The Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden will conduct the Million Orchid Project Authentic STEM Initiative to provide inclusive and accessible STEM learning opportunities for approximately 1,800 students annually from the most diverse and under-resourced middle and K-8 schools in Miami–Dade County. The initiative will use the Fairchild's STEMLab — a mobile plant propagation lab designed especially for schoolchildren — to bring the museum’s specialized scientific research to young learners in South Florida neighborhoods. Students and teachers will collect and analyze scientific data, devise research questions, and test hypotheses that will advance local conservation and contribute to the propagation of endangered orchids. Students will have the opportunity to explore STEM careers through interactions with Fairchild botanists.
The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum will partner with the Flowing Wells Unified School District on “We Bee Scientists,” a program to engage students in grades K–6 in real-world science by learning about bees—the most important group of pollinators. They plan to create a curriculum and related activities aligned with the Arizona science standards. The program is an expansion of the Tucson Bee Collaborative, which empowers community scientists from “K to grey” to contribute to ecosystem health and understanding through the study of native bees. The museum also will partner with Pima Community College and the University of Arizona on the program, which will involve volunteers and high school, college, and university students in documenting the abundance and diversity of native bees.
Creative Discovery Museum will create an indoor/outdoor, natural science gallery designed for children ages 2 to 12. Named “Unearthed,” the gallery will include exhibits on fossil layers, dinosaurs and paleontology, volcanos and volcanology, erosion and weathering, entomology, and insects. It will offer hands-on, exploratory experiences in natural science for children and their families. The new science gallery will align with state educational standards, provide more interactive learning experiences, and introduce children to real elements including dirt, water, and sand in an outdoor exhibit that reinforces the concepts presented inside the museum.
The Wyoming State Museum will implement an exhibit plan developed with content experts from across the state to produce a Prehistoric Wyoming exhibit. The exhibit will explore the prehistory of Wyoming, with a special focus on the age of dinosaurs, and will serve the needs of the museum’s three main visitor groups—local families, out-of-state tourists, and students on field trips—as determined through formative surveys and visitor feedback. Visitors will learn about the geological forces that shaped the Wyoming landscape visible today, examine the different plants and animals that have called Wyoming home through the ages, and discover the history of fossil hunters in Wyoming.
The University of Kansas Natural History Museum, in collaboration with the University of California Museum of Paleontology, will develop, test, and deploy an immersive educational game on the topic of evolution and common ancestry. The museum will frame the game with a narrative that involves tracing the origin of a zoonotic disease (infectious disease that is transmitted between species from animals to humans or from humans to animals). Played on the museum floor, the escape room-inspired game will explore innovative formats for museum learning and engagement. It is being designed for families with children ages 7 to 12, and by visiting groups of schoolchildren in grades 3 to 5.
The Palo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo will create the California Dinosaur Garden exhibition, an inclusive environment for children ages 3 to 11 that promotes science learning. The museum will employ sensory-rich storytelling and interactive experiences to engage children and their caregivers. Project activities will include the completion of initial concept designs and evaluation to inform exhibit development; design development, prototyping, and formative evaluation; and engaging external contractors to fabricate and install the exhibit. The exhibition will include prehistoric plants within a seasonal marsh landscape, interactive interpretive exhibits, a fossil dig, and life-size dinosaur sculptures. The project will also address the need for science learning experiences for children with disabilities by applying universal design principals such as wheelchair access to the garden experience, braille labels, and tactile, sensory-rich elements.
Two critical challenges in science education are how to engage students in the practices of science and how to develop and sustain interest. The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which high school youth, the majority of whom are members of racial and ethnic groups historically underrepresented in STEM, learn the skills and practices of science and in turn develop interest in conducting scientific research as part of their career pursuits. To accomplish this goal, we applied Hidi and Renninger’s well-tested theoretical framework for studying interest development in the context of
This project engages families in engineering design challenges through a sustainability and biomimicry lens. Families advance their engineering proficiencies while learning from nature to create a livable future.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
This presentation "Revealing Impacts: How does one long-term, statewide field trip program influence a community's learning ecosystem?" was shared as showcase at the 2021 Connected Learning Summit (https://app.clowdr.org/conference/clsummit2021/) held virtually from July 7-30, 2021.
In the showcase session, we shared details of an NSF funded collaborative project between the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Oregon State University and TERC to understand how a longstanding, statewide field trip program, LabVenture, influences a community’s learning ecosystem. The project uses the construct
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 RAPID was submitted in response to the NSF Dear Colleague letter related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This award is made by the AISL program in the Division of Research on Learning, using funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The project will develop and research an integrated package of high-quality, widely accessible media and other outreach materials designed to engage middle school youth, educators, and libraries in learning about viruses in relation to COVID-19. There is an immediate need to provide youth with accurate, engaging, and accessible materials to help them understand the basic biology underlying the COVID-19 pandemic, including the routes of COVID-19 transmission and mechanisms to prevent its spread. This is particularly important for those without science backgrounds or interests so that the rumors, hearsay, and gossip circulating among youth can be replaced with research-based information. Since 2007, the project team and partners have focused on developing and studying new ways of educating youth and the public about biology, virology, and infectious disease. The project will develop a web-accessible package of customizable graphics, illustrated stories, and essays--all of which can be easily incorporated into free-choice and directed on-line learning as well standards-based lesson plans for Grades 6-8. These resources will be disseminated broadly and at no cost to youth and educators of all kinds, including schools, libraries, museums, and other established networks for formal and informal science education. The project web package will be linked to multiple websites that serve as important educational resources on science and virology for youth, the general public, and educators. A prominent university press will publish and promote the illustrated stories and support distribution of 7,000 free copies.
The project will conduct research examining how richly-illustrated science narratives impact youth understanding of and curiosity about science. The research will help develop the foundation for better understanding how to educate youth about COVID-19 (and future pandemics) while generating new knowledge about effective methods for public science outreach during a major unanticipated natural event. For formative evaluation, the project will use an innovative rapid response feedback method. Youth will be invited to provide timely, specific comments on the serialized stories through a curated portal. As new excerpts are related online, different questions will be posed to youth who are selected because of specific characteristics (e.g., low or high initial science interest). These data will guide story development in real time and provide a mechanism to gauge the story appeal, comprehensibility, and initial impacts. The project will address two research questions: (1) How effective are illustrated stories in having positive impacts among participants on COVID-19 knowledge, science identity, attitudes, and interest in science careers?; and (2) How do story lines and characters have differential impacts on virus knowledge, epidemiology, and youth attitudes towards science and science careers? To conduct this research, the project will conduct online surveys using adapted items from prior research conducted by the project team. Additional items will assess COVID-19 knowledge, attitudes, personal experiences with the virus, well-being, and exposure to public health messaging about the virus. Research findings will be shared widely to inform the field about new ways delivering science education content during the advent of rapidly evolving global and educational challenges.
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.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Judy DiamondJulia McQuillanPatricia Wonch HillElizabeth VanWormer
The New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) will develop, test, market, and disseminate an interactive graphic novel iBook that will use the interests of young people (ages 10–14) in animals and comics to engage them in learning about health and clinical research. Provisionally called “Transmission: Astonishing Tales of Human-Animal Diseases,” the project represents a new approach to engaging young people in biomedical science learning.
Graphic novels are one of the fastest growing categories in publishing and bookselling, and today, they are significantly more sophisticated than the comics that came before them. They are also enormously popular among young people. The proposed graphic novel iBook will focus on the diseases that humans and animals share and pass between them (sometimes to devastating consequences), from Ebola, bird flu, and West Nile disease to influenza, measles, and pneumonia. Moreover, like many other contemporary graphic novels, it will address a pressing issue of the day—amely, the growth of zoonotic and anthropozoonotic diseases.
The iBook will be developed in a digital, interactive format (a growing trend within the genre) and, like many graphic novel titles, will take a mystery and forensic crime approach to exploring its content. Ultimately, Transmission will become a national model for conveying biomedical understanding through the use of up-to-the-minute interactive iBook technologies and an engaging graphic novel format.