The goal of this evaluation was to determine how museum visitors responded to the museum's existing live animal exhibits and identify recommendations for their new Live Animal Garden exhibit.
The National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation [NNOCCI] is a Community of Practice [CoP] dedicated to advancing the conversation on climate change, based on the principle that wide-scale training with proven communication techniques can change the national discourse around climate change to be more productive, creative, and solutions-focused.
NNOCCI CoP is a network of individuals and organizations in formal and informal education, the social sciences, climate sciences, and public policy. By 2018, the community represented more than 184 institutions in 38 states, and over
Overview
In 2020, RK&A (now Kera Collective) partnered with the National Museum of Natural History to conduct a summative evaluation of the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils: Deep Time, a 31,000 square foot exhibition that explores how Earth’s distant past shapes our future.
Our evaluation explored how visitors process complex scientific topics, such as climate change, mass extinctions, the evolution of life on Earth, and humans’ role in positively impacting Earth’s future.
Approach
We designed a large-scale evaluation study with four distinct but interrelated parts:
A
Through the T523: Formative Evaluation for Educational Product Development course, our team conducted a semester-long formative evaluation for the Museum of Science, Boston (MoS) Gaia Exhibit. The Gaia Exhibit (Gaia) is a new, temporary art installation located in the MoS’s Blue Wing exhibition hall. Gaia that strives to inspire appreciation for the earth and climate change awareness. The exhibit displays imagery of the Earth’s surface on a twenty feet diameter, three-dimensional globe. Additional exhibit elements include projected questions on the floor to prompt reflection and exhibit-
Engaging Faith-based Communities in Citizen Science through Zooniverse was an 18-month pilot initiative funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Any opinions, findings, or recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Foundation. The goals of this initiative were to broaden participation in citizen science (aka people-powered research) among religious and interfaith communities by establishing pathways for them to engage with science using the online Zooniverse platform, and to build positive, long-term relationships with these
NSF generously funded the Science Museum of Minnesota's exploration of whether or not the "theatrical gaming" technique could improve visitors' understanding of complex topics requiring conceptual shifts--topics like evolution. COVID disrupted our formal evaluation plans, but this report offers finding and guidance/best practices for other informal education institutions interested in developing this type of experience. Individual sections discuss our particular, three-phased project, theatrical gaming as a technique, storytelling, gaming, technology, and evaluation.
The Lineage project was a collaboration between Twin Cities Public Television and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The project included creation of a feature-length video program, a Virtual Reality game, and a set of hands-on activities designed for use by multigenerational audiences—all of which were incorporated as part of a series of seven Fossil Festival events at museums and other sites around the United States. This report presents findings from a set of external evaluation studies that examined impacts on families who participated in Fossil Festival events as well
ChemAttitudes: Using Design-Based Research to Develop and Disseminate Strategies and Materials to Support Chemistry Interest, Relevance, and Self-Efficacy (ChemAttitudes, NSF DRL-1612482) is a collaborative project between the Museum of Science, Boston (MOS), the National Informal STEM Education Network (NISE Net), and the American Chemical Society (ACS) among others. As a part of this project, researchers and educators from MOS and the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM) used design-based research to create chemistry hands-on activities meant to positively impact visitors’ attitudes towards
This report presents summative evaluation results for a National Science Foundation funded project entitled Grounding Institutional Partnerships in Structures for Broader Impacts Design (BID). The project represents a collaboration between five institutions: Institute for Learning Innovation, The STEM Research Center at Oregon State University, Scicenter, University of Washington-Bothell, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. BID aimed at creating an inter-institutional structure and toolkit to assist higher education institutions (HEIs) and informal science education organizations (ISEs) in
This report summarizes findings of an NSF conference grant designed to support the knowledge-building component of the 2019 Inclusive SciComm Symposium (ISCS). Specifically, this document describes symposium participants' motivations for attending the symposium, the symposium's effectiveness in achieving participants' desired outcomes, and participants' attitudes, behaviors, and self-efficacy related to critical dialogue, or difficult conversations across difference. The report also summarizes participants' perceived needs, challenges, and opportunities for advancing inclusive, equitable, and
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Sunshine MenezesHollie SmithKayon Murray-JohnsonHannah TrautmannMehri Azizi
Through Project BUILD, a STAR Library Network (STAR Net) program funded by the National Science Foundation, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the Space Science Institute’s National Center for Interactive Learning (NCIL) offered the virtual Dream, Build, Create program which consisted of (1) the award-winning documentary Dream Big: Engineering Our World and (2) five live-streamed panels of diverse engineers (Dream Teams) who shared their stories of what it means to be an engineer.
The external evaluation, conducted by Education Development Center (EDC), aimed to examine how
In 2006, the U.S. Botanic Garden (USBG) decided to conduct an institution-wide study of their visitors—why they come to the Botanic Garden, how they utilize the space, their level of satisfaction with the experience, and overall effectiveness of the USBG’s exhibitions and interpretation—in order to provide input to a strategic planning process that will align its living collections with its educational mission. To date, the only existing data characterizing USBG visitors was gathered in the early 1990s. Since then, the USBG has undergone a major transformation, including complete renovation of