Chicago's DuSable Museum of African American History will develop and present the "Exploration of African American Physicians and Surgeons" project with an overall goal to expose young people in the community to the opportunities and benefits of STEM education. Project components will include educational programming, lectures, and an historical exhibition revolving around African American contributions and achievements within the world of medicine. The exhibition will focus on work of Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the founder of Chicago's Provident Hospital, the first non-segregated hospital in the United States. Dr. Williams was the first general surgeon to perform a documented and successful pericardium surgical procedure to repair a wound. The project's educational programming will explore the ways in which other African American doctors broke down racial barriers within the field of medicine.
NASA's Universe of Learning provides resources and experiences that enable diverse audiences to explore fundamental questions in astronomy, experience how science is done, and discover the universe for themselves. Using its direct connection to science and science experts, NASA's Universe of Learning creates and delivers timely and authentic resources and experiences for youth, families, and lifelong learners. The goal is to strengthen science learning and literacy, and to enable learners to discover the universe for themselves in innovative, interactive ways that meet today's 21st century needs. The program includes astronomical data tools, multimedia resources, exhibits and community programs, and professional learning experiences for informal educators. It is developed through a unique partnership between the Space Telescope Science Institute, Caltech/IPAC, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and Sonoma State University.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Denise SmithGordon SquiresKathy LestitionAnya BifernoLynn Cominsky
Beyond Spaceship Earth is a multi-faceted project at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis that includes an immersive permanent exhibit about the International Space Station, the Indianan Astronaut Wall of Fame, the Schaefer Planetarium and Space Object Theater; museum theater and facilitated programs throughout the exhibit; complementary programming for schools and families in the museum's STEMLab; and a freely available unit of study for classroom teachers of 3rd-8th grades. The summative evaluation of the project used qualitative and quantitative methods including timing and tracking
The Space and Earth Informal STEM Education (SEISE) project, led by the Arizona State University with partners Science Museum of Minnesota, Museum of Science, Boston, and the University of California Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science and Space Sciences Laboratory, is raising the capacity of museums and informal science educators to engage the public in Heliophysics, Earth Science, Planetary Science, and Astrophysics, and their social dimensions through the National Informal STEM Education Network (NISE Net). SEISE will also partner on a network-to-network basis with other existing coalitions and professional associations dedicated to informal and lifelong STEM learning, including the Afterschool Alliance, National Girls Collaborative Project, NASA Museum Alliance, STAR_Net, and members of the Association of Children’s Museums and Association of Science-Technology Centers. The goals for this project include engaging multiple and diverse public audiences in STEM, improving the knowledge and skills of informal educators, and encouraging local partnerships.
In collaboration with the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD), SEISE is leveraging NASA subject matter experts (SMEs), SMD assets and data, and existing educational products and online portals to create compelling learning experiences that will be widely use to share the story, science, and adventure of NASA’s scientific explorations of planet Earth, our solar system, and the universe beyond. Collaborative goals include enabling STEM education, improving U.S. scientific literacy, advancing national educational goals, and leveraging science activities through partnerships. Efforts will focus on providing opportunities for learners explore and build skills in the core science and engineering content, skills, and processes related to Earth and space sciences. SEISE is creating hands-on activity toolkits (250-350 toolkits per year over four years), small footprint exhibitions (50 identical copies), and professional development opportunities (including online workshops).
Evaluation for the project will include front-end and formative data to inform the development of products and help with project decision gates, as well as summative data that will allow stakeholders to understand the project’s reach and outcomes.
Informal science learning (ISL) organizations that are successful at providing meaningful science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) experiences for Latino children, youth, and their families share some common traits. They have leaders and staff who believe in the importance of developing culturally relevant models and frameworks that meet the needs and acknowledge the legacy of STEAM in Latino communities. Such organizations are willing to take risks to create experiences that are culturally meaningful, garner funding and implement programs by working closely with their
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Cheryl JuarezVerónika NúñezExploratorium
Designing Our World (DOW) was a four-year NSF-funded initiative in which the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) sought to promote girls’ pursuit of engineering careers through community-based programming, exhibition development, and identity research. The overarching aim of DOW was to engage girls ages 9–14 with experiences that illuminate the social, personally relevant, and altruistic nature of engineering. In addition to programming for girls, the project also included workshops for parents/caregivers, professional development for staff from community partners; and an exhibition
As part of a grant from the National Science Foundation, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) developed, implemented, and evaluated the National Center for Blind Youth in Science (NCBYS), a three-year full-scale development project to increase informal learning opportunities for blind youth in STEM. Through this grant, the NCBYS extended opportunities for informal science learning for the direct benefit of blind students by conducting six NFB STEM2U regional programs included programs for blind youth, their parents/caregivers, blind teen mentors (apprentices), and museum educators.
One way to encourage youth to pursue training in the STEM fields and enter the STEM workforce is to foster interest and engagement in STEM during adolescence. Informal STEM Learning Sites (ISLS) provide opportunities for building interest and engagement in the STEM fields through a multitude of avenues, including the programming that they provide for youth, particularly teens. Frequently, ISLS provide opportunities to participate in volunteer programs, internships or work, which allow teens both to learn relevant STEM knowledge as well as to share that knowledge with others through opportunities to serve as youth educators. While youth educator programs provide rich contexts for teens to engage as both learners and teachers in these informal STEM environments, research to date has not yet identified the relationship between serving as youth educators and STEM engagement. Thus, the goal of this project is to document the impact of youth educators on visitor learning in ISLS and to identify best practices for implementing youth educator programs. The project studies STEM interests and engagement in the youth participants and the visitors that they interact with at six different ISLS in the US and UK. This project is funded through Science Learning+, which is an international partnership between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Wellcome Trust with the UK Economic and Social Research Council. The goal of this joint funding effort is to make transformational steps toward improving the knowledge base and practices of informal STEM experiences. Within NSF, Science Learning+ is part of the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program that seeks to enhance learning in informal environments and to broaden access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences.
This project examines youth educator experiences related to STEM identity, educational aspirations, and motivation. The project also identifies outcomes that the youth educators have on visitors to ISLS in terms of knowledge, interest, and engagement in STEM. The specific aims are: 1) Outcomes for Teens - To measure the longitudinal impact of participation in an extended youth educator experience in an ISLS; 2) Outcomes for Visitors - To compare visitor engagement with and learning from exhibits in ISLS when they interact with a youth educator, relative to outcomes of interacting with an adult educator or no educator; and 3) Outcomes Across Demographics and STEM Sites - To examine differences in visitor engagement based on participant characteristics such as socio-economic status (SES), age, gender, and ethnicity and to compare outcomes of youth educator experiences across different types of ISLS. This research, which draws on expectancy value theory and social cognitive theory, will follow youth participants longitudinally over the course of 5 years and use latent variable analyses to understand the impact on the youth educators as well as the visitors with whom they interact. Importantly, the results of this research will be used to develop best practices for implementing youth educator programs in ISLS and the results will be disseminated to both academic and practice-based communities.
This project has clear and measurable broader impacts in a variety of ways. First, the project provides guidance to improve programming for youth in ISLS, including both the sites involved directly in the research and to the larger community of ISLS through evaluation, development, and dissemination of best practices. Additionally, this project provides rigorous, research-based evidence to identify and describe the outcomes of youth educator programs. This study directly benefits the participants of the research, both the visiting public and the youth educators, through opportunities to engage with science. The findings speak to issues of access and inclusivity in ISLS, providing insight into how to design environments that are welcoming and accessible for diverse groups of learners. Finally, this project provides evidence for best practices for ISLS in developing programs for youth that will lead to interest in and pursuit of STEM careers by members of underrepresented groups.
Becoming computationally literate is increasingly crucial to everyday life and to expanding workforce capacity. Research suggests that computational literacy--knowing what, when, how, and why to use the ideas of computer science, in combination with the capacity to view problems and potential solutions through the lens of computational structures and procedures--can be supported through digital game play. This project aims to develop a social and creative exhibit game that foregrounds aspects of computer science, specifically artificial intelligence (AI) and computer programming, in ways that enable youth to explore, construct, and share computational complex systems content with one another and other museum visitors. To play the game, pairs of youth visitors will use code cards to program the behavior of AI animals in a virtual forest. As they do so, youth will engage with computational literacy practices, such as basic computer programming, describing their computational ideas, and doing computational problem solving with their friends. Their activity will be projected on a large screen as a strategy for enabling youth to test, rehearse, and communicate their computational ideas and to also interest other visitors into computational problem solving.
Using multi-perspective and iterative design-based research, university learning scientists, museum practitioners, and game developers will pursue research questions around how science museums can better engage youth who are traditionally underrepresented in computer science in complex computational practices. Data sources will include interactive-log data, observations of visitor interactions with the game, visitor interviews, and visitor surveys. A multimodal and mixed methods approach that searches for convergences between qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, and learning analytics will be used to generate research findings. Changes in computational literacy will be assessed by evaluating what problems visitors choose to solve with programming, how they frame those problems, and their selections from among possible solutions, what they program, how they program, and how they describe programming ideas. The results of this project will include: 1) a social, interactive gameplay experience that supports the development of computational literacy; 2) design principles for game-based exhibits that facilitate development of computational literacy; and 3) new knowledge of variations in design and gameplay across diverse gameplay users, including those from underrepresented groups in computer science. It is anticipated that 1,000 museum youth visitors will directly participate in the study.
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 understandings of deeper learning by participants.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Matthew BerlandLeilah LyonsMatthew Cannady
The landscape for out-of-school STEM learning in Hong Kong is evolving. In 2017, to capture this change, the Croucher Foundation conducted a mapping exercise. This is the second annual mapping exercise conducted by the Croucher Foundation.
The study reveals a rich and vibrant ecosystem for out-of-school STEM in Hong Kong with almost 2,000 discrete activities covering a very wide range of science disciplines. This second report indicates extremely rapid growth in available out-of-school STEM activities compared to 2016 and an even larger increase in the number of organisations offering out
The Croucher Foundation recently embarked on a research study to explore informal science learning in Hong Kong. This is the first study to focus on the out-of-school ecosystem for science learning in Hong Kong. This exploratory and investigative study identified over a thousand out-of-school STEM activities that happened between June 2015 and May 2016, including courses, workshops and exhibitions available to Hong Kong school students over this twelve-month period. The study excluded tutorials and exam-orientated courses and focused instead on activities designed to encourage an interest in