The ChemAttitudes project recieved supplemental funding to create materials for train-the-trainer workshops in order to inoculate the chemistry outreach community with members who have the knowledge and resources to train others on strategies for stimulating interest, sense of relevance, and feelings of self-efficacy that were tested in the earlier work of the project. The project team recruited participants from minority serving professional organizations as a strategy for broadening participation. Can it work? Did it work?
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Chemistry is a vital and highly relevant field of science that is under-represented in science centers and museums. Amidst concerns that the public is ambivalent about the chemistry field, the Explore Science: Let's Do Chemistry project sought to understand how to design hands-on activities that could increase the feelings of interest, relevance, and self-efficacy around chemistry. Using design-based research, the team tested and refined a variety of activities while simultaneously creating a framework for future use about content and format strategies that increase interest, relevance, and
This four-year research study will investigate families' joint media engagement (JME) and informal STEM learning while listening to the child-focused STEM podcast, Brains On! Prior research has shown that the setting where families most often listen to this podcast together is the family automobile as children are being driven to school, on road trips, or other activities. Brains On! is rooted in the mission-driven principle of public radio to educate and inspire. The target audience is children 5-12 years old and their parents or caregivers. Each episode ranges from 20-45 minutes in length and presents ideas from a variety of STEM disciplines such as physics, chemistry, biology and engineering featuring sound-rich explanations of concepts through fun skits, original songs and interviews with scientists. The episodes use a light-hearted, humorous approach to share oftentimes complex STEM information. To provide an interactive experience, hosts encourage the audience to participate with the show by sending in drawings, emailing photos of plants and animals, or posing questions to be answered in future episodes. Every episode is co-hosted by a different child who interviews top scientists about their work. The scientists are selected to be representative of the range of topics presented and are meant to serve as role models for the listeners and demonstrating a wide range of career options in the STEM field.
The research adds to the social learning theory of joint media engagement (JME) which has shown that interactions between people sharing a media experience can result in learning together. Recent work on Joint Media Engagement has focused on parent/child interactions with television/video in the home. But little is known about how families engage with children's STEM podcasts together and what learning interactions occur as a result. Even less is known about this engagement within an automobile setting. This research project will build new knowledge filling a gap in the informal STEM learning field. It will use a mixed-methods research design with three phases of research to answer these questions: 1) How does the Brains On! podcast mediate STEM-based joint media engagement and family learning in an automobile setting? 2) What does STEM based joint media engagement and family learning look and sound like in this setting? 3) How do "in-automobile" factors foster or impede STEM-based joint media engagement and family learning? Phase 1 is a listener experience video study of 30 families listening to the Brains On! episodes. Phase 2 is video-based case studies of the natural automobile-based listening behaviors of eight Phase 1 families. Phase 3 is an online survey of Brains On! listeners to understand how representative the findings from Phases 1 and 2 are to the larger Brains On! Research. Results will be shared widely with key audiences that can use the findings (media developers, ISE practitioners, ISE evaluators and researchers, and families). It will also make an important contribution to the Joint Media Engagement literature and the ISE field.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.
The Explore Science: Let’s Do Chemistry project is a design-based research study creating both chemistry hands-on activities and a theoretical framework about strategies that promote increases in public interest, understandings of relevance, and feelings of self-efficacy about chemistry. This poster, which was presented at the 2019 NSF AISL Principal Investigators Meeting, shared the design-based research process for the ChemAttitudes project and asked how we can promote use of project findings and products beyond the life of the grant.
Conducting qualitative research in any discipline warrants two actions: accessing participants and eliciting their ideas. In chemistry education research, survey techniques have been used to increase access to participants and diversify samples. Interview tasks (such as card sorting, using demonstrations, and using simulations) have been used to elicit participant ideas. While surveys can increase participation and remove geographic barriers from studies, they typically lack the ability to obtain detailed, thick description of participant ideas, which are possible from in-person interviews
Summary brief describing summative evaluation associated with the MarcellusByDesign component of Marcellus Matters: EASE. Marcellus Matters: Engaging Adults in Science and Energy (EASE) was a program of Penn State University’s Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research (MCOR), in collaboration with other experts across the university. The first year of program activities took place in 2012, and the project continued through September 2016. EASE was a multidisciplinary initiative that provided adults in rural Pennsylvania with opportunities to increase their knowledge of science and energy
Summative evaluation of one of four pieces of the Marcellus Matters: EASE project. This study examined the effectiveness of a series of environmental planning workshops geared toward local community members in counties across Pennsylvania.
Summative evaluation of one of four pieces of the Marcellus Matters: EASE project. This study examined the effectiveness of a program developed to immerse adult learners in the processes of scientific research by teaching participants to locate and report orphan and abandoned natural gas wells.
Summative evaluation of one of four pieces of the Marcellus Matters: EASE project. This study examined the effectiveness of a ten-week adult/community education program about topics related to natural gas development.
Summative evaluation of one of four pieces of the Marcellus Matters: EASE project. Formative evaluation of one of four pieces of the Marcellus Matters: EASE project. This study examined how effective a series of "Community Conversations" theater and dialogue/discussion events was at a) communicating natural gas development-related science content and community issues, and b) promoting audience members' openness to dialogue about natural gas development-related issues.