Video has become a key tool for scientific communication because it increases the outreach and impact of projects, furthers scientific research within and across fields of study, and offers an accessible medium to engage the public in the understanding of science. This project supports the expansion of an interactive, online STEM Videohall where hundreds of NSF-funded researchers share their work through brief video narratives and interactive discussion. While the Videohall is accessible year-round, periodic annual Showcase events are used to drive visitors to the site where they can engage with one another, the project investigators and trained facilitators. The Videohall is a multiplier of NSF's investments in individual projects because it allows STEM education researchers to become aware of, and learn from, related work that is funded across NSF programs and directorates, and other federal agencies. In 3-minute video narratives, investigators share ideas, resources, data, evidence of impact, strategies and challenges. The Videohall platform supports open access and is designed to foster communication in ways that scale beyond traditional formats such as academic conferences. Moreover, because the online STEM Videohall is open to the public, it allows STEM investigators to share their work with multiple stakeholder communities including K-12 educators and school leaders, informal educators and community organizations, the STEM industry, education policy makers and families. Finally, because each video narrative is accompanied by a facilitated online discussion thread, investigators have a unique and valuable mechanism for receiving feedback from these various stakeholder communities. The STEM Videohall project is funded by the Discovery Research K-12 program (DRK-12), which seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.
This project brings together seven NSF-funded resource centers who work with their respective communities to encourage Principal Investigators to share video narratives of their work through annual NSF STEM Showcase events. Each annual Showcase event presents videos created by 150-230 projects; many of the projects are affiliated with one of the seven resource centers, but others are from projects across NSF directorates and beyond. During a one-week period, Principal Investigators, their project staff, as well as the public at large, are invited to engage in interactive discourse, providing queries, comments, and feedback. Participants also vote for favorite presentations through "Presenters' Choice," "Public Choice," and "Facilitators' Choice," processes. This participant voting system serves to increase engagement and enhances outreach of the event through social media. After the one-week Showcase event concludes, all of the videos along with the related discourse remain available to the public online, who continue to access the Showcase throughout the year. Based on prior pilot work, it is estimated that over the course of a year, over 30,000 visitors, from over 150 countries, will engage with each annual Showcase. Videos from annual showcase events will be shared, reused, and repurposed to create new products with new constituencies. The project includes technical development efforts to iteratively improve its interactive platform, outreach efforts before each annual Showcase event, facilitation of the week-long event, and intensive dissemination efforts. A research component examines the extent of participation on various constituencies, the benefit of participation to projects, and the success of the events in terms of dissemination nationally and internationally.
This longitudinal research study will contribute to a broader understanding of the pathways of STEM-interested high school students from underrepresented groups who plan to pursue or complete science studies in their post-high school endeavors. The project will investigate the ways that formative authentic science experiences may support youth's persistence in STEM. The study focuses on approximately 900 urban youth who are high interest, high potential STEM students who participate in, or are alumni of, the Science Research Mentoring Program. This program provides intensive mentoring for high school youth from groups underrepresented in STEM careers. It takes place at 17 sites around New York City, including American Museum of Natural History, which is the original program site. Identifying key supports and obstacles in the pathways of high-interest, under-represented youth towards STEM careers can help practitioners design more inclusive and equitable STEM learning experiences and supports. In this way, the project will capitalize on student interest so that students with potential continue to persist.
In order to understand better the factors that influence these students, this research combines longitudinal social network and survey data with interviews and case studies, as well as an analysis of matched student data from New York City Public Schools' records. The research questions in the study are a) how do youths' social networks develop through their participation in scientists' communities of practice? b) what is the relationship between features of the communities of practice and youths' social networks, measures of academic achievement, and youths' pursuit of a STEM major? and c) what are the variations in youth pathways in relationship to learner characteristics, composition of social networks, and features of the community of practice? The research design allows for a rich, layered perspective of student pathways. In particular, by employing social network analysis, this study will reveal relational features of persistence that may be particularly critical for underrepresented youth, for whom STEM role models and cultural brokers provide an otherwise unavailable sense of belonging and identity in STEM. The study will also access a New York City Public Schools data set comprised of student-level records containing biographical and demographic variables, secondary and postsecondary course enrollment and grades, exam scores, persistence/graduation indicators, linked responses to post-secondary surveys, and post-education employment records and wages. These data enable examination of inter-relationships between in-school achievement and out-of-school STEM experiences through comparison of program participants to similar non-participant peers. This project is supported by NSF's EHR Core Research (ECR) program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field.
In order to improve science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM) learning, it is crucial to better understand the informal experiences that young children have that prepare them for formal science education. Young children are naturally curious about the world around them, and research in developmental psychology shows that families often support children in exploring and seeking explanations for scientific phenomena. It is less clear how to link children's natural curiosity and everyday parent-child interaction with more formal STEM learning. This collaborative project will team researchers from the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Texas, and Brown University with informal learning practitioners at the Children's Discovery Museum, The Thinkery, and the Providence Children's Museum in order to investigate how family interaction relates to children's causal learning, as well as how modifications to museum exhibit design and facilitation by museum staff influence families' styles of interaction and increase children's causal learning. This project is funded by the Research on Education and Learning (REAL) program which supports fundamental research by investigators from a range of disciplines in order to deepen what is known about STEM learning.
The project team will examine how ethnically and linguistically diverse samples of parents and children engage in collaborative scientific learning in three children's museums across the U.S. The research will combine observational studies of parent-child interaction in a real-world setting with experimental measures of children's causal learning. The investigators will examine how children explore and derive explanations for museum exhibits about mechanical gear function and fluid dynamics. In this way, the researchers will investigate the relation between styles of parent-child interaction and children's causal learning. The team will also investigate novel ways of presenting material within the exhibits to facilitate exploration and explanation. They will explore how signage, conversations with museum staff, parents' attitudes towards learning in museum settings, and parents' own prior knowledge about the exhibits can influence the parent-child interaction and subsequent causal learning. The project will advance the basic research goal of advancing what is known about what affects children's science content learning. It will also advance the practice-oriented goal of developing new strategies for the design of science museum exhibits and make recommendations for how parents can better talk to their children about scientific phenomena.
Education stakeholders from advocates to developers are increasingly recognizing the potential of science games in advancing student academic motivation for and interest in science and science careers. To maximize this potential, the project will use science games (e.g. Land Science, River City, and EcoMUVE), shown to be enjoyable to students and proven to promote student learning in science at the middle school level. Through a two-phase process, games will be used as vehicles for learning about ways to change how students think about science and potentially STEM careers. The goal of the intervention is to explore which processes and design features of science games will actually help students move beyond a temporary identity of being a scientist or engineer (as portrayed while playing the game) to one where students began to see themselves in real STEM careers. Students' participation will be guided by teams of teachers, faculty members, and graduate students from Drexel University and a local school. All science students attending the local inner city middle school in Philadelphia, PA, will participate in the intervention.
Using an exploratory mixed-method design, the first two years of the project will focus on exploring, characterizing, coding, and analyzing data sets from three large games designed to help students think about possible careers in science. During year 3, the project will integrate lessons learned from the first two years into the existing middle school science curriculum to engage students in a one-year intervention using PCaRD (Play Curricular activity Reflection Discussion). During the intervention, the PI will work with experts from Drexel University and a local school to collect data on the design features of Land Science to capture identity change in the science identity of the participating students. Throughout the course of year 3, the PI will observe, video, interview, survey, and use written tasks to uncover if the Land Science game is influencing students' identity in any way (from a temporary to a long-term perspective about being a scientist or engineer). Data collected during three specified waves during the intervention will be compared to analyses of existing logged data through collaborations with researchers at Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These comparisons will focus on similar middle-aged science students who used the same gaming environments as the students involved in this study. However, the researcher will intentionally look for characteristics related to motivation, science knowledge, and science identity change.
This project will integrate research and education to investigate learning as a process of change in student science identity within situated environmental contexts of digital science gameplay around curricular and learning activities. This integrated approach will allow the researcher to explore how gaming is inextricably linked to the student as an individual while involved in the learning of domain specific content in science. The collaboration among major university and school partners; the expertise of the researcher in educational psychology, educational technology, and science games; and the project's advisory board makes this a real-life opportunity for the researcher to use information that naturally exists in games to advance knowledge in the field about the value of gaming to changing students' science identities. It also responds to reports by the National Research Council committee on science learning and computer games, which identifies games as having the potential to catalyze new approaches to science learning.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Aroutis Foster
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
DACUM (Developing A CUrriculuM) was developed in Canada in the 1980s as a tool for industry to improve training. It has been championed in the USA by the Center for Education for Employment at The Ohio State University where they have conducted thousands of DACUMs and trained scores of people to conduct them. As used today, DACUM is a unique, innovative, and very effective method of job, and/or occupational analysis. It is also very effective for conducting process and functional analyses. The DACUM analysis workshop itself involves a trained DACUM facilitator and a committee of 5-12 expert
This review is a short synthesis of some of the literature around learning in adulthood, professional learning, professional learning frameworks, and models of professional learning frameworks. Its primary purpose is to inform the development of an interview protocol for the exploration of building a professional learning framework with a secondary purpose of providing richer shared language and understanding around some of the central constructs of a professional learning framework for the informal science education community and other informal learning environments.
This poster was presented at ASTC 2016 in Tampa, Florida. Climate change can be abstract to visitors, but seeing, touching and smelling permafrost can make it seem more real. This poster shares lessons about bringing an ISE program to rural Alaska, and how this University & Museum partnership leverages real objects from frozen ground to engage child and adult learners alike in the emotions of climate change.
This project, conducted by the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California, Berkeley, seeks to discover what makes middle school students engaged in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The researchers have developed a concept known as science learning activation, including dispositions, practices, and knowledge leading to successful STEM learning and engagement. The project is intended to develop and validate a method of measuring science learning activation.
The first stage of the project involves developing the questions to measure science activation, with up to 300 8th graders participating. The second stage is a 16-month longitudinal study of approximately 500 6th and 8th graders, examining how science learning activation changes over time. The key question is what are the influencers on science activation, e.g., student background, classroom activities, and outside activities.
This project addresses important past research showing that middle school interest in STEM is predictive of actually completing a STEM degree, suggesting that experiences in middle school and even earlier may be crucial to developing interest in STEM. This research goes beyond past work to find out what are the factors leading to STEM interest in middle school.
This work helps the Education and Human Resources directorate, and the Division of Research on Learning, pursue the mission of supporting STEM education research. In particular, this project focuses on improving STEM learning, as well as broadening participation in STEM education and ultimately the STEM workforce.
The trend of utilising open learning environments and informal learning sources has a clear link to outdoor education, which bridges the gap between formal education and informal learning. According to the findings related to informal learning and its relevance to early professional development, the crucial era seems to be the first 3 years as an inexperienced teacher. Despite the long history, outdoor education needs new research methods. In Finland, the new National Curriculum 2016 underlines teaching of this “phenomenon” besides the traditional subject orientated teaching. This challenges
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Hannu SalmiArja KaasinenLiisa Suomela
The aim of the study was to analyse learning using Augmented Reality (AR) technology and the motivational and cognitive aspects related to it in an informal learning context. The 146 participants were 11- to 13-year-old Finnish pupils visiting a science centre exhibition. The data, which consisted of both cognitive tasks and self-report questionnaires, were collected using a pre- post-test design and were analysed by SEM path-analysis. The results showed that AR-technology experience was beneficial for all, but especially for the lowest-achieving group and for the girls. In general, pre
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Hannu SalmiHelena ThunebergMari-Pauliina Vainikainen
This report details the formative evaluation study conducted through collaboration with the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) to inform the iterative development and piloting of the Connected Science Learning: Connecting In-School and Out-of-School STEM Learning journal. The journal was the result of an Early Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop, disseminate and evaluate a new resource for connecting STEM education practitioners across settings and to
Over three years beginning in January 2016, the Science Museum of Virginia will launch a new suite of public programming entitled “Learn, Prepare, Act – Resilient Citizens Make Resilient Communities.” This project will leverage federally funded investments at the Museum, including a NOAA-funded Science On a Sphere® platform, National Fish and Wildlife-funded Rainkeepers exhibition, and the Department of Energy-funded EcoLab, to develop public programming and digital media messaging to help the general public understand climate change and its impacts on Virginia’s communities and give them tools to become resilient to its effects. Home to both the delicate Chesapeake Bay ecosystem and a highly vulnerable national shoreline, Virginia is extremely susceptible to the effects of climate change and extreme weather events. It is vital that citizens across the Commonwealth understand and recognize the current and future impacts that climate variability will have on Virginia’s economy, natural environment, and human health so that they will be better prepared to respond. In collaboration with NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office, George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, Virginia Institute for Marine Science, Public Broadcasting Service/National Public Radio affiliates, and Resilient Virginia, the Museum will use data from the National Climatic Data Center and Virginia Coastal Geospatial and Educational Mapping System to develop and deliver new resiliency-themed programming. This will include presentations for Science On a Sphere® and large format digital Dome theaters, 36 audio and video digital media broadcast pieces, two lecture series, community preparedness events, and a Resiliency Checklist and Certification program. This project supports NOAA’s mission goals to advance environmental literacy and share its vast knowledge and data with others.