maker Education scholarship is accumulating increasingly complex understandings of the kinds of learning associated with maker practices along with principles and pedagogies that support such learning. However, even as large investments are being made to spread maker education, there is little understanding of how organizations that are intended targets of such investments learn to develop new maker related educational programs. Using the framework of Expansive Learning, focusing on organizational learning processes resulting in new and unfolding forms of activity, this paper begins to fill
The goal of the National Science Foundation?s Research Coordination Network (RCN) program is to advance a field or create new directions in research or education by supporting groups of investigators to communicate and coordinate their research, training and educational activities across disciplinary, organizational, geographic and international boundaries. This RCN will bring together scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of equity and interdisciplinary making in STEM education. Making is a culture that emphasizes interest-driven learning by doing within an informal, peer-led and creative social environment. Hundreds of maker spaces and maker-oriented classroom pedagogies have developed across the country. Maker spaces often include digital technologies such as computer design, 3-D printers, and laser cutters, but may also include traditional crafts or a variety of artist-driven creations. The driving purpose of the project is to collectively broaden STEM-focused maker participation in the United States through pursuing common research questions, sharing resources, and incubating emergent inquiry and knowledge across multiple working sites of practice. The network aims to build capacity for research and knowledge, building in consequential and far-reaching mechanisms to leverage combined efforts of a core group of scholars, practitioners, and an extended network of formal and informal education partners in urban and rural sites serving people from groups underrepresented in STEM. Maker learning spaces can be particularly fruitful spaces for STEM learning toward equity because they foster interest-driven, collective, and community-oriented learning in making for social and community change. The network will be led by a team of multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary researchers from different geographic regions of the United States and guided by a steering committee of prominent researchers and practitioners in making and equity will convene to facilitate network activities.
Equitable processes are rooted in a commitment to understand and build on the skills, practices, values, and knowledge of communities marginalized in STEM. The research network aims to fill in gaps in current understandings about making and equity, including the many ways different projects define equity and STEM in making. The project will survey the existing research terrain to develop a dynamic and cohesive understanding of making that connects to learners' STEM ideas, communities, and historical ways of making. Additionally, the network will collaboratively develop central research questions for network partners. The network will create a repository for ethical and promising practices in community-based research and aggregate data across sites, among other activities. The network will support collaboration across a multiplicity of making spaces, research institutions, and community organizations throughout the country to share data, methodologies, ways of connecting to local communities and approaches to robust integration of STEM skills and practices. Project impacts will include new research partnerships, a dissemination hub for research related to making and equity, professional development for researchers and practitioners, and leveraging collective research findings about making values and practices to improve approaches to STEM-rich making integration in informal learning environments. The project is funded by NSF's Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of settings. As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of settings.
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.
The STAR Library Network Phase 2 (STAR Net) brings inquiry-based STEM learning experiences to public libraries through six traveling exhibits, training for library staff and associated programming for library patrons, and a virtual community of practice for library staff and others interested in bringing STEM programming to libraries. In 2014, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a four-year grant to the Space Science Institute’s (SSI) National Center for Interactive Learning (NCIL) and its partners—the American Library Association (ALA), the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), the
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Ginger FitzhughSarah ArmstrongSheila RodriguezVicky Coulon
resourceevaluationProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The STAR Library Network Phase 2 (STAR Net) brings inquiry-based STEM learning experiences to public libraries through six traveling exhibits, training for library staff and associated programming for library patrons, and a virtual community of practice for library staff and others interested in bringing STEM programming to libraries. In 2014, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a four-year grant to the Space Science Institute’s (SSI) National Center for Interactive Learning (NCIL) and its partners—the American Library Association (ALA), the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), the
DATE:
TEAM MEMBERS:
Ginger FitzhughSarah ArmstrongSheila RodriguezVicky Coulon
The COMPASS conference will bring together 80 participants for two days in September 2018 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA. The first dissemination will take place in a presentation at the ASTC conference the following month in October 2018. A webinar sharing insights from COMPASS and inviting others to engage will be held in March 2019 hosted by ASTC and accessible by ASTC members and non-members alike. A companion COMPASS e-publication will be released for free download, also in March 2019, with summaries of conference proceedings, key issues identified, case histories of ILAM in
The Multi-Site Public Engagement with Science—Synthetic Biology (MSPES) initiative was an Innovations in Development project funded by the National Science Foundation (DRL-1421179) through the Advancing of Informal STEM Learning program (AISL). MSPES promoted public engagement with science (PES)—a model of mutual dialogue and learning between public and scientist audiences—through the creation and distribution of PES kits to nearly 200 informal science education sites around the country. Kits included two types of learning experiences: (1) forum programs during which scientists and teen or
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (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 project is a two-day conference, along with pre- and post-conference activities, with the goal of furthering the informal science learning field's review of the research and development that has been conducted on data visualizations that have been used to help the public better understand and become more engaged in science. The project will address an urgent need in informal science education, providing a critical first step towards a synthesis of research and technology development in visualization and, thus, to inform and accelerate work in the field in this significant and rapidly changing domain.
The project will start with a Delphi study by the project evaluator prior to the conference to provide an Emerging Field Assessment on data visualization work to date. Then, a two-day conference at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and related activities will bring together AISL-funded PIs, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, designers, and technology developers to (a) synthesize work to date, (b) bring in relevant research from fields outside of informal learning, and (c) identify remaining knowledge gaps for further research and development. The project team will also develop a website with videos of all presentations, conference documentation, resources, and links to social media communities; and a post-conference publication mapping the state of the field, key findings, and promising technologies.
The initiative also has a goal to broaden participation, as the attendees will include a diverse cadre of professionals in the field who contribute to data visualization work.
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.
Supported by the National Science Foundation, the Global Soundscapes! Big Data, Big Screens, Open Ears project employs a variety of informal learning experiences to present the physics of sound and the new science of soundscape ecology. The interdisciplinary science of soundscape ecology analyzes sounds over time in different ecosystems around the world. The major components of the Global Soundscapes project are an educator-led interactive giant-screen theater show, group activities, and websites. All components are designed with both sighted and visually impaired students in mind. Multimedia
Digital Observation Technology Skills (DOTS) is a framework for integrating modern, mobile technology into outdoor, experiential science education. DOTS addresses longstanding tensions between modern technology and classical outdoor education by carefully selecting appropriate digital technology for educational purposes and by situating these tools in classical experiential pedagogy.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
R. Justin HoughamMarc NutterCaitlin Graham