RISES (Re-energize and Invigorate Student Engagement through Science) is a coordinated suite of resources including 42 interactive English and Spanish STEM videos produced by Children's Museum Houston in coordination with the science curriculum department at Houston ISD. The videos are aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, and each come with a bilingual Activity Guide and Parent Prompt sheet, which includes guiding questions and other extension activities.
Tinkering experiences in informal learning spaces can engage families in engineering practices and support learning (Pagano et al., 2020). Further, reflections after informal learning experiences can reveal and extend children’s memory and learning (Pagano et al., 2019), but reflections vary by age, culture, setting, program, and other factors (Fivush et al., 2006). We examined how the conversational structure and engineering content of families’ reflections vary across multiple museum visits and across different types of tinkering programs (e.g., open-ended vs. function-focused).
Tinkering activities designed for parents and children can foster spatial thinking, which benefits spatial skill development (Ramey et al., 2020). During tinkering activities, families may be challenged to use tools and materials to solve open-ended problems (Bevan, 2017). The problems specified by different tinkering challenges can highlight intrinsic or extrinsic spatial information (Chatterjee, 2008; Mix et al., 2018). In this project we asked, how does the spatial information highlighted by a tinkering challenge affect the quality of families’ spatial thinking?
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Naomi PolinskyElena FiegenKaitlyn HurkaCatherine HadenDavid Uttal
The tinkering process of making, testing, and iteratively redesigning projects can teach children about engineering concepts (Marcus et al., 2021; NGSS, 2013), but there is variability in how tinkering programs are designed. Storytelling may make children’s learning experiences personally meaningful and narratively organized, thereby supporting memory (Bruner, 1996). We designed multiple story-based tinkering programs and examined how the types of story characters and goals introduced in the tinkering programs would relate to the content of families’ talk in post-tinkering reflections.
In this project, we asked whether storytelling during tinkering might support children’s engagement in STEM and how that may differ across boys and girls. According to Bruner (1996), stories can help children to organize experiences by adding coherence, increasing understanding, and facilitating learning. We observed associations between story and STEM in two contexts: home and museum exhibit.
Given the important role of autonomy support in children’s motivation and learning, this study asked whether parents’ use of autonomy supportive language (vs. controlling language) was associated with children’s engagement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in a bi-directional manner during an at-home tinkering activity.
This project includes the development of a toolkit of new hands-on facilitated museum activities, and a mobile app with both app-based activities and DIY activities. The toolkit expands on the Explore Science series from the NISE Network and will be distributed to 350 NISE Network partner sites. This evaluation report focuses on the formative evaluation of the facilitated museum activities at the Science Museum of Minnesota.
This is a compilation of front-end, formative, and a partial summative evaluations, and an exploratory study using the xMacroscope, a data visualization technology developed for generating data from an exhibit using data captured from visitor actions.
This study explores the part that child-orientated exhibitions play in the child and family museum experience. Such exhibitions are characterised by their distinctive approaches to learning, interpretation, and design, being especially devised for children. The research was carried out in children's galleries from three types of museum (a maritime museum, a science museum, and a children's museum) in order to compare and contrast similarities and differences between them. Since most of the research in this area has been carried out in science centres or science museums, there is a need to
Funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Access from the Ground Up project at the Palo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo (JMZ) seeks to better serve children with disabilities through a combination of partnerships with community, staff professional development and training, and the development of accessible STEM-focused exhibits and resources at the new JMZ facility, which opened in November 2021. This summative evaluation report seeks to answer the following evaluation questions:
To what extent does the Access from the Ground Up project build or strengthen relationships with
The DoSeum will re-imagine its exhibition, “Dream Tomorrow Today,” focusing on underserved students in San Antonio. The community-driven exhibition will provide a space for children ages 4 to 11 to develop key learning and STEM leadership skills to approach their desired futures. In developing the exhibit content, the museum will partner with academic futurists, local organizations with a focus on underserved students, STEM-focused organizations, and a community network of families connected to those organizations. Community conversations will be convened for children and families throughout the exhibition development process to elicit feedback from key stakeholders.
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis will redesign its popular Dinosphere exhibition to explore and test accessibility to ensure the discoveries from its “Jurassic Mile” dig site are accessible to all visitors. This will result in updated exhibition elements that promote accessible lifelong learning experiences for children and families of all abilities, as well as spark interest in STEM through hands-on engagement. Findings from the accessibility assessment also will inform development of industry standard guidelines for future exhibitions. The museum will disseminate the findings to arts, science, and cultural institutions.