This video presents reflections on SCIENCES: Supporting a Community’s Informal Education Needs—Confidence and Empowerment in STEM. SCIENCES brought together Eden Place Nature Center and the Chicago Zoological Society to collaboratively support environmental conservation and lifelong scientific learning in the Fuller Park neighborhood of Chicago.
The SCIENCES project began in 2013 and focused on adapting existing educational programs into a suite of environmentally focused science learning opportunities for professional, student, and public audiences in the Fuller Park neighborhood
The summative evaluation documents and articulates what SCIENCES has improved or changed, and in what ways. The final design of the summative evaluation was based on findings from the front-end and formative evaluations, including using participatory evaluation techniques to engage community members in discussing their experience with the programs and assessment of community needs and assets at the close of the project.
The goal of the summative evaluation was to address discrete program impacts in the context of the project, as well as the cross-program impact of providing a thematically
In The Nature of Community: SCIENCES, we share the lessons learned from an innovative partnership designed to leverage the strengths of two nonprofit organizations—a large cultural institution and a smaller, deeply-rooted community-based organization, both of which offer informal science education expertise.
You’ll read first-hand reflections of how staff members, community leaders and members, children, and adults experienced this partnership: the expectations, surprises, challenges, successes, and lessons learned. We hope the description of this partnership inspires other organizations to
In this paper, we use the concept of consequential learning to frame our exploration of what makes learning and doing science matter for youth from nondominant communities, as well as the barriers these youth must confront in working toward consequential ends. Data are derived from multimodal cases authored by four females from nondominant communities that present an account of 'science that matters' from their work during their middle school years. We argue that consequential learning in science for these girls involves engaging science with a commitment to their community. This form of
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Daniel BirminghamAngela Calabrese BartonAutumn McDanielJalah JonesCamryn TurnerAngel Roberts
How does focusing on “community science literacy” change the role of an informal science learning center?
This poster was presented at the 2019 NSF AISL Principal Investigators meeting.
Digital Observation Technology Skills (DOTS) is a framework for integrating modern, mobile technology into outdoor, experiential science education. DOTS addresses longstanding tensions between modern technology and classical outdoor education by carefully selecting appropriate digital technology for educational purposes and by situating these tools in classical experiential pedagogy.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
R. Justin HoughamMarc NutterCaitlin Graham
This article discusses the Youth in Science Action Club (SAC), which uses citizen science to investigate nature, document their discoveries, share data with the scientific community, and design strategies to protect the planet. Through collaborations with regional and national partners, SAC expands access to environmental science curriculum and training resources.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Laura HerszenhornKatie LevedahlSuzi Taylor
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This ChangeMakers project builds on a 2016 National Academies report finding that scientific literacy can be understood at a community level as opposed to a traditional focus on the individual. This is important since scientific knowledge is often seen as abstract and distant from the daily concerns of average citizens. A community focus shifts the spotlight away from individual learning to collective learning facilitated by trusted cultural institutions serving as social assets. This work brings together scientific expertise and community organizations to advance operational science literacy--scientific ways of problem-solving--for community leaders and functional science literacy--information and skills people can use in their daily lives--among their service populations. This will be done by gathering and sharing knowledge and developing skills and abilities to contribute to the community's overall well-being.
The New England Aquarium (NeAq) and Aquarium of the Pacific (AoP) will apply a community engagement model involving active listening, documentation, alignment of concerns and goals, and co-development of shared solutions that serves the needs of all participants. As part of the Advancing Community Science Literacy (ACSL) project, multi-disciplinary teams from NeAq, AoP and their regional partners will participate in training on the model. They will apply that training to build and implement action plans to advance community-driven responses to local environmental issues. Teams will be assessed with respect to how they use tools from their shared training, along with peer support and coaching, to make progress in engaging diverse community stakeholders. Results of the evaluation will offer insights and recommendations for informal science learning centers to serve their communities more effectively as engagement facilitators and change agents to support science literacy development and action. By applying techniques developed for cultural institutions to communicate about climate science, and combining those with techniques developed for libraries and other organizations to help meet emergent community concerns, such as storm surges and coastal flooding, it is possible to redefine the role informal science learning centers can play as part of a community culture.
ACSL is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program which supports projects that provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advances innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and develops understandings of deeper learning by participants.
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. In this exploratory Change Makers project, the Concord Consortium will develop, test, and evaluate a citizen science program that leverages innovative technology, such that youth engage directly with energy issues through scientific inquiry. The project will create the Infrared Street View, a citizen science program that aims to produce a thermal version of Google's Street View using an affordable infrared camera attached to a smartphone. The infrared camera serves as a high-throughput data acquisition instrument that collects thousands of temperature data points each time a picture is taken. Youth will collect massive geotagged thermal data that have considerable scientific and educational value for visualizing energy usage and improving energy efficiency at all levels. The Infrared Street View program will provide a Web-based platform for youth and anyone interested in energy efficiency to view and analyze the aggregated data to identify possible energy losses. By sharing their scientific findings with stakeholders, youth will make changes to the way energy is being used. The project will start with school, public, and commercial buildings in selected areas where performing thermal scan of the buildings and publishing their thermal images for educational and research purposes are permitted by school leaders, town officials, and property owners. In collaboration with high schools and out-of-school programs in Massachusetts, this project will conduct pilot-tests with approximately 200 students.
To contribute to advancing learning, the study will probe three research questions: 1) Under what circumstances can technology bridge out-of-school and classroom science learning and improve learning on both sides? 2) To what extent can unobtrusive assessment based on data mining support research and evaluation of student learning in out-of-school settings? and 3) To what extent can instructional intelligence built into the app used in the program help students learn in out-of-school programs and improve the quality of data they contribute to the citizen science project? Data sources for investigating these questions include students' interaction data with the app logged behind the scenes and the images they have taken, as well as results based on traditional assessments from a small number of participants. Throughout the project, staff will widely disseminate project products and findings through the Internet, science fairs, conferences, publications, and partner networks. An eight-member Advisory Board consisting of cleantech experts, science educators, and educational researchers will oversee and evaluate this project.
The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) involves thousands of people of all ages in the observation and study of weather, climate and water resources. In CoCoRaHS, citizens of all ages help measure and report rain, hail and snow from their own homes, schools and businesses. These data are then efficiently collected via the internet, archived in a national database, and made immediately available to participants, scientists and the general public showing the fascinating patterns of precipitation from each passing storm (see http://www.cocorahs.org). The measurement of precipitation and the patterns, variations and impacts that result, open the door to creative study of our environment. It is the "lowest common denominator" of hydroclimatic exploration. In this project, data from the CoCoRaHS citizen science network will be shared with and utilized by NOAA partners to help monitor drought, to help detect local severe storms, to alert local authorities to developing flash flood situations, to provide "ground truth" for NOAA and NASA remote sensing technologies, and to provide verification for both local and national weather and climate forecast products.
CoCoRaHS (The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network) is a citizen science program where thousands of volunteers across the entire country measure and report the amount of precipitation that falls each day in their own neighborhood (see http:www.cocorahs.org). In the next three years CoCoRaHS will use strategies from the "Citizen Science Toolkit" and align activities to the "Essential Principles to Climate Science" to engage thousands more participants in collecting, reporting and exploring precipitation. Evapotranspiration measurements will be added to better teach and demonstrate the hydrologic cycle in action. Through strong NOAA partnerships with the National Weather Service, the National Climatic Data Center, the Earth Systems Research Lab and the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center, precipitation data quality and accessibility for professional users will be enhanced. The CoCoRaHS network will be constructing training, data entry and visualization tools utilizing Web 2.0 concepts, cyberlearning tools and hand-held device applications with a goal of increasing participation and expanding the current volunteer network into broader, younger, more diverse and more interactive audiences.
C-RISE will create a replicable, customizable model for supporting citizen engagement with scientific data and reasoning to increase community resiliency under conditions of sea level rise and storm surge. Working with NOAA partners, we will design, pilot, and deliver interactive digital learning experiences that use the best available NOAA data and tools to engage participants in the interdependence of humans and the environment, the cycles of observation and experiment that advance science knowledge, and predicted changes for sea level and storm frequency. These scientific concepts and principles will be brought to human scale through real-world planning challenges developed with our city and government partners in Portland and South Portland, Maine. Over the course of the project, thousands of citizens from nearby neighborhoods and middle school students from across Maine’s sixteen counties, will engage with scientific data and forecasts specific to Portland Harbor—Maine’s largest seaport and the second largest oil port on the east coast. Interactive learning experiences for both audiences will be delivered through GMRI’s Cohen Center for Interactive Learning—a state-of-the-art exhibit space—in the context of facilitated conversations designed to emphasize how scientific reasoning is an essential tool for addressing real and pressing community and environmental issues. The learning experiences will also be available through a public web portal, giving all area residents access to the data and forecasts. The C-RISE web portal will be available to other coastal communities with guidance for loading locally relevant NOAA data into the learning experience. An accompanying guide will support community leaders and educators to embed the interactive learning experiences effectively into community conversations around resiliency. This project is aligned with NOAA’s Education Strategic Plan 2015-2035 by forwarding environmental literacy and using emerging technologies.