This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
What do you think?
How do you connect with youth audiences?
What assumptions do you have about how identity relates to exhibit engagement?
How do factors that shape your identity impact your life? Has this shifted over time?
The Developing Guidelines for Designing Challenging and Rewarding Interactive Science Exhibits project is a Research in Service to Practice grant running from 10/1/2016-9/30/2021. We have used a Design-Based Research (DBR) approach to refine a framework about exhibit design practices that support learners through the emotional aspects of “productive struggle” as we built three science museum exhibits.
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
This is the summative evaluation report for the “Understanding the Physics of Collaborative Design and Play,” a collaboration between researchers and children’s museum practitioners to design and build a physics-based children’s museum exhibit to provide opportunities for children and their caregivers to tinker with play related to the STEM concepts of momentum, mass, velocity, friction, and balance in the context of informal learning related to skateboarding. The exhibit, “The Science of Skateboarding” at the Iowa Children’s Museum, was designed and fabricated as a result of this grant.
In
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Deb DunkhaseKristen MissallBenjamin DeVane
In this study we explore two different faciitation styles, collaboration and competition, in an 1-hour long, highly interactive, digital experience called Future Energy Chicago. The aim of the faciliations is to affect guests' energy literacy, that is their knowledge of, and their attitude and behavior toward energy conservation. In the collaboration condition, guests were encouraged to talk as a whole room about what they had learned about energy during the latest round of play with the goal for the whole room to get as high a score as possible. In the competition condition, guests met only
Although museums have long valued and catered to families as an audience, museum educators have not always had the tools or training to support the unique nature of family learning or to develop family-specific approaches that are distinct from classroom teaching. In this chapter, we outline a series of research-based principles for understanding family learning and provide examples to illustrate how these principles play out in museums. Specifically, we highlight the importance of (a) recognizing that families have multiple goals, (b) appreciating the central role of parents and other adult
The overarching goal of this Research in Service to Practice project is to leverage multimodal learning analytics to develop an enriched understanding of visitor engagement in science museums. The project centers on data-rich investigations of visitor engagement with interactive tabletop exhibits about environmental science and sustainability. During free-choice learning in museums and science centers, visitor engagement shapes how learners interact with exhibits, move around the exhibit space, and form attitudes, interests, and understanding of science. Multimodal visitor analytics integrates
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TEAM MEMBERS:
James LesterJonathan RoweJames MinogueRoy Campbell
Despite the fact that most science learning takes place outside of school, little is known about how engagement in informal science learning (ISL) experiences affects learners’ knowledge, skill development, interest, or identities over long periods of time. Although substantial ISL research has documented short-term outcomes such as the learning that takes place during a science center visit, research suggests that the genuine benefits of informal experiences are long-term transformations in learners as they pursue a “cascade” of experiences subsequent to the initial educational event
This project addresses a longstanding problem in informal science education: how to increase the likelihood of consequential science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning from short duration experiences such as field trips. Although informal learning experiences can greatly contribute to interest in and knowledge of science, there is a shared concern among educators and researchers that students may have difficulty recalling and using scientific information and practices emphasized during these experiences, even though doing so would further their science learning. Nonetheless, science learning is rarely, if ever, a "one-shot deal." Children acquire knowledge about science cumulatively across different contexts and activities. Therefore, it is important that informal science learning institutions identify effective practices that support the consolidation of learning and memory from exhibit experiences to foster portable, usable knowledge across contexts, such as from informal science learning institutions, to classrooms, and homes. To this end, this Research in Service to Practice project seeks to harness the power and potential of visual representations (e.g., graphs, drawings, charts, maps, etc.) for enhancing learning and encouraging effective reflection during and after science learning experiences. The project promises to increase learning for the 9,000+ 5th and 6th grade students from across the rurality and growing diversity of the state of Maine who annually participate in LabVenture, a 2.5-hour exploration of the Gulf of Maine ecosystem at Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The research will provide new and actionable informal science learning practices that promote engagement with visual representations and reflection, and science understandings that can be applied broadly by informal science institutions. This project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) and the Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12) programs. It supports the AISL program goals to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. It supports the DRK-12 program goal of enhancing the learning and teaching of STEM by preK-12 students and teachers.
The project is grounded in the idea that visual representations, including drawings, can both enhance science learning and encourage reflection on doing science that can support extension of that learning beyond a singular informal science experience. The project uses design-based research to address the following research questions: (1) Does reflection during an informal science learning experience promote students’ retention and subsequent use of science information and practices that are part of the experience? (2) Does interpreting and constructing visual representations, such as drawings, improve students’ understanding and retention of information, and if so, how and when? and (3) Does combining visual representations and narrative reflections confer benefits on students’ science learning and engagement in science practices both during the informal learning experience, and later in their classrooms and at home? These questions will be pursued in collaboration with practitioners (both informal educators and classroom teachers) and a diverse team of graduate and undergraduate student researchers. Approximately 600 student groups (roughly 3000 individual students) will be observed during the LabVenture experience, with further data collection involving a portion of these students at school and at home. The project will yield resources and video demonstrations of field-tested, empirically based practices that promote engagement with visual representations and reflection, and science understandings that can travel within students' learning ecosystem. In support of broadening participation, the undergraduate/graduate student researchers will gain wide understanding and experience connecting research to practice and communicating science to academic and nonacademic audiences.
Informal STEM learning environments, programs, and policies can be designed to support and promote neurodiversity through inclusive practices. This project will explore the benefits of informal STEM learning for K-12 neurodiverse learners through a systematic review and meta-analysis of extant literature and research grounded in the theory of social model of ability. This framework is an asset-based approach and aims to promote social, cognitive, and physical inclusion, leading to positive outcomes. Using various quantitative and qualitative methodologies, this project endeavors to collect and synthesize the evidence for supporting and enhancing accessibility and inclusiveness in informal STEM learning for K-12 neurodiverse learners. It will explore key features of informal STEM learning and effective, evidence-based strategies to effectively engage children and youth with neurological conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, and dyspraxia, in informal STEM learning environments. The findings of this complex synthesis will provide a timely contribution to deeper understanding of supports for neurodiversity while also highlighting areas that inform further research, shifts in practice, and policy.
The systematic review will occur over a two-year period. It will focus on identifying program elements that promote inclusion of children and youth with neurodevelopmental disabilities in informal STEM learning contexts. Specifically, the review will explore two overarching research questions and several sub-research questions:
RQ1. What program elements (teaching and learning variables) in informal STEM learning settings facilitate inclusion of K-12 neurodiverse STEM learners? Sub-RQ1a: What are the overlapping and discrete characteristics of the program elements that facilitate social, cognitive, and physical inclusion?
Sub-RQ1b: In what ways do the program elements that facilitate inclusion vary by informal STEM learning setting?
RQ2: What program elements (teaching and learning variables) in informal STEM learning settings are correlated with benefits for K-12 neurodiverse STEM learners? Sub-RQ2a: What are the overlapping and discrete characteristics of the program elements that correlate with increased STEM identity, self- efficacy, interest in STEM, or STEM learning?
Sub-RQ2b: In what ways do the program elements that correlate with positive results for students vary by informal STEM learning setting? The research synthesis will consider several different types of studies, including research and evaluation; experimental and quasi-experimental designs; quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods; and implementation studies.
The research team will (a) review all analyses and organize findings to illustrate patterns, factors, and relationships, (b) identify key distinctions and nuances derived from the contexts represented in the literature, and (c) revisit and confirm the strength of evidence for making overall assertions of what works, why, and with whom. The findings will be disseminated in practice briefs, journal articles, the AISL resource center, as well as presentations and materials for researchers, practitioners, and informal STEM leaders. Ultimately, this work will result in a comprehensive synthesis of effective informal STEM learning practices for neurodiverse K-12 learners and identify opportunities for further research and development.
This literature review and meta-analysis project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.
Using a design-based research approach, we studied ways to advance opportunities for children and families to engage in engineering design practices in an informal educational setting. 213 families with 5–11-year-old children were observed as they visited a tinkering exhibit at a children’s museum during one of three iterations of a program posing an engineering design challenge. Children’s narrative reflections about their experience were recorded immediately after tinkering. Across iterations of the program, changes to the exhibit design and facilitation provided by museum staff corresponded
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Maria MarcusDiana AcostaPirko TouguDavid UttalCatherine Haden
Awareness of a STEM discipline is a complex construct to operationalize; a learner’s awareness of a discipline is sometimes viewed through the lens of personal identity, use of relevant discourse, or knowledge of career pathways. This research proposes defining engineering awareness through a learner’s associations with engineering practices - fundamental processes involved in engineering such as identifying criteria and constraints, testing designs, diagnosing issues and assessing goal completion. In this study, a learner’s engineering awareness was determined by examining 1) their ability to
This paper provides detailed descriptions of the goals, theoretical perspectives, context, and methods used in A study of collaborative practices at interactive engineering challenge exhibits (the C-PIECE Study), the first of two studies in the Designing Our Tomorrow (DOT) research program. The C-PIECE Study supported foundational and exploratory lines of inquiry related to engineering practices used by families engaging with design challenge exhibits. This paper describes the study background and methods as an anchor to four other products that detail these four specific lines of inquiry and